 Everybody back here to Segal Talks at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Greater Center CUNY. And it's a cold day in New York City, gray and there's a big warning out for a storm that is coming, a big snowstorm that will also put the eating outdoors to rest. It's still incredible times. If I understand right in one day over 200,000 infections is just unbelievable what we are going through in the moment. But we at the Segal, as so many others, we do think about art, about culture, about history, about the put it in context we live in and how we can create meaning in these times. And artists have been always part of that discussion. They have helped us to understand better who we are through artists and who their way. We see the world differently better and perhaps we get a little bit accustomed to the future and we understand the ideas of a community of sharing moments of life here where we are on planet Earth. We have been so reminded as always how precious it all is now that we lost it. A wrong handshake can kill us now. Who knows some of us, some of the readers, some of our listeners might not be alive in a couple of months. I might not be, we don't know. And so of course it's a moment of deep reflection. What does it really mean? What are we doing? What is essential and what is necessary? What has changed and what will change? And with us today, we have a great worker in the field of theater, in the field of writing, in the field of criticism and in the field of editing. Someone who has for almost 50 years now has been a very influential, very significant journal about theater performance and art. It's Bonnie Marankasso. Bonnie, really, thank you. Thank you for being with us and for taking the time to speak to us. First of all, in the name of everybody, I wanted to thank you because in your great journal, PHA, a magazine of performance and art, you published excerpts of our thoughts. It made us very proud and it was a lot of work you put in and you saw something in what we did. So I really would like to thank you. We were so inspired by it. As we were with TDR, Carol Martin mentioned as Richard Schachner about also your work as you have done over five decades now is stunning. So it's a great matter of pride for us to be part of it. So thank you for being with us in here in New York to give our, yeah. So how are you today? I'm pretty good, I'm fine. Just kind of deciding what I'm going to do today. I have various phone calls and meetings and things in the afternoon and reading and I don't know, the days pass very quickly, actually. Yeah, it's stunning. Even if I spend the whole day inside, which I do often, the time goes fast. Yeah, it does. So for our listeners to give a little bit of an idea, we also have many international ones which we welcome here on the hall round and at the Segal Talks. Bonnie Maranka is the founding publisher and editor of the OB Award winning PHA publications and this is her great contribution next to many others of course, but it's PHA, a Journal of Performance and Art. By the way, it's 45 years, not 50. Almost, yeah, I started in 1976 and it's fifth decade. And she has done so many awards for this from Art of Higher Education, sustained achievement, great and significant George G. Nason Award for Traumatic Criticism and she has really edited countless volumes of the Journal of Plays, of Books, Meridith Monk, New Place from Europe, Place from the Continent, Place from the End of the Century, for the End of the Century, small series on Conversations on Art and Performance, Interculturalism and Performance. She also writes about food, about Hudson Valley, about gardening, many, many others. She really is a writer and has a great love for writing and for the arts and for the culture. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has been to Japan with the Asian Cultural Council, a great organization. She was also in Berlin, I think, in the American Academy, which is a very big meeting. It's a free university on a full-bright. The university at the beginning and then also a full-bright senior, a Balaskio Foundation and she's a professor emeritus of theater at the New School here in New York City. And I really, it's impossible to really sum it up in such a short time, Bonnie. Your work always made us aware that part of great art is a critical writing about it, that almost an archival quality, that there's a record of this ephemeral, as you also wrote, an appearance of something, this appareance. And if it's not written about it, somehow it is lost. In this moment we are in now, where we all take account of what we are doing, why we are doing it, is it worth it? Is it worth the effort? Does it work? If you look at your work as a writer and an editor in this moment, what's going on in your mind? What are you thinking about? Well, I guess one of the major things that anybody would be thinking about in terms of, let's say, editing the journal, because I'm still responsible with my now associate editor, Ben Gillespie, who was from CUNY also. We're responsible for three issues a year, and also with our contributing editors who are dispersed around the country. So the question is like, what does one do at a time like this? Yeah, well, the questions you raise, is it worth it? What is the value of doing things? How can you write? How can you address things? In the beginning of the pandemic last spring, I was in New York for three months then, during that time, starting the lockdown in March. I spoke to many people who write and who see many things, people in visual arts and dance and theater, and everyone said they just didn't feel like writing. People who are professional writers in the sense of learning their living that way, it is very hard to gather your thoughts in the beginning, but we went through different periods of fear and anxiety, and then somehow adjustment and reflection and all these different kinds of feelings that helped us get cope now, eight or nine months, 10 months later. So the uppermost is the question like, what does one do with the journal at this time? A lot of what we do is to cover current events and so on, and things that are being performed very much of our time, so we didn't have that. So one of the things was that, to perhaps cover artist documentaries. So like in particular, I had asked one of our writers to write about the recent Lorraine Hansberry and Baldwin artist documentaries. Other people wrote essays directly related to the pandemic and cultural politics and funding and different artworks. We published the whole excerpts from the pandemic section from all of your talks over a period of a few months. So that's one of the things, how to keep a journal and how to keep your publishing schedule. The print version wasn't sent out the first two issues during this time, only the online version was available, but now print is available and MIT has been able to keep to the schedule, whatever you want has adjusted in terms of publishing. For my own work, I started, I finished editing the interview with the conversation with Meredith Monk, which just came out this month and wrote the preface. And I also organized a book of mine that'll come out in the spring, Timelines. So I put that together. So I've always been working during this time. And also trying to explore and find out from various people who write for PAJ what kinds of things we should cover, what they're thinking about, what they might be finding online, especially things that might be dealing with new forms and new ways to cover work or something special online. So, we're still grappling with that. And hey, it also written to a hundred of our authors over the last recent years, people who've contributed to the journal. And there was a list of topics that we posed. And so added to the usual topics