Louise Steinman

This hands-on guidebook to creating and understanding performance pieces offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process involved in transforming personal stores to theater. Steinman interviews some of the most interesting post-Judson performers of the last decades-Trisha Brown, Ping Chong, Meredith Monk, Spalding Gray, and a host of others. She weaves descriptions of her own path as a writer and performer into a thesis which demonstrates how one can work towards developing an authentic voice. Steinman describes how performers use their body’s “native language,” making use of dreams, memory, and improvisation, building small stories into larger collective tales, offering warmth and connection. As she says in a new Preface, “stories can be both healing and a radical act.”

Essential reading for shamans, performers, and humans. March 7, 1997

Reviewer: A reader

For some reason, this book is still the only one of its kind, delving into the performance art philosophies of Meredith Monk, Barbara Dilley, Ping Chong, and Spalding Gray, just to name a few. Beautifully illustrated, this book explores dance and performance art from a kind of Jungian/shamanist/Buddhist perspective. You can learn from this book just what it means to be an artist--or just what it means to be alive.