PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, originally Performing Arts Journal, is a triannual arts journal established in 1976 by Bonnie Marranca

Bonnie Marranca

Bonnie Marranca is a New York City-based critic, and publisher/editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, which she co-founded, in 1976, and continues to edit. She has written three collections of criticism: Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, which received the...

 and Gautam Dasgupta. It has taken a particular interest in contemporary performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

 and features expanded coverage in video, drama, dance, installations, media, and music. The journal is published for PAJ by special arrangement with the MIT Press

MIT Press

The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...

 and is distributed worldwide in a print version and online in color at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/paj. Issues can also be accessed through the online databases JSTOR and Project Muse.

PAJ Publications

PAJ integrates theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

 and visual arts

Visual arts

The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...

 in an expanded view of performance history. The journal publishes essays, interviews and artists' writings, reviews of new exhibitions, performances, and books, and also, plays and performance texts from the United States and abroad. PAJ has featured interviews with Marina Abramović

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...

, Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...

, Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.-Background:Neshat's parents were upper middle-class...

, William Kentridge

William Kentridge

William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two...

, Deborah Hay

Deborah Hay

-Life and work:Deborah Hay was born in 1941 in Brooklyn. Her mother was her first dance teacher and directed her training until she was a teenager. Hay moved at age 19 to Downtown, Manhattan in the 1960s, where she continued her training with Merce Cunningham and Mia Slavenska...

, Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson (director)

Robert Wilson is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called "[America]'s — or even the world's — foremost vanguard 'theater artist'". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video...

, and Charles L. Mee

Charles L. Mee

Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts.-Early Life and Early Career:...

. The journal publishes a play in each issue, and has featured works by authors such as John Jesurun

John Jesurun

John Jesurun is writer, director and multi-media artist, based in a New York, USA. His work Chang in a Void Moon is a live serial running since 1983, originally at the Pyramid Club in the East Village, and now less frequently at venues worldwide. He was born 1951 in Battle Creek, Michigan.-...

, Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...

, Václav Havel

Václav Havel

Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...

, Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman is an American playwright and avant-garde theater pioneer. He is the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.-Life :...

, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...

, Naomi Wallace

Naomi Wallace

Naomi Wallace is a playwright, screenwriter and poet from Prospect, Kentucky, United States.-Life:Wallace obtained her Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College and did graduate studies at the University of Iowa....

, Heiner Müller

Heiner Müller

Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...

, and Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall is a poet of French-Norwegian nationalities who has lived in England since 1989.Bergvall has developed audio texts and collaborative performances with sound artists in Europe and North America; her critical work is largely concerned with emerging forms of writing, plurilingual...

. In recent years PAJ has featured new series on performance drawings; art, spirituality and religion; dialogues on crossovers in performance and visual arts.

PAJ Publications is the journal's book division, with more than 150 titles to date on or by Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...

, Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk

Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...

, María Irene Fornés

María Irene Fornés

María Irene Fornés is a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director who is associated with the establishment of the Off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Fornes themes focused on poverty and feminism. In 1965, she won her first Obie Award for Promenade and her second for The Successful...

, Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...

, Mac Wellman

Mac Wellman

Mac Wellman is an American playwright, author, and poet. Wellman is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether...

, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema.He maintained a frenetic pace in film-making...

, Victor Turner

Victor Turner

Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage...

, Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

, and Heiner Müller

Heiner Müller

Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...

.

External links

• PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art at Project MUSE
  Project MUSE
  Project MUSE is an online database of current and back issues of peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journals. It was founded in 1993 by Todd Kelley and Susan Lewis and is a project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. It had support from the Mellon...