Saying farewell to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art with editor Bonnie Marranca

After nearly 50 years in print, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art publishes its last issue

Since 1976, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art has published innovative work in theatre, performance art, dance, video, writing, technology, sound, and music, bringing together all live arts in thoughtful cultural dialogue. This past fall after 48 years in print, long-standing editor Bonnie Marranca ended her editorship of the journal and published PAJ’s last issue.

To celebrate PAJ’s legacy and Marranca’s stewardship of the publication, the MIT Press’s director of journals and open access Nick Lindsay—a longtime colleague of Marranca’s—recently spoke to her about the journal, her work, and what could come next in the field of performance. Read on for their conversation.


Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press: What were you hoping to accomplish when you started PAJ in the 1970s? What was it offering that was new and different from what was around at that time?

Bonnie Marranca, PAJ: PAJ was founded by Gautam Dasgupta and me when we were in the PhD department at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The first issue was published in May 1976. We had a very traditional education at that time. The experimental theatre was not part of a curriculum in the early- and mid-70s in universities. One studied mainly European theatre, traditional American playwrights up to the mid-20th century, and maybe 19th century American drama.

We were also writing about the current theatrical events for the Soho Weekly News. We were meeting a lot of artists, going to the theatre several nights a week. At this time, we began to think about starting our own journal. The New York Times and the establishment press was not covering all the lively theatre, video art, and performance art or the new dance and experimental film that really took off in the 70s.

Our main competitor was The Drama Review (TDR), which was based at New York University. Then-editor Michael Kirby, who was a scholar especially of futurism and avant-garde theatre, believed in a kind of flat, objective style of writing, which was very descriptive. It was an extreme version of Susan Sontag’s “against interpretation.” Our vision was totally different in that we believed in critical thinking and criticism—not just describing a production and pretending to be totally objective about it. Our driving force was to create a new kind of criticism and other ways of writing about the arts. PAJ’s goals even now, almost fifty years later, have remained the same as those mentioned in the journal’s first editorial: to focus on the modernist heritage and the contemporary spirit, within a historical context. The approach would be interdisciplinary.

Nick Lindsay: What are some of the early articles that were emblematic of what you were doing at PAJ?

Bonnie Marranca: The first issