Search results for ""53rd State Press""

In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth’s bull-jean & dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.

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Ann and Mary Ann are married. They are both neuroscientists and they both witnessed deeply traumatic events when they were young. Now, in the carefully ordered worlds of their marriage and laboratory—which is linked like the two lobes of the brain—Ann and Mary Ann care for, protect, and reflect one another. But when Ann begins to study Fran, a tile artist who is unable to recognize her husband after he commits an unthinkably violent act, Ann and Mary Ann must reckon with what it really means to see and be present to another person. Ann, Fran, Mary Ann is a deeply reflective, reflecting, refracting play about trauma, God, patterns, and the way they live in our bodies, our minds, and acts of love.

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Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. One artist's reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and crowd-funded self-care. Capitalism is toxic but the Revolution is not in your body butter.

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This is the first collection of plays by OBIE award winning Tina Satter, described as a "rising experimental star" by the New York Times and named a 2011 Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. Seagull (Thinking of You) is a personal look at performance, failure and attempted love -- ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. This volume includes the plays Family, named a Top 10 show of 2009 by Time Out New York and Away Uniform.

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In this collection of interviews conducted between 2019-2021 with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde, playwright Sara Farrington brings to light a series of "lost conversations" about class, race, difficulty, endurance, and privilege in the New York avant-garde of the past fifty years, as well as conversations about the ephemerality, the always-about-to-be-lostness of the medium itself. Featuring conversations with Joanne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart, Lee Breuer, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Andre Gregory, Deborah Hay, Bill T. Jones, Adrienne Kennedy, Lola Pashalinksi, Jennifer Tipton, Kate Valk, Mac Wellman, and Robert Wilson, The Lost Conversation is also a record both of the avant-garde's past and of its urgent present.

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This volume collects two plays by Erin Courtney, A Map of Virtue and Black Cat Lost. The Obie Award--winning Map is a symmetrical play: part interview, part comedy, part horror story. Courtney's plays unfold in a delicate dance of pattern and narration; they ring out their images and meanings as a sequence of bells: complicating, harmonizing, and remapping their senses as they run their idiosyncratic course.

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This book collects three plays and one manifesto by writer-director Julia Jarcho, including American Treasure, Dreamless Land, and Grimly Handsome, winner of a 2013 Obie award for Best New American Play.

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It's easy to dismiss the Holy Ghost People. They travel door-to-door in white sheets spouting pseudoscience about time travel, wormholes, and a new galactic gospel. Most of the town has already laughed them away. But when the Holy Ghost People start to perform "miracles," denial becomes difficult, and conversation quickly shifts to what ought to be done.

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In a roving, shimmering conversation that took place in May 2021, scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and playwright, songwriter, performance artist, and educator Daniel Alexander Jones discuss love as a foundational principle of artistic practice and societal change. Reflecting on Love Like Light, Daniel Alexander Jones's collection of seven plays and performance texts (published by 53rd State in July 2021), DAJ and APG illuminate the ways in which an attention to care, community, nuance, invitation, perceptual particularities, and embodied conditions can resist the profoundly extractive context in which life is lived and art is made. As they discuss the work of Audre Lorde, Billie Holiday, Beah Richards, Bayard Rustin, and Malcolm X, as well as that of DAJ's grandma Daisy Mae and APG's grandmother, aunt, and niece, DAJ and APG propose that love, like light, suffuses everything, and that love, like light, creates a field in which transformation, justice, healing, and radical beauty are not just possible—they are already, now.

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La Guía de campo de iLANDing contiene 75 partituras para la investigación de espacios urbanos que fueron desarrolladas a lo largo de diez años por el Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Arte, Naturaleza y Danza. En estos laboratorios, artistas y científicos generaban metodologías híbridas para un acercamiento a la ecología urbana fundamentado en la danza y diseñado para cualquiera que desee experimentar la incursión de la naturaleza en la ciudad o descentrar los métodos antropocéntricos habituales de navegar por el mundo. Lleva una introducción de la fundadora de iLAND, Jennifer Monson.