that we're interested in like performance histories and also ecological issues and climate change. I was interested if people were able to write or address issues like authoritarianism and fascism and this kind of politics. So we did get responses and people have been thinking about different topics and where they might fit in with this expansion of topics in addition to our regular ones that we might want to address. So that's basically what I've been doing these last months in terms of writing or editing. Yeah, I think you are such a hard worker. You work so much. It's astonishing what you produce. You're like a great painter who puts out the paintings and over decades there was changes of colors, themes, structures, but still always you see the hand-writing. I think this has been true for a PHA. I think you wrote, I think that the health of an art form is connected to the rigor of critical thinking that's circulating around it. How do you see the contemporary moment and the critical thinking about it in the theater? We just left because we're no longer in there, but even now where we don't have the theater, what is the rigor of critical thinking? Do you feel we are in a moment where this is taking place? In recent years, we've lost so many different venues where people would write criticism. Traditionally, criticism over the period of the PHA has been publishing. It was in the Soil Weekly News, The Village Voice, the New York Press, maybe the New York Observer, in addition to things like The Times and so on, and also American Theater Magazine. So many things have closed. So there are online blogs and things, but it's not the same as a community that has access to and generally people read the same pieces and they become important. For example, in the establishment of the Downtown Theater, which we focus on, those reviews and the reviewing and the writing was also very, very important to people. And that was a time where people had very high standards and for work and were very demanding. A lot of people wrote books also and collected criticism. In this sort of vacuum, everything now has become mostly absorbed into journals. So in this country, there's our journal, The Drama Review, coming out of NYU. Also the theater journal theater, it's called, which Yale produces. And then there's Theater Journal, which is from the American Theater and Higher Ed. So all of us publish reviews and essays and then there are so many journals now in theater around the world. They're also the British journals, but in general criticism has not, has kind of fallen by the wayside in the sense because people have turned toward theory, at least since the 80s. So it's become very academic and institutionalized the discourse. And regular journalism in the newspapers or what's around or magazines is generally not the kind, you know, on the level of what, you know, we had been used to it in film writing or, you know, in theater. So I think that there's a bit of a vacuum and it's hard to know why any one thing is more important than another or why one should see something or what is the broader context of something. So in that sense, the kind of critics who did that mostly don't really have venues. And if they write it all, it's usually in a journal or in a book, which comes out after many years and the journals only come out a few times a year and they're mostly read online also. And one big change with editing and publishing is that people no longer read a journal from cover to cover and read everything in it. They generally have become so specialized now since mostly academics read these journals and that they read the work that pertains to them. So we've lost a kind of a sort of a core of meaning and reflection in the body of work. It's just very, very dispersed now to many different audiences and very specialized. Yeah, I mean, it is a moment of loss not only because of that time of COVID important, you know, people we have left over time not only Susan Sontar, I don't say Pina Bausch, Muscanningham, Harold Pinter, Ellen Stewart. It's a whole universe which you were covered, you know, since the very beginning. I mean, I have here some names of what you have covered on very early as, you know, of course, others, but still you had Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, the Wooster Group, Patricia Brown, Robert Ashley, Maria Irene Fornes, Laurie Anderson, George Micuna, and I'm John Pike. And of course, the list goes on and on, Caroline Snaeberg and John Jonas. It is an incredible discourse. I think, as someone wrote, I think once an essay, why can't we stop talking, you know, about the 70s at worldwide or someone, you know, you have a unique perspective, you know, for someone like Shackner or also Maren Karlsruin for looking over decades on the field. What are your reflections on the impact on the moment of, how would one say, you know, the theater performance to New York City. It has changed so dramatically. What do you think are we going through it right now at this moment? It's such a big question. I don't know if we know really where we're going because until we come out of this pandemic situation, we don't know what the finances are, whether or if and when audiences will return to the theater, what the situation is for all the people who are working in it. And I'm concerned, of course, as an editor and a writer and theater goer, to see how this, you know, terrible experience, this existential crisis in a way, and financial crisis and health crisis, how it affects people's thinking. You know, will there be a different psychology of character? Will people, how will people think of space? What will, the notion of truth, how will that be dealt with in an era where, which has been called a post-truth time? And also what does reality and realism mean now when so much of what we see has been, you know, called into question and denied? So I can't really predict what will happen. For myself, I would like to see more of an emphasis on writing in the theater, which is to say new forms of dramatic writing, new forms of new play and theater forms. You wrote in one of your essays or interviews where you said there is a general disregard of working with writers in that you detected the moment a bit in the scene. You're a big, you know, support of dramatic writing, you know, do you think this will change? And we will see. Well, you know, we've kept to our original mission, which is to publish a play or performance text, but that has very wide, wide parameters and includes any kind of text or avant-garde piece of writing, not what we think of as conventional plays, but we still do that in every issue and have published over a thousand, and especially plays in translation or plays from the more unconventional non-mainstream theater downtown, but definitely over at least 20 years or if not more, 25, there's been a move away from dramatic literature once one passes the undergraduate level in terms of, you know, theater study on the graduate level and the PhD level, and even in terms of the kinds of contributions we get to the journal or what you see in other journals. People are not writing about dramatic literature, playwriting as much as they used to before. Instead, we've moved toward what many people call devised theater, a theater that's more built on the intersection of many different kinds of texts or more like a collage structure and often definitely not with the writer at the center of theater, but maybe put together by a group of actors or put together by the director. And I don't really, you know, consider this as complex a form in most cases as writing. So looking toward the future, I would like to see a kind of philosophic, poetic theater with also a lot of new experimentation in terms of forms of writing, we'll have on guard writing. So