New from TCG Books:
Getting Off
Lee Breuer on Performance
With Stephen Nunns
NEW YORK, NY – Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is pleased to announce the publication of Getting Off: Lee Breuer on Performance with Stephen Nunns.
Since he first arrived on the New York art/theatre/performance scene in 1970, Lee Breuer has been at the forefront of the American theatrical avant-garde, creating challenging works both independently and with Mabou Mines, the company he co-founded with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow. By blending disciplines and techniques from widely different cultures, he has created a unique performance genre, fusing sound and musical components, visual arts, and arresting movement/dance/puppetry into a groundbreaking form.
Breuer’s work as a director includes radical adaptations of major works, such as his celebrated stagings of The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett, The Gospel at Colonus, inspired by Sophocles, a gender-reversed King Lear, and a revolutionary reinterpretation of Ibsen with Mabou Mines DollHouse.
Breuer has also been a prolific writer who redefines the concept of character and the use of biography in such works as The Shaggy Dog Animation, A Prelude to Death in Venice, Hajj, Ecco Porco, and La Divina Caricatura in a distinctive American voice.
In this volume, theatre historian and journalist Stephen Nunns has assembled a unique look into one of contemporary theatre’s most singular creative minds. Using interviews and excerpts from Breuer’s writings, with added historical commentary, the thrilling result is equal parts autobiography, artistic manifesto, and critical exploration. Extensively illustrated with photographs of his work from around the world, this is a one-of-a-kind portrait of the artist and theatrical activist at work.
Lee Breuer (Chevalier and MacArthur Fellow) is a writer and director whose work expands the boundaries of storytelling in the theatre. He is a founding artistic director of Mabou Mines. The Gospel at Colonus, his unprecedented merger of Greek theatre and gospel service, is now a classic of the contemporary stage, as is his post-Brechtian production Mabou Mines DollHouse.
Stephen Nunns is a professor at Towson University. From 1996 to 2000, he was an associate editor at American Theatre magazine, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.
Theatre Communications Group (TCG) exists to strengthen, nurture, and promote professional theatre in the U.S. and globally. Since its founding in 1961, TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and nearly 10,000 Individual Members. Through its Core Values of Activism, Artistry, Diversity, and Global Citizenship, TCG advances a better world for theatre and a better world because of theatre. TCG offers its members networking and knowledge-building opportunities through research, communications, and events, including the annual TCG National Conference, one of the largest nationwide gatherings of theatre people; awards grants and scholarships, approximately $2 million per year, to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 17 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. In all of its endeavors, TCG seeks to increase the organizational efficiency of its Member Theatres, cultivate and celebrate the artistic talent and achievements of the field, and promote a larger public understanding of, and appreciation for, the theatre.www.tcg.org.
Getting Off: Lee Breuer on Performance
With Stephen Nunns
256 pages
June 2019
$19.95
Paperback
978-1-55936-533-8
eBook
978-1-55936-862-9
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