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bull-jean & dem/dey back collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth’s southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.First published by RedBone Press in 1998, the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories chronicles the course of lovve returning in the Life-times of bull-dog-jean. Set in the rural 1920s south, the bull-jean stories is an act of griot-anthropology, remembering the ancestor we never knew but always knew we needed—the raucous, sweet-talking, heart-aching wo’mn-lovvn-wo’mn bull-dog-jean and the fierce and beautiful community that surrounds her.Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns in bull-jean/we wake. Grieving the loss of their elders, seeking healing, the Narrator calls forward bull-jean. Through a series of dreams, porch prayers, and visitations from cussing conjurers, Black Mermaids, children that fly, and shape-shifting ole folk, bull-jean and dem guide the Narrator towards a realization of the sustaining power of love, memory, community, ritual, and spiritual binding.

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Psalms for the Wreckage collects Joshua Young's trilogy of scripts in verse—To the Chapel of Light (Mud Luscious Press, 2012), When the Wolves Quit (Gold Wake Press, 2012), and a third, previously unpublished play in verse This is the Way to Rule—in a single edition. Exploring faith, dogma, and the politics of power, Psalms for the Wreckage is a stunning collection of poetic, epistolary playwriting as well as a fascinating look at one author's evolving relationship with genre.

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This volume includes The Mayor of Baltimore and its companion piece Anthem from Kristen Kosmas, whose writing invents its poetry from the blunt, the found, and the discarded. A coterie of friends and strangers gather to celebrate a modest electoral victory. Oblique poetry alternates with the syncopated clatter of small talk. A brokenhearted refrain of disappointment underscores, and a tiny aria of self-revelation hangs in the empty space after the guests leave.

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Lumberob (Rob Erickson) is a singular phenomenon of language, looping and manic-obsessive performance intensity. Erickson's writing employs a syntax wholly his own, patterning words by working them through a physical obstacle course and so creating a performance text that really undoes any useful distinctions between language and embodiment. Off the Hozzle is lurching, digressing, doing-undoing, and unlike any other play.

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1534: John of Leyden proclaims himself the Favorite of Heaven, runs naked through the streets of Munster, Germany, and forms a society free of laws or private property. 1976: John Lydon proclaims himself an “antichrist,” helps launch a movement to “destroy passersby,” and permanently changes popular culture. Coincidence? In Lana Lesley’s graphic adaptation of the Rude Mechs’ stage adaptation of Greil Marcus’s text, Dr. Narrator and the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren recount an alternative history of the 20th century via the Sex Pistols, the Cabaret Voltaire, the May ’68 riots, and a handful of medieval heretics. Lipstick Traces is a graphically gritty and intellectually nervy rendition of a theatrically irreverent and physically ecstatic production of a history of “movements in culture that raised no monuments…movements that barely left a trace.”

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David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

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Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work. Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves with lithe and associative grace through histories personal, political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price. Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive, multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh Silverman, “continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for.” A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.

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SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer’s identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again?

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Dark, disturbing, deft, irreverent, and revelatory, Ignacio Lopez’s monologue is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy. Weaving together two very different voices grappling with strikingly similar crises of sexuality and conscience, Severed asks: where do we draw the line between human and monster, severing, as we do so, the possibility of empathy, forgiveness, and understanding? What happens when we see ourselves reflected in the monster’s eye?

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Set in Alabama at the scene of James Agee and Walker Evans's famous reporting, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag brings Sibyl Kempson's attention to the ethical snares of poetic journalism and what it means to work on the land. She interrogates the strange energy of images, both their potential to anesthetize response, and their invitation to be approached as hermeneutic thresholds between visible and invisible orders. Interwoven with sources from Agee and Walker to Sontag, to inscriptions on Assyrian mythological seals, and nested in a set of images from other performances, the play holds forth in its own genre, a bad-ventriloquism visitation seed-eating prayer ceremony with songs. The entire score, composed by Kempson's longtime collaborator Ashley Turba, completes the book.

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