I hope that that returns and maybe it's on its way because of the sense of privacy we have now in spending a lot of time at home and not working together. I don't know. Different forms produce different kinds of language and different kinds of acting. So it remains to be seen where we will go in the future. Yeah, I think early on, you know, that's kind of an easy pre-performance. I think you wrote about new forms of writing and art that we need to have critical standards of value and comparison that this is the contribution you make and others make, TDR makes, our journals. You said there's a difference between criticism and writing. Where do you draw the difference? Oh, yeah, I've always made a difference between writing and criticism. But now we don't have criticism so much in terms of the world we exist in because a lot of it is theoretical writing done by academics rather than journalists. But quite a while ago in the mid-80s, I called my first book, my first collection of work, Theater Writings. And that was a direct opposition to theater criticism. Now, of course I've always valued criticism and sometimes I use the terms interchangeably. But what I meant by writing at that time was that I consciously developed over the decades now in my writing the intimacy of the personal of the voice. I like to write work that you can speak that you could, that's not like reading a text or reading an essay. I tried to really, and I promote this with people who write for the journal as well to bring their critical voice to the forefront. So I'm interested in poetic techniques and techniques of the novel. And writing that people who are not necessarily doing academic writing have brought into their own work, so their essays, like there are so many good essayists now. Siri Hustvedt, Marilyn Robinson, Teju Cole, Daniel Mendelssohn, Sadie Smith, they're just innumerable good essayists. And none of these works are theoretical and they're not filled with jargon. They're real writers thinking. I love the work of William Gass or Sontag or Brodsky or Tavio Paz, you know, Elizabeth Hardwick, real writers and literary stylists. So that's what I meant by theater writing to bring different kinds of techniques not previously brought into what was considered a kind of rigorous critical writing, but to capture the quality of the voice and have a kind of literary quality. Now, I realize that that might not be, certainly not in fashion in the academic world because people have been forced into a certain way of writing, but I find that I'm able to get writers who write in a more literary journalistic way. It's a kind of high journalism, you know, in a sense. They have different kinds of writing, some for their academic credentials and others, they'll write in this style in P.I.J. and they're happy to do it. So that's my vision of how I contrasted theater and writing and criticism. They often also, you know, novelists, essayists will write very complex subject matters but in language that is accessible in a first world, meanwhile, perhaps in some part, you know, writing or criticism on theater when it comes to the abstract formulation of theories and how, you know, it's no longer as easy to access. You also say, define your work at P.I.J. to say it's a critical thinking against the current. It's something you should have a new form as you said, it was a standard. It should be, the things we already do not know. You say, you know, so many right about things we already know, the artists we have seen. So what do you feel, do we need now, if you say it's against the current, which also means that it has been achieved something but now it's the next. It's not there as I said, about democracy, you know, or something that it's never there. It's coming, it will be with us. It's never been achieved as in Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice that law is, it's on some wall in New York, it's always coming. It's not here yet. So what are we writing about? Are you writing about the current now? What do you say, what voices do we need to hear? Of artists or critical voices? Critical voices in a moment, yeah, and perhaps connected to artists but of critical voices. I have an Italian friend, he's a scholar and wrote many books in Italy and ran festivals and organized and psychopedias and everything, Antonio Attazzani. And he said many years ago when we had a conference in New York connected with NYU that the critic can't wait for a theater. You know, so in a way you have to create your subjects. Which is also what I tried to do. I tried to bring my theater and arts interest into writing about other things. You've mentioned earlier about my food book and my book on the Hudson Valley and book and gardening. But I try, you know, they're not all real separate categories. They intersect. For example, in an essay more than 30 years ago that I wrote about Chekhov, I tried to create a fictional section in it. I created a fictional section in one of the sections of that essay. And I wrote about Chekhov as a gardener. I'd read his letters and I knew how much he was interested in his rose bushes and he wrote about them and everything. You wrote about Pirandello because the name Maranka, you know, comes. Yeah, yeah. Maranka was a porter in one of Pirandello's plays, which is, I said, why the Marankas came to America. Incredible. If I am no right, you worked over a year, you know, just in one essay, you know, for four. I could do that at one time. I spent about a year with that. And you know how I put it together. I wrote it in separate sections and there may be 10 or 15 or 20 sections. And I spread them out on the floor and I kind of figured out how they would go together. And that's how I wrote the sequence. But I was actually very proud because Susan Sontek had complimented me on that essay. And after thinking about it for many years, I thought maybe it might have been because I said that Pirandello had an argument against photography in his work. So I always thought to myself, maybe that's why she liked it. Since I admired her so much, that was a big thrill for me to have that from her in the mid-80s. Maybe connected to her. You also say, you know, about the suffering of others with really also really critically looks at photography and representation of an image. You know, by the way, speaking of that, I had a long conversation with her of some months before she died, but maybe eight months or so before she died. And at the time she said she was reading the biography of Goya. And Goya, the cover of that book regarding the pain of others is a Goya. Yeah. And she talks about it also. Most significant essay, also that travel Floyd, of course, but also the time you live in. How do we represent? I mean, it's an incredible project, PHA magazine. If I may say that, if I understood right, instead of writing, you know, the dissertation you and Gautam Dasgupta were the great founders of this, you know, instead of writing on Bob Wilson or on, I don't know what you were writing about. He said, let's do our journal. This is going to be our dissertation. Of course, you ran into a trouble and it wasn't accepted. And you said, I've never want to be in places where I'm, you know, working places. Also, where I fenced in, I need my freedom. So you created something you also called an alternative to performance studies, a field of, you know, where you can, a garden where there are offerings out, you say you write out of love, actually, that the joy, the enjoyment is important. Of you, it's, as you said, a place for thinking out loud, what we do anyway at the Seedle talks. So I think your deep belief in the gravity of words, and to make the process of thinking visible and it's archived, it's there, like 200 years from now, 300. A lot of stuff will be gone, nobody will know, but