Alchemies of theater : plays, scores, writings / Dick Higgins ; edited with introductory essays by Bonnie Marranca.

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2024.

©2024

1 online resource (xii, 203 pages) : illustrations

Access is available to the Yale community.

Description based on information from the publisher.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

In addition to his work as visual artist, publisher, poet, and composer, Dick Higgins (1938-98) was also a genuine man of the theater. A founder of Fluxus, he was a major figure in artistic communities in downtown New York City, across Europe, and in Japan. Yet as important as Higgins's work has been to historians of the American avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to his radical theatrical vision. Alchemies of Theater brings together a broad selection of Higgins's writings and theater-related work, much of it unpublished or long out of print, including plays and performance scores, drawings, and writings on theater and performance. As this book demonstrates, Higgins deconstructed the drama long before it became a project of theater; undercut the traditional roles of author and director; created what is now considered "devised" theater; pioneered the use of media in theater, writing the first electronic opera; and was a precursor in deconstruction and "postdramatic" avant-garde traditions. His Intermedia manifesto offered a sweeping view of interdisciplinarity--in effect, a new arts ecology.

UMPEBC 2024.

Books / Online

English

July 16, 2024

Includes bibliographical references.