Issue #24
Spring 2002
This issue of the journal was published in the aftermath of 9/11, featuring raw responses to a moment in New York long before artists and writers would begin to process a so-called post-9/11 world. Editor Sarah Michelson recognized that "now everything is different" referring to the previous issues focus on the concept of now, while editor Jill Sigman offered the following introduction to this issue: "...I agreed to edit this issue of the MR Performance Journal, all the while thinking ‘how can we deal with such a confused subject at such a confused time?’ But this journal is a way for people to “use what they’ve got”-- to share their experiences, their unique movement-oriented ways of processing events, and their meditations on the current relevance of the arts."
Editorial team
Editor-In-Chief
Sarah Michelson
Contributing Editor
Jill Sigman
Design
Ellen Fanning - Jana DeWitt
Articles
From the Editors
The very last Performance Journal , #23, was entitled “Now,” and now, everything is different. —Sarah Michelson Performing is always such a thing . I try to sleep enough, eat...
Excerpt from “The Role of the Artist in Dark Times”
When the bombing of Yugoslavia started in 1999 I realized that I no longer understood anything. At that moment, all my years of working in theater, fighting for sense and...
The Grasshopper Drags Itself Along
The Chinese supposedly have this saying that’s both a blessing and a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” “Maybe it's a locust and this is a sign of the...
An interview with Elizabeth Streb, choreographer and Artistic Director of STREB, and Laura Flanders, activist, author, and host of Working Assets Radio
JS: Elizabeth, you're in rehearsal now; when did you go back to rehearsal after 9/11? ES: 13 days. JS: And what made you start again? ES: My schedule is set...
Jill Szuchmacher
I was running late to work that morning. I had voted in the primary. It was eerily quiet. There were no sirens yet. 3-Legged Dog, a multimedia theater company I...
Pat Cremins
In 1981 in Lebanon, Phalangeist militias massacred a thousand Palestinian refugees in camps at Sabra and Shutilla. At the time, I was in rehearsals with a fast-rising downtown choreographer for...
Three Poems
Richard Paul Schmonsees Complex I am not a reasonable person I urge you to lock your bedroom doors. You who are afraid of shadows And who listen for my voice...
Trisha Brown
As we begin to heal and rebuild our lives, I hope we can find reasons to be thankful for the world we live in and also seek the inspiration to...
Homer Avila
my inner and outer experience, our individual and collective experiences a never before alignment of life forces to be felt so viscerally spilling from a rupture of goodness and love...
Yoshiko Chuma
It has been fifty-five years since WWII, but Japan still smells of occupation, as if it is a U.S. colony. The United States is now my home, but the country's...
Lise Brenner
It is a wet grey morning here in Amsterdam and the orange roses are dying in their yellow vase. I have no idea what to say about New York, about...
Fiona Marcotty
In 1942, my mother and grandmother were living in Paris; as former Russian aristocrats and refugees, they held no passports. The Nazis invaded, and deported them to Germany because they...
Jennifer Monson
Oct 13, 2001 I teach dance at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the Early Childhood Center. It's quite close to the site of the World Trade Center and...
Excerpt from Nostalgia, Aesthetics and Terrorism
There were big and smaller models of the towers at Dad's office. (My dad had worked as an architect with Yamasaki, the firm that designed the World Trade Center.) I...
Maia Ramnath
and nothing is the same anymore and why am i doing this and driven by uncomprehending restless- ness and dread i'd crossed the bridge from Queens on foot against an...
Susan Klein
The following was a letter to the NYFA: Safety is an illusion. It is a construct of the human mind, a survival mechanism. We all had this thrust upon us...
Sally Hess
I am a New Yorker, born and bred. On September 11 at 11:30 a.m. I was in Pennsylvania, ready to meet my yoga class in a sunny dance studio. Earlier,...
Mollie O’Brien
On the 11th I call my father. My progressive liberal dad says, "Blow that country up." I take in his rage without having a response. At work the company gives...
Donald Byrd talks about 9/11 with Jill Sigman
JS: You live right by the World Trade Center. Were you home on September 11th? DB: Most of the summer I would get coffee at Starbucks, so I got my...
9/11 Reflections
The evening of September 11th I came home to try to rest. A man I've never seen before was on the next-door roof just a few feet from my window....
Hope Clark and Jean Steiner organized and took part in simultaneous performative actions-- Jean in San Diego and Hope in New York. These are excerpts from their accounts of these actions.
JEAN STEINER While driving past San Diego's Horton Plaza on Sunday October 28, drivers and passengers craned their necks to observe an unusual sight: a group of people dressed in...
Keely Garfield
Tuesday Morning I live in Battery Park City. On September 11th, I awoke early to a beautiful day. I dropped my son off for what was to be his third...