people will be able to read PHA, TDR and, and writings, you know, about this time. And, you know, people don't realize that because the focus is so much on production. For those of us who write criticism or even publish plays and things, the foundations never supported things like that. They were always interested in supporting a production, not a publication of a play. And many people have the false sense that the production is the most important thing. Of course, it's important to get the work known, but the plays will disappear if they're not published. For example, we published Irene Fornas in 1977, right at the time she did FFU, but except for Audrey and Kennedy, all of her peers are forgotten. Remember, Irene had a theater strategy producing agency for playwrights that Julia Bavasso, Rochelle Owens, Ronnie Savelle, Adrienne and Irene were involved in. So many plays and playwrights have disappeared. There's so many names I can mention from that period. They're all gone. I, unfortunately, the theater has not been very good about preserving its legacy, unlike the art world or the dance world. Everybody moves on. Like I've been shocked to learn how few people that I'd come across in publishing PHA knew, had ever studied or knew of Reza Abdo or the Squat Theater. And my feeling is they probably don't know the open theater. Theater study changed so much and academia changed so much that the curriculum was really totally revamped around theory. And so I think a lot of people aren't really given the tools, but the archival aspect I know because I'm working on our archive now with a consultant and I've saved everything for 45 years along the correspondence and all that. This is really important as a record. So much of what any magazine or review covers really is the foundation of creating theater history or performance history or visual arts. It's really the books and the publications that are so important in keeping work alive so that it can get in the repertoire and so that it can be studied because sometimes people are forgotten in their own time and then someone finds them and maybe 20, 30 years later, they are looked at again. I think with the case of Adrienne Kennedy now and all the fun on her, that's a case where that is happening or it did in recent years when Reza Abdo had the exhibit at PS1 and Queens. So saving these materials and having the manuscripts or things in print is very important. The video is now as well. So how do you approach writing, editing? What is your process? How do you think about the craft of writing and editing? What, for everybody who listens and is in the field, what do you think is of importance? When you say the craft, you just have to keep writing and writing and writing. One just sits down with the blank page. Like a painter might sit down with the blank canvas. You hope the ideas come. You mentioned earlier that an essay, the Purandello essay that took a year. I also spent a year on Gertrude Stein who had always been an obsession of mine from graduate school. I read and read and read and take notes. I think I had about 90 pages of notes for Gertrude Stein. And then you just sit down with a blank piece of paper. I have a system for generating my notes all on loose leaf paper coded with what the topic is. And I try to cover things in my notes and my thoughts, but I never outline anything. I don't do abstracts or all that. I do a lot of rewriting. I used to write longhand, but, you know, since the 90s at least from mid 90s, I worked on a computer. But I used to do everything longhand and then type it. But I think writers are always readers. Certainly that's the case with poets and novelists. I'm not sure to what extent say people writing about theater are reading novels or reading other essays. I've always loved the essay. And I've always been an editor or connected with journalism from high school. I was an editor on my high school paper. And in college, I started the drama and arts page of my college paper and began writing. I don't know where the impulse came from, but I just wanted to write about work. I was never tempted to perform or act or do anything or direct or anything like that. But, and then when I came to New York in the early 70s, I also worked for other publications and changes, for example, which was a wonderful downtown arts publication that was edited by the wife of Charlie Mingus, the jazz musician. And then Soho came along and then P.A.J. We started P.A.J. in 76. You worked for Rolling Stones, right? I did. I wrote for, I was a music critic and I wrote for Craw Daddy and Rolling Stone and. And you worked for Max Eisen, Broadway agent. So it's quite, nothing. I did a lot of things. I wrote, I worked for a very famous Broadway agent. We had an office in the Sardine building. He was a press agent. He was very well known. So I did a lot of things. I wrote for, I mean, I worked for a producer of jingles. And that was when Barry Manilow was writing a lot of jingles and Carly Simon was coming up and all that and they would come through our office. So I found my way to graduate school. And at that time, you know, I was also doing a lot of freelance work. Then we started the journal. But what I'm saying is like from high school to now, I've been an editor or working in journal and journalism. Yeah. So you have been trained, I know Lillian Hellman, the great playwright was one of your teachers, the great Harold Klumann. Harold Klumann, yeah. He came from the group theater who has influenced American theater. And actually as many say, you know, actually also influence American film. Film acting in America has come, comes from of course the acting studio but he made the case or many do make the case to say actually, you know, the way the group theater performed. And many of the actors went to Hollywood disc created the American acting. You were trained by Daniel Gerald by Andrzej Virgo, who he boasts the world. Then it comes to writing and editing. What do you keep in mind? What are the lessons? If we say, perhaps a lot of people are moving away a little bit from it at that time here. And what is the beauties, the mysteries, but also what are your secrets? Well, how do you, what is often important? I started to say that I've always loved the essay. I like it because it's reading thinking and that appeals to me very much. Just simply the engagement with mind. I love the form, I love the form of the essay and I've been reading essays and journalism since undergraduate days. I read a lot of different kinds of work extensively but since you mentioned some of these teachers, I wrote an essay about Lillian Hellman also in that same book, Theater Writings. And what I, I studied with her at Hunter College for one or two courses and I think in creative writing or something, but not in theater at all. But I love the way that she said the word writer. And that's what I wrote about in my essay. As far as Dan Gerald, excuse me, the way I take notes for my writing is based on the way I took notes in his class. Dan Gerald was a great, great teacher and we studied in a way that people don't study anymore. For example, you might take a whole semester on comedy or melodrama or a tragic comedy or say, avant-garde plays between the wars or things like that and dramatic structure. That was his big set course in two semesters of that. So he was very much taught from the point of view of structure and that's the way I approach work also, just really take apart the mechanics of the work and try to put it back together. Let the work speak to me and keep reading and reading it or looking at it, taking notes. I don't take notes when I go to the theater though. So with Dan's method, that's how I arrived at my method that I had described about loose leaf paper and taking notes and having the subject of that