Louise Steinman

THE SOUVENIR: A DAUGHTER DISCOVERS HER FATHER’S WAR
(North Atlantic/Random House, 2008)

Growing up, Louise Steinman knew little about her father's experience in WWII. All she knew was that the whistling teakettle was banned from the kitchen and that she was never to cry in front of him. Years later, after her parents' death, she found an old ammunition box filled with nearly five hundred letters her father had written to her mother during the war. She also found a silk Japanese flag inscribed to Yoshio Shimizu. Who was Yoshio Shimizu and why did her father have his flag? So began Steinman's quest to return this "souvenir" to its owner and, in the proces, learn more about the war that transformed the expressive young man in those letters into the reserved father she had known.

Weaving together her father's raw poignant letters with her own journey, Steinman presents a powerful view of how war changed one generation and shaped another. (from the Plume edition)

“Exceptional…A graceful, understated memoir…that draws its strength from the complexities it explores.”

"The Souvenir is a powerful testament that, regardless of time and place, the effect of war on the human spirit remains the same. Steinman's remarkable discovery shows how war separates our common humanity. It is a journey to repair that broken bond, a journey to know the humanity of those we have made enemy."
-Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone

“Partly a detective story, partly a meditation on the legacy of war… a bold, unusual, and moving book.”

"...an intimate and powerful story of the effects of war." -- James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers.

Gold Medal, Autobiography/Memoir, ForeWord Magazine

THE KNOWING BODY: THE ARTIST AS STORYTELLER IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
(North Atlantic Books)

When I wrote The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance (published in 1986, revised, 1995) I began with my own experience and also posed questions to choreographer/artists like Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Meredith Monk, Barbara Dilley and many others to understand how choreographers make dances.

I wrote both from my experience as a dance critic as well as a dancer/choreographer who’d performed with Meredith Monk and Ping Chong and as co-director of a dance/theater company. I’d been inspired by Judson Dance Theater, as well as storytellers like Spalding Gray, contemplative performers like Barbara Dilley, and improvisers like Nancy Stark Smith. With movement, language and image, and narrative as building blocks, I made dance performance pieces exploring my cultural heritage, the history of my city, the role of ritual in a fractured world.

We are trying to get this landmark book-- still in print from North Atlantic Books and now distributed by Random House-- out to the attention of the larger dance audience. The book has been in use for the past twenty years in theater, dance, and communications courses. It’s a lavishly illustrated hands-on guide to creating dance and performance out of the grist of your own experience and your own movement. Please consider using this text in your dance history classes or dance composition workshops.

Selected Reviews:

“…a dazzling and deeply impressive study of the performing arts.” -Jonathan Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times

"In the territory Steinman explores—risk, play, improvisation, the dual image of the performer and persona—her fine prose builds firmly, gracefully and movingly to what she considers the basic, too often unacknowledged function of the performer as storyteller: 'to remind us of our mortality.'"
—Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

"...a visceral experience, a temporal tome that transcends the limits of a 'good read.' Most readers will come away from The Knowing Body with an enriched sense of their own movement through the world as well as a greater understanding of the work of many new artists."
—Morrie Warshawski

Product Description
Steinman's book really stands alone among performance art books. While there are many that document what particular artists are doing, this one offers a way in for a person who wants to perform (or know more about how performance artists work). Must reading for anyone interested in performance art, it will also be fascinating to those in dance, theatre, playwriting, visual arts and performance of any sort.

This hands-on guidebook to creating and understanding dance and 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.”

Great Book on Performance!, December 26, 2000
By BananaFan (Denver, CO USA) -
Steinman's book really stands alone among performance art books. While there are many that document what particular artists are doing, this one offers a way in for a person who wants to perform (or know more about how performance artists work). The book is difficult to characterize: while not exactly a "how-to" manual, it inspired me to create new art and to think about how we tell stories with our bodies, with images, in front of an audience. Must reading for anyone interested in performance art, it will also be fascinating to those in theatre, playwriting, visual arts and performance of any sort. I lend mine out all the time (but it's one of a few among my many books that I make sure I always get back!)

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
Essential reading for shamans, performers, and humans., March 7, 1997
By A Customer
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.