A Moment in Time
Bonnie Marranca
W e go to press with this spring issue in the hope that the policies of
our new President can lift American society on economic, sozial,
cultural, and political levels, to move past the worst devastations of
Covid-19 toward new beginnings. For PAJ, it is also a special marker, the start of
our forty-fifth year of publication, which commenced in May 1976. For those in
theatre, there is the feeling that in the months ahead stages may be re-opening
and live audiences slowly returning to their seats. In light of that hopeful feel-
ing of theatre coming back to life, there may be a special joy in the selection of
Julian Beck’s previously unpublished account from his journal of the January
1959 opening of the Living Theatre’s 14th Street theatre, with William Carlos
Williams’s Many Loves. Beck painstakingly details all the work involved with the
building of brick walls, the pouring of cement, working with carpenters, electri-
cians, plumbers, and city inspectors, along with the anxiety of being ready for
opening night, and then rejoicing at the party afterwards, filled with an artistic
who’s who documented in his entry with historic photos.
As with recent issues, a considerable number of the new pieces published in this
issue were written in the midst of the global pandemic. Playwright-director Rob-
ert Quillen-Camp created a visual poetic text in the form of a map as guide to
the headphone and headset modes of experiencing theatre, by way of discussing
various tech generations from the Walkman to Zoom. Along the way he draws on
Merleau-Ponty, Shakespeare, Wilder, Rimini Protokoll, and Godard. Composer
Joseph Diebes looks at the work of Alan Lomax, known for his historic recordings
of folk music in the forties and fifties, which led to his system of cantometrics to
quantify the folk songs of every culture. It can be understood as a precursor to
algorithmic profiling that dominates social media and marketing strategy in our
own time, especially when considered alongside public service announcements
quantifying a long list of statistics on Covid and the American public.
The brilliant Berlin-based media artist Hito Steyerl turns a Dusseldorf retro-
spective canceled by the pandemic into an occasion for reimagining a series
© 2021 Bonnie Marranca
SEITE 128 (2021), S. 1-3.
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https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_e_00557
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of livestreamed zoom events. Instead of giving a walk-through of the exhibit,
Christian de Mouilpied Sancto describes how she created new material related to
the pandemic, reflecting on conditions for communications during quarantine,
and addressing far-right politics, anti-lockdown protests, and AI profiling. Der
Wilma Theatre staging of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, reviewed by
Bess Rowen, notes that the company quarantined in the Pocono Mountains while
filming their production that was eventually livestreamed. The British-Kuwaiti
playwright Sulayman Al Bassam reveals in a conversation with Geoffrey Lokke
that his play Mute grew out of his helplessness as a theatre-maker confronting
closed theatres and canceled projects, in addition to being a response to the politi-
cal violence and corruption that came to a head in the recent explosions in Beirut.
In the absence of live theatre, Isaiah Wooden turned to recent documentaries
on Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, against the background of the Black
Lives Matter protests surrounding the death of George Floyd and occurring at
the same time as the Covid crisis. With the increased interest in black political
Bewegungen, histories, and authors, these documentaries on two intellectual giants
offer new research and understanding of their importance in American culture.
Hansberry, a playwright and political activist had her life in letters cut short
by early death at the age of thirty-five, while James Baldwin has been rediscov-
ered by a new generation of readers and reread by those who had already been
familiar with his eloquence before his death in 1987. Playwright-director John
Jesurun, in lieu of directing his new work, took to the streets and empty theatres
to capture the images of emptiness and loss in the deserted spaces of theatrical
Aktivität. He discovered that space and light had changed in the way people now
viewed daily events. The writer Carol Becker took another direction in reflecting
on her life over the last year of social distancing and solitary living. She offers a
meditation on not traveling and the process of looking inward, how that impacts
one’s relationship to the outside world and to the past. Intriguingly, she draws on
Freud’s essay “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” connecting her own
travels to Greece through exploring the revelation by Freud of the importance of
travel to the psychoanalytic process of freeing buried aspects of the self. Was
she discovers has to do with staying in place and understanding one’s biography
in deeper tracings.
In the experience of the last year, each individual has had to experience life in
alternative ways, for better or worse. Unfathomable numbers of people have lost
their lives, and those who live to see each new day consider how to go forward.
It has been a year of isolation, anxiety, self-discovery, preservation, arbeiten, Und
caretaking. Life and death matters. I had been thinking about these conditions
when I went this afternoon to see an exhibit of paintings by Giorgio Morandi,
2 BLUME 128
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who over decades gave to the still lives of ordinary vases, bowls, and bottles an
immense intensity and feeling of presence. In his own observations of work and
life there is a lesson for our present moment: “One can travel the world and see
Nichts. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to
look hard at what you do see.”
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MARRANCA / A Moment in Time 3
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