Just a few quick Friday updates this week, as it’s the first week of classes.
As posted by Theatre Communications Group, applications in Theater, Playwriting, Dance Performance, Choreography and Film are now available. These awards are for emerging artists in several disciplines. The Princess Grace Award site is here.
I’ve been re-reading Amelia Jones’s Performing the Subject from the perspective of photography and performance. What an incredible book, structurally, conceptually, and maddeningly, thoroughly, envyingly researched. I’ve been particularly interested in the image of Jackson Pollack through photographs of his “action painting” as well as the documenting of Warhol performance in Christopher Makos’s photography, particularly his drag series “Lady Warhol.” (Makos just published a catalog of the series in September 2010; here’s a link to the Artbook site.) I like Jones’s reference to Duchamp (as well as her complication of the well-rehearsed lineage from the avant-garde to late 20th-c body art), but I’m also struck by the ways in which these photographic images connect with James Harding’s Cutting Performances, particularly the ways in which both books take a critique of scholarship and an engaged viewing position as critical to the understanding of the work itself. I’m not sure I’m up to either work as a model, but both are providing very useful ideas for my current avant-garde project. Next Friday, I’ll post a brief review of Harding’s work, perhaps also in relation to Jones.
Also of note, is the imminent publication with co-author Amy Strahler Holzapfel of our essay, “The Living Theatre: A Brief History of a Bodily Metaphor” forthcoming in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. More soon.
