Book Celebration: The Theatre of Drawing

Book Celebration: The Theatre of Drawing with Bonnie Marranca and Daniel Sack.

Monday, Nov 2nd, 6:30PM

Join us for an evening celebrating PAJ's newest publication Theatre of Drawing with its editors Bonnie Marranca and Daniel Sack.

Printed in color, this is the first book to present such an expansive theatrical perspective on drawing. Artists drawings and writings featured include Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Jibz Cameron, Judith Malina, Raven Chacon, Gyun Hur, Joan Jonas, Ralph Lemon, Elizabeth LeCompte, Julie Mehretu, Peter Schumann, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs, Annie B-Parson, Robert Wilson, Ann Hamilton, and others. Contributors to the volume Kelly Copper, Clifford Owens, Joan Jonas, Gyun Hur, and Jay Scheib along with Bonnie Marranca and Daniel Sack, in conversation with Frank Hentschker.

The new volume marks PAJ Publications’ 50th year of publishing, joining the 160 other titles the press has published since its founding in 1976.

“This is an unexpectedly moving volume, in which visual lightness is anchored by emotional weight. Julie Mehretu’s “mind breath” sketches, Laurie Anderson’s chalky smears, Trisha Brown’s wobbly, fragile lines: these and other drawings disclose the eloquent “hesitations of the thinking body,” as Ann Hamilton calls them. . . Throughout (as Joan Jonas says in a sentence that could apply to this whole, beautiful book), “drawing…does draw you in.” Marc Robinson, Yale University, author of American Performance in 1976

Bonnie Marranca is publisher and editor of the Obie Award-winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art which she co-founded in 1976. Her books include Timelines: writings and conversations, Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, Theatrewritings, and Conversations with Meredith Monk. She has also edited several collections of plays, essays, and interviews: Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Performance Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, The Sun on the Tongue by Etel Adnan (with Klaudia Ruschkowski), Conversations on Art and Performance, New Europe: plays from the continent, Plays for the End of the Century, and The Theatre of Images, a seminal work on American Theatre.

Bonnie Marranca has received the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship (UK), Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (Japan), Fulbright Award (Free University, Berlin), Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship in American Studies (Princeton University), and Guggenheim Fellowship. Her writings have been translated into more than twenty languages. She has lectured and taught widely in American and European universities, including Columbia University, Princeton University, NYU, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, Free University (Berlin), Autonomous University/Institute for Theatre (Barcelona), and University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and was a Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre at The New School/Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Bonnie Marranca resides in New York City.

Daniel Sack is a writer and editor with interests in contemporary theatre and interdisciplinary arts, performance theory, and critical writing as a creative practice. He has published five books, including the monographs Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying (University of Michigan Press, 2024) and After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2015). He is the editor of Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (Routledge, 2017), a collection of page-long hypothetical performances by close to one hundred artists and theorists of the stage, and the founding editor of the online open-access journal Imagined Theatres, a site for creative critical thinking about performance. His research has been funded with fellowships from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Daniel is a professor in the Commonwealth Honors College and the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where his current research includes the intersections of printmaking, drawing, and performance, and collaborative creation with children. 

Kelly Copper began collaborating with Pavol Liska in 1997, and together they founded Nature Theater of Oklahoma in 2006. The company is committed to “making the work they don’t know how to make,” an approach yielding new amalgams of opera, dance, theatre, and film, combined with popular culture and humor. Starting out in dirty New York basements working with zero subsidy and cardboard sets, Nature Theater of Oklahoma has, since 2008, been commissioned by theaters and festivals around the world, including Rhurtriennale, Burgtheater Wien, Festival d'Avignon, Kampnagel Hamburg, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Salzburger Festspiele. Copper and Liska have each been recipients of the Nestroy Special Prize in Theater, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts, as well as two OBIE Awards for their work on No Dice and Life and Times. Their most recent show, Pizza or A Door In The Dark Does Not Dance will be coming this February 2027 to New York City's Skirball Center.

Gyun Hur is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores grief and the poetics of diaspora. Born in South Korea and raised in Georgia, her practice spans installation, performance, drawing, and writing. Her recent work features hand-blown glass vessels filled with local water, evoking the fluidity of intergenerational memory and community resilience. Hur has received fellowships from the NEA, Arnhold Forum, and AHL Foundation, and has participated in residencies and fellowships at Art Farm, Stove Works, the Bronx Museum, among others. Her work has been featured in BOMB, Hyperallergic, and Art in America. She is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design.

Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas' experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.

Jonas has exhibited and performed extensively around the world. Her notable exhibition history includes Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th São Paulo Biennial; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and The Drawing Center, New York. Most recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a retrospective of Jonas's work. Jonas is the recipient of many awards including The Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon (2016); the Maya Deren Award given by the American Film Institute (1989); and the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009). In 2024, she was presented the Nam June Paik prize, awarded to artists who have contributed to the development of contemporary art, mutual understanding, and world peace; and in 2018, Jonas was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, given to those individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

Clifford Owens is a visual artist. His solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1, Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England, and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His performance-based projects have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owens’ art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Jay Scheib studied theater and comparative literature as well as fine arts/video and performance, later receiving his MFA in Directing at Columbia University, School of the Arts in New York. With a New York-based ensemble, Jay Scheib & Co., Scheib began the development of an approach to contemporary performance which would draw together an improvisation-rich approach to physical performance with a "live cinema," technology-forward stage aesthetic. Scheib’s most recent works include a new staging of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal for the Bayreuther Festspiele in Germany and the world of premiere of Paola Prestini’s opera at the intersection of AI and disability, Sensorium Ex. His past works also include Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face with New York City Opera; The Medea after Euripides, Müller, and Passolini; Beethoven’s Fidelio; the Montiverdi opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria; as well and many of his own original adaptations including Platonov, or the Disinherited after Chekhov; the Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems trilogy; and two “live cinema” Ingmar Bergman adaptations – the Keeril Makan-composed opera Persona and a theatrical staging of The Silence.