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Cover of What Can Theatre Do

Bruno

What Can Theatre Do

Miguel A. Melgares ed. , Silvia Bottiroli ed.

€25.00

What Can Theatre Do invites artists and thinkers to explore the potential of the performing arts, the political role of theatre and its ability to imagine alternative realities and future scenarios, ranging from essays to artistic interventions.

At a time when the relation between art and society is under permanent scrutiny, the utterance What can theatre do serves as an open invitation for artists and thinkers alike to reimagine the potential agency of the performing arts. The formulation of this sentence is both ambitious and ambiguous since the affirmative or interrogatory status remains undefined. The intonation of the sentence can provide both a sense of hope and belonging or a nihilist sensation of powerlessness. It could provide a resource for research development and analytic inquiries, but could also serve as a suggestion to trigger political action.

From fictional interviews to recipes, social-media exchanges to dramaturgical texts, theoretical essays to artistic interventions, the contributions gathered here are a diverse and multifaceted collection of dialogues. These interventions are singular and unique but share concerns and desires about the politicality of theatre as a realm where possible alternative realities can be enacted and potential future scenarios can be collectively rehearsed.

What Can Theatre Do tries to explore the idea of a book as a complex performative apparatus that can generate a space within which art and theory, and therefore also strategies of reality-making and of fiction-making, can entangle and affect one another, creating possibilities for the emergence of the not yet imagined.

Contributions by Lotte van den Berg, Carolina Bianchi, Silvia Bottiroli, Ilenia Caleo, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Piersandra Di Matteo, Valeria Graziano, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Samara Hersch, Asa Horvitz, Mala Kline, Low Kee Hong, Tom Oliver Jacobson, Miguel A. Melgares, Juan Miranda, Ogutu Muraya, Mazlum Nergiz, Andrej Nosov, nyamnyam (Ariadna Rodríguez and Iñaki Alvarez), Giulia Palladini, Venuri Perera, Livia Andrea Piazza, Amanda Piña, Annalisa Sacchi, Mariana Senne, Agat Sharma, Lara Staal, Elioa Steffen, Rolando Vázquez, Elioa Steffen, Suvani Suri, Pankaj Tiwari, Ingrid Vranken.

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Cover of TALKER issue #5 — Spalding Gray with Kathy Acker

Talker

TALKER issue #5 — Spalding Gray with Kathy Acker

Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #5. It is a transcript of an event hosted by the writer Kathy Acker at the ICA, London in February 1987 in which the performer Spalding Gray discussed his work.

A founding member of the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray gained fame for his autobiographical monologue performances. At the time of this conversation, he had just completed filming Jonathan Demme’s movie adaptation of his work Swimming to Cambodia, a performance in which he describes experiences surrounding a trip to Southeast Asia to play a small role in the film The Killing Fields (1984). In this dialogue with Acker, Gray focuses on the process of developing work and compares his experience of writing with making live performance.

The event was part of the ICA’s IN CONVERSATION series which paired up writers to talk about their practices.

Cover of Aftershow

Sternberg Press

Aftershow

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz

Performance €25.00

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Cover of Schismatics

LAPAS

Schismatics

Goda Palekaite

Essays €20.00

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

Cover of Cutting Out Reading the New York Times

Unbidden Tongues

Cutting Out Reading the New York Times

Lorraine O’Grady

Produced on the occasion of the event Unbidden Tongues #6: Cutting Out Reading the New York Times, Saturday, April 9 from 4-6pm. The event unfolded over a newly conceived spoken-word version of Lorraine O’Grady’s collage series Cutting Out the New York Times. The initial work consists of 26 “cut-out” or “found” newspaper poems that O’Grady made on consecutive Sundays from June to November in 1977.

It is the sixth title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

Cover of Still Life 4

Self-Published

Still Life 4

Hamish MacPherson

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.