Suzanne Lacy between Kaprow and Chicago

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

Towards an Abyssal Praxis in 5 Moves

The equivalency “land is to soil as body is to flesh” is a guide to reflect on the techniques of coloniality in the extraction and violation of matter. From the perception that body and land are invented even as they are stolen, we endeavor to stay on the edge of that paradoxical abyss long enough to foresee modes of radical imagination.

On the Creative Process

The scenic experiment Silence of the World brought together indigenous leader Ailton Krenak and performer Andreia Duarte. The show deeply explored the perception of time in mythology as a space for reinventing the world and evoked the recognition of humans as just another planetary species alongside so-called nonhumans: animals, rivers, mountains, plants, and everything that exists. Silence of the World drew attention to indigenous peoples who connect with the living organism that is the planet.

The Promise of the Green New Deal

US theatre suffers from insufficient funding, mass unemployment, and widespread structural inequities. The Green New Deal, with its calls to create millions of highwage jobs and promote equity, offers a solution: establish a Green Federal Theatre. This examination of two historical Federal Theatre Project structures — the National Service Bureau and the Community Drama Program — culminates in a manifesto for a Green Federal Theatre.

Ending and Excess

In its willingness to expend resources towards the construction of worlds that end, theatre models the possibility of a response to crisis that refuses to make action in the present contingent upon the promise of a future. Three recent works reflect a contemporary metatheatrical preoccupation with this combination of exertion and conclusion, and suggest the need to reimagine conservation and sustainability once we’ve embraced the structuring logic of “the end.”