note and then somehow coordinating and putting it together. But it directly comes from the method of his classroom. As far as Anjaye Veer, he's a great figure in education for changing the German system after he left the United States and went back to Germany where he founded the Theater Science Division or Department at Giesen near Frankfurt. And he was one of the most brilliant imaginative people I know and I know a lot of really smart and brilliant people but the way that he saw everything in this kind of dialectical way was also a kind of training and humor that he brought in his great loyalty and friendship. But he was teaching Heine Müller and ideas about the post-traumatic in the early 70s at CUNY. So we then became lifelong friends and I often stayed with him in Berlin or he stayed in my apartment here. But he just saw everything in a very different way and he was very aesthetically inclined. So I mean, these are just a few of the... I came in close contact with... Harold Klerman, you... Harold Klerman, it was so inspiring. I remember him jumping up and down in class and turning red, we were all afraid he was going to have a heart attack. He was an old man then, he was also a hunter. I think that it's not necessarily that you learn rules or techniques or methods from people. It's not like studying and acting when you're in a classroom or you're reading criticism or something. It's more a person's work ethic and spirit and energy that flow through or their rigor and their attachment to their field. I'm very much admiring of work ethics. That's why I love Chekhov. And I think that's attracted me so much to plays of Irene Fornes as well, the work ethic. I've come from the middle class and I worked all the times in high school and work is a certain kind of commitment and it's a commitment to a certain set of values. And that's what you learn from people. You're on your own in terms of developing techniques and styles and you hope they come, you hope you have ideas from seeing things. I don't write anymore about work that doesn't really appeal to me or I don't like. Just as I no longer have a year to spend on an essay, I don't feel like writing anymore about artworks that just don't move me in some way. So you really say, a couple of times it came up, you say I write out of love for what I see or what I'm interested in. Yeah, I mean, I love art, I love the idea of performance. I, yeah, I write out of love for a work, out of somehow, not all the times and I mean, not all the times of my life and not every single moment. But in choosing work, there is a certain amount of love or a certain sense of living in that landscape or understanding work, it's very hard to write. It's hard to write about something that you're half interested in or so. I mean, I love writing and I love the essay, as I said. Just the exercise of thinking about art and going deeply into something is mysterious and beautiful and it's also very, it's a private act in a way. I love the way some artists, the certain sense of striving for grace and people who have a real value system in their work, that attracts me more and more. Though to be honest, I have maybe less interest in writing about art now, writing about the arts. I don't know, I don't know what I'll do after this book of mine comes out in the spring, which is 10 years of my essays and interviews and conversations with artists. I really like talking with artists. I like the conversation form. I spent a lot of time during this lockdown period of listening to conversations with writers, particularly novelists or writers and thinkers. And at different periods of my life, I turn to other things like the garden writing or the Hudson Valley book or food writing. I'm not worried about what I wanted to do next. I don't have that sense of compulsive productivity. It's fine if I don't have something in mind to start the day after I finish something else. It's okay, I don't know what. The world is so complex now and it's so difficult to place oneself. There's so much of everything. There's so much of every kind of commentary and there's such a proliferation of things. It's hard to just decide what is to start out to say where you started out earlier about what is meaningful now. That's the question, but what is meaningful? It's not a question of just doing something for the sake of doing it, but what is the real value of it? And where does it take one? Yeah, I think in that great issue of being here, PHA 100 after 100 issues. And I know you now since going online with MIT next to the print issues, and it's a miracle it's still out in print, but you have 120 countries and readers from all around the world. And but the question is what you said wrote is how should I act in the world? Yeah, that's the question. I mean, Camus says, I love Camus writing and I've often taught and read his essay Create Dangerously, which was his Nobel Prize speech. But he says that, you can't run away from the world, but you can't also be overtaken by it. In a way, the question now that I've asked myself also is, you know, in the midst of all this destruction and all the anxiety and anger that so many people have felt in these last four years with the government, the shock of seeing how quickly our democracy can collapse and that the people that we counted who run the government to just let it go if they could. So, you know, I asked myself over the summer too when I was out in the city and just enjoying nature. You know, I feel that you have to preserve some sense of happiness and joy for yourself. I'm basically a contented person, not as opposed to being a depressive, you know? And I feel like I have to preserve something like that. You can't get up every day and be overwhelmed by all the world's problems. But of course, to be a thinking, acting person, you need to know that and absorb that in your work, whatever work you do, teaching, writing and any field. To go back to Camus, he says also that every person has something to contribute to the world, to change the world, to make it different. And it's not that artists can just do that. Any ordinary person, every day you see the simple acts of beauty and grace and kindness that ordinary people enact. So, in a way, I was discussing this with Meredith Monk sometime in the fall we were talking and we were both talking about the same thing. It's to even feel a certain kind of happiness or joy. You know, like what does one have the right to do that or should we preserve that? Or how can we do that and not feel guilty about it in the midst of all that is going on around us? But I think all religions, and in her case, Buddhism, and in terms of my own philosophy also, I think it's important to have a part of yourself that you, even Patty Smith talks about this in one of her recent books. I'm a big admirer of her writing. You just need that some part of yourself. Actually, Alan Capro wrote about this decades ago and when he wrote about John Cage in an essay called Right Living, he talked about the beautiful privacy of the artist. So artist, individuals, everybody, there's some part of yourself that you need to preserve and create out of that. And that's a certain kind of joy or a certain kind of happiness that Hannah Arendt as well talks about loving the world. Some people can't do that, some people manage to do it, but that for me is sort of the question, one of the questions now, our attachment to the world in the midst of trying to solve so many problems and coming out of this. Yeah, the thing is art transforming people, you know? Is it, are we transformed by the act of drawing? You also write about drawing, performance drawings, which you like very much. Are we transformed, the singer or the stage, or is the artist who does it, or is we the audience? And what do you think is the essence