Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins

Join us for an hour of readings and discussion celebrating Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, edited by Bonnie Marranca and just out from University of Michigan Press. Bonnie will be joined by Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Jessica Higgins, and George Quasha, moderated by Jeffrey Lependorf, The Flow Chart Foundation’s Executive Director.

In addition to his work as visual artist, publisher (of the highly influential Something Else Press), 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Alchemies of Theater brings together a broad selection of Higgins’s writings and theater-related work, much of it unpublished or long out of print, including plays and performance scores, drawings, and writings on theater and performance. 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.