and not the art? Yeah, I mean the audience is definitely transformed, but so is the artist. I mean, John Cage referred to it as the self-alteration of the artist. Perhaps you could say that's another form of self-improvement, which is a big American theme, but he talked about it as self-alteration for the artist. I think we're moved by everything. It doesn't have to be art, but there are extraordinary works that are sublime. I mean, before the lockdown, I guess it was a year and a half ago, I'm not quite sure. I saw Anne-Theresa de Kiersmacher's work at the Skirball, and I've seen her work also at similar pieces at Brooklyn Academy of Music. I mean, it was absolutely sublime and transporting. There are works like that, I think. I know you're a big fan of Kendrick. Yes, I am. I followed his work for years. His head in the load, which was done at the Armory about two years ago, was another extraordinary work that required even new inventions of new kinds of projection equipment and lenses, worked with music and text, highly political with projected drawings. I'd become over the last decade or dozen years very interested in performance and drawing. And often my research interests come into the journal. So we've been publishing for a dozen years now these portfolios on performance and drawing. Many, many artists have practice of drawing and making studies before they produce a work. Some people say like Joan Jonas, she's famous for that, draws in the work itself. And there's actually recently a new book out, Cold Performance Drawing, and I wrote the foreword to it. It came out from Bloomsbury in London just in September. And it has many, many chapters and things on the artists and drawing. So I love work on paper. You could say writing is that in a sense. But Bob Wilson's work is work on paper, works on paper, because he draws his whole theatrical work before it stays. He basically stages his drawing. So he has a visual book. I'm interested in these things and bringing these kinds of new ideas into the journal, things about notation and drawing. I'm interested in notebooks and process. Yeah, it's an action. I think Ulaanbaad also became later in his life, he loved Japanese ink drawings. It's an action with your body in a moment. And it also represents something in design or word, often in Asian languages. They are there. There is something that is so deeply connected. Yeah, even John Berger, the great critic, he also has a book on drawing and he drew. So many people have this practice. I don't draw actually. But I just, yeah. But you're right. So you would encourage people to take up writing as a form, right? For students, artists. Don't do that anymore as much as we should, you know, everybody. Artists, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we used to have many, many more artists used to write about their work. And that's kind of unfortunate now. I love artist writings. A lot of visual artists write about their work or novelists write. But theater people don't really write so much about their work. They're very few books. Not to mention all the histories and monographs and things that were missing in the theater field because of people's move into theory and into other kinds of studies. The monograph and the history that used to be written, you know, in the 60s, 70s, whatever, they have fallen by the wayside. So we don't have a comprehensive history of the Judson Theater, which encompassed the Judson poets as well as Judson dance. We don't have a history of Lamama, of the public theater of theater, you know, so many different theaters and so many different artists should have biographies that are written about them in many critical books. You know, our major artists, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And one day, people might, you know, find old hard drives and we'll try to recover deleted versions of things that was used to be written on paper. I think always, you know, you talk about history and the significance of it, you know, even the P.A.J., the places where your office is where, the places where theater was. The idea of history and represented also in theater, I think you have a deep sense of almost of as a mission or as a obligation. And so what is your relation to that concept of history? What does it represent to you? You know, it's funny, one of the colleges I applied to in high school was to go as a history major, but I ended up becoming a, having another major, but I guess I'm interested in history because I'm a traveler and I love knowing about histories and cultures and it was always intrigued me when I was teaching that often people confuse history and nostalgia. There are very big difference between having a historical perspective on a field or topic or theme than just having a more sentimental or kitschy or nostalgic feeling, though one could have nostalgia too. That's fine, but people are very wary about history and don't care about it so much anymore. And I think it's considering the complexity of the world and suddenly look at the resurgence of discussion about authoritarianism and fascism and all that. If you don't know that or you don't know 20th century history, it'd be hard to create work out of that or to grapple with ideas today. Some of the books that I've been reading lately, Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lore of Authoritarianism and Apple Bound's book or Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy. I mean, these are the kind of books that are important to read now. So with regard to the arts on a different level, we talked earlier about the idea of having documents or archives. That's a big issue now in terms of the materials that are saved from all this 50 year period. Many artists are placing or in the process of or have already put their archives in different institutions. And that's our lasting record. PHA, when it started out, so much of that theater downtown was just becoming known. So we made a lot of that work known in our journal or STDR did. And now we're in the process of people writing about performance history, which is the history of this. So now we have 45, 50, 60 years of this history and that's a big field of scholarship. A lot of people are dealing with some of the major figures in the post-war period. And resuscitating them or having more scholarly works on him, for example, on the Judson Dance period or Yvonne Rainer or Charlotte Mormon or Namjoon Paik or Karol Shneiman, a lot of it is happening within the visual arts and performance worlds. We have a lot of people who are interested in the arts and performance world. Where people are suddenly producing more historical works and more essays and especially in that field, Charlotte Mormon is a case in point two. So I think people are in scholarship, certain people in scholarship historians are very interested in retelling the histories of these fields. So I'm concerned with the curriculum and with what students learn now and restoring more of a sense of the history of the great art forms as well as social and political history because I don't see how we can have a serious theater without people and training changing. Yeah, we need to know where we come from, where we are going to and then we have said it before, you know, someone said it's important to know about history because then you learn that people don't learn from history, you know, otherwise you wouldn't know that. So, you know, it's a real great contribution in a way and also that kind of split you do make as the art, as you said, as such an intimate personal practice as a human being, it's such an individual experience, but also then it's kind of connected, you know, to global history and national history that there is a way to, you know, to put arms around it and those arms are a little bit bigger. I remember you commented on Bob Wilson said Jack Danny was so great on TV because his arms weren't so big so they would fit in the TV screen. So we should have longer arms and these long arms of history, you know, I think you really in your work with PHJ, you know, you're a great long poem of a hundred and more issues that it's, you know, collecting. Thank you. Polyphonic voices that talk to each other and they're all alone, little islands like Idois-Glissant's idea of the archipelagos which I love so much, they're little islands, but also that they are, you know, archipelagos. And I think this is what you created. I also know what I wanted to ask you that, you know, the symbolic act of an actor on this stage and I would like to go to something specific because I know you love singers. I know you're a big fan of Judy Garland and other, you know, usually what, and tell us a bit about that, you know, you go to and see them. What, why is that significant? What does it mean that a person on the stage who sings, you know, what does it mean to you? Tell us a bit about your, did I know you're a music lover? You know, yeah, I know I do love singers, but it's, you remind me of something that Philip Glass said when he was asked what Einstein on the beach means, he said, it's not important what it means. I don't know what it means, but the important thing is that it's meaningful. So I don't know what singing, I don't know what singing means. The thing about it is it's mysterious. You don't see it. And this incredible voice comes out of people. You think of Maria Callas or how does that, where does that voice come from? That it's so, it's so incredible, an act, it's invisible. And it just comes out of a person's mouth and breath. I've always loved singers. You know, I grew up at a time when a lot of singers had their own television shows, all the American singers. And so I was very familiar with the American song book. And even now, and I love, you know, Ella Fitzgerald or the young Barbra Streisand or Yves Piaf. And I mean, there's so many singers. I've always been a great music lover. So I listened to a lot of music. I have music, a lot of it from other cultures where when I'm traveling, I'm buying things, buying, you know, that's I'm CDs. I don't listen with ear pods and I don't have like a playlist or anything. I like music in the open air. But I'm very interested also in singers gestures. And it's interesting to watch the singers who grew up or who became known before microphones, how much they use their arm and their elbows or comparing the way singers like the way Peggy Lee moves as opposed to someone like, you know, Judy Garland or you can mention any singers. I also follow very much when I can younger singers. I thought that Amy Winehouse was incredible. Like, you know, Billie Holiday, I love her work. And Amy Winehouse was singing in that style. Tony Bennett is a great singer. And I, you know, the show that she did with Lady Gaga was, you know, so intriguing. I just, I don't know what to say. I just have always loved music and singers. We did in my family where I grew up. My father always sang around the house and we all played musical instruments. I played piano, I have a piano in my apartment, though I don't play so much anymore. I don't write about singers all that much, but I mean, I've written a lot about Meredith Monk, not, but more about her theater than her particular voice, but her voice is her theater. And I have written about Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland and other singers and musicians. Of course you could see life in the beginnings of careers or end of careers, you know, we can't go back. Yeah, I know. I wrote about early jazz at the same time I was going to graduate school about blues or jazz and blues and things like that. So, I mean, I go to the opera. I mean, I like, I love that transcendent feeling of the great voices. I used to go to musical theater when there were more of the, you know, like Sondheim musicals and things like that when some of the great musicals were on Broadway, though I don't really go any more, but I saw a lot of the, oh, I mean, I've seen a lot of the great performers, musical comedy performers and great Broadway stars like Ethel Merman or Gwen Verdin. You know, it was possible to see these people or Stryus Ann on Broadway, some of the old stars. You know, in a way I have to say that I really feel like a very eclectic performance person because I can enjoy any of that work or any of the standard traditional song book just as much as I can enjoy something downtown or something experimental. I don't, I never really distinguished between things. I love virtuosity and great talent and everything is interesting. If you watch an old movie, the way people speak or their gestures and fees into an idea of acting and performance. I know you wrote a piece about the time, the corona time, about duck soup, right? The Marx Brothers that somehow relates to where we are, right? Well, you know, yeah, I wrote an editorial in the P.A.J. that sometimes the Trump world reminds me of an old the cabbage clay, you know, or duck soup is one of these things that take place in a fictional country where all these ministers are trying to satisfy this crazed ruler. Yeah, hopefully it will be out of that soon. But it is a remarkable, you know, to say, you know, we're trained a little great but also you're interested in novel and painting and sculpture and film and music and both performance, the hybrid, the low bro, what David Saffron also, you know, wrote about. So I think it's quite something to learn and becoming closer to the end of our talk. And of course there should be much longer or different versions of it. I think we just scratched the surface but you would see the young Bonnie Moranca who was just getting into a Hunter College now has her, I don't know, most of you didn't have the backpack at the time, you had it. No. You had a little book bag, probably. A book bag, you know. And it would be times of corona and this incredible change, you know, that has taken place, which we are in the middle of, you know, I mean, it's just the fact that American theater magazine from TCG is closed. I mean, it's not, we fully realize what it means, you know, and so much has moved from the digital, it's like great changes right now in the moment. What would you say to that young Bonnie Moranca? What is, what you wish you would have known then but you know nobody, you didn't know then at the time but also in the time you live and know, what do you feel is of importance and significance? Well, that's a number of different questions. I think when you're young, you're just kind of follow one foot in front of the other. I mean, I personally had no grand plan or anything. I don't live my life that way. I believe in that you, if you have, you know, beliefs in something, you should follow what you want to do and try to do it against all odds. Of course, people said, oh, you're crazy to start a journal and we didn't listen to anybody. You just have to find a way to do what you want to do and to be happy in your life and then you, because you have to wake up every day for 50, 60 years and work. So you have to love what you're doing. As far as any kind of topics now, if I were a young student going, one topic that interests me, even though I say that I want to preserve a certain kind of joy and feel that we have a right to also keep that for ourselves, some part of our life. I'm very interested in the 20th century kinds of artworks that deal with the catastrophic imagination. So that's another side and something different. But just in summing up an answer to you, I would say what I've always loved is the, and this is kind of my motto, and I discovered it somewhere along in the early 70s or mid 70s. Hannah Arendt said that artworks clearly are superior to all living things. They stay longer in the world than anything else. And they are the, since they stay longer in the world than anything else, they are the worldliest of things. And I've always, I always keep that close to me and I mean, I believe in art and its power to transform people's inner lives and as a driving spirit and force in the world. Not enough to change the world, but to be part of that change because it changes people. And so I have, you know, I have favorites that spoke so deeply about art and politics and culture and philosophy. People like Vaslav Havel or Kamu, as I said, Hannah Arendt has been so important to my thinking. So I think we all have our touch stars and we, and they, you know, they keep us going. And we just, you know, we just keep going day after day after day and trying to pursue what's important, what's important to us. Yeah, yeah. I remember you called Vaslav Havel, you know, who had to hide as you wrote some of his manuscripts and trees. You know, about trees, you know, about Wilson's work with trees and glands through the forest and on land and tablet machine. And the watermelon trees, the beautiful ones. But it stuck with me that idea that you, you quoted Havel also philosopher statesman, you know, who come back so much, you know, of that's what is important. I don't fully remember the quote, but he had, he might be, I'll find it somewhere. The quote was something about, you know, the world has its reality and, but we can't, and so does political life and the political order, but that is not all of our world. We have our own subjective world also, and we can't depend on these other systems to keep us going or to change the world. In other words, we have to change ourselves. He talked about a lot of these things in this very influential essay, the power of the powerless or living in truth, his famous, and also your similar, the sociologist, much earlier in the 20th century talked about like objective reality and subjective reality. We are always living on two layers. There's the world outside and there's also what kind of forces in life energy that we have to bring to the world. You know, we can't always be blaming the system or the outside world. We have to, I think we've come to that point now seeing that we are more responsible than ever in creating this world. We cannot just leave it up to, you know, government and different systems. There's another reality beyond that, that we inhabit and that kind of moral force has to come from within us. I think I found the quote and I would like to end with it. And he imagined, as he wrote, a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I call the human order, which no political order can replace. A new experience of being a renewed rootedness in the universe. A newly grasped sense of higher responsibility and new found inner relationship to other people and the human community. These factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go. And this is a really quite a statement. It's significant. And I think your work in PHA, your teaching about your work, your time you spend in your gardens and upstate, this is a, you know, I think you do follow these kind of new steps out about it. You made a great contribution and you continue to make it in the future. So in the name of the community, the theater community, of course I would like to thank you for what you have done. I as a student read PHA, just looking at the images, you know, I always read all the essays as I should. As you said, people don't read the journals anymore. I'm one of those who just read what was, and then the end is, but you know, I think that's in that style. If you really think of the heaven and the stars and there's some, there was your little boats where people oriented themselves. It was one of those great shining stars and the sense of shining. It was so important. And it is important. And to be in there meant something. It means something. So it's also for us to have been represented there. Really thank you for your work and editing is an art form. And you are, you know, an artist in what you do. And so it's a way of practicing art and writing. So, yeah. Thank you for your generous conversation and your comments. I really enjoyed talking with you today. Yeah. No, really. We got a sense of Bonnie Moranca. So she's out there. Email her or call her, harass her with articles, get inspired by her writing, do your own writing. Say why everything is so terribly and wrong. What she does and write manifestos against PHA. And she's like, this is what we miss. You know, find your voice. Yeah. We talked about and writing actually can help us as does drawing or singing. As she said, join us again tomorrow. We have the meeting company, a young company coming out of the living theater, a company that is out there on the streets, a very diverse company. I wish we had the great Judas Malina with us. We were such good friends. She came so often to the Segal Center. The only thing she came to New York events. He was in the old age home out in Jersey. She took a, you know, car and drove there, a bread, bring her and we were talking. So we really miss her. It would have been so important to hear what she had to say. But let's see what that young company does, which is out there on the streets in Brooklyn, protesting against pipelines that are supposed to go through neighborhoods and other things. They just did the coming reading with us at the white box. We've all done Asturias were coming. You warned against the ghosts of fascism, you know, that only detected it started at an election night. And then the great Norican poetry cafe. We will have on Friday, Daniel and artists. Who spoken word artists and we will hear from the community. How is that going for them this, this time of Corona? But again, Bonnie, thank you, thank you. I hope I didn't get too long. The great how round. Thank you for having us, for hosting us the VJ. It means the world to us. And this was a, I think an inspiring conversation. And yeah, it's no inspire me to write. Maybe I'm always also trying to do it and say, what does he, but listening to you, you know, we, we have to find our voices and it's important. What do we do and to do some drugs here and there. So thank you, Bonnie. Good. Thank you for lunch today or for dinner. Are you a cook? What's, what's. Well, I, I'm trying to stay away from pasta. I had some yesterday, but I just made some sauce. But, you know, I like, I like watching the cooking shows too, even if I don't have to eat it all, you know, with performance. You don't have to see everything we're reading about it. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes helps, you know, and what's the difference a day later? Did you eat it? And you saw that? No, I ate it all. What is the memory in the mind? I know you wrote a whole book about pasta. So I know you are a big fan of it. So all the best. And I hope all we will get together soon. And we have great holidays and thank you all for listening. And what Bonnie talks about, it is not, you know, that we know just know about her and we, we congratulate and celebrate her work, but it is really in this sense, what she did about transforming the people, audiences. So that's meaningful to you. So something in there that is of significance. So you pick up a pen, write things down for 20 minutes a day, a writer friend, a mail or a letter, a good old letter, a great poets project. Out there, people say we go back to letter writing. People write themselves later now by the mail. To support the post office, but also as an artistic practice. So bye bye. I should stop. We always say it's about radical listening. And then I go on talking. Great conversation. Thank you, Bonnie. Thanks so much. We wait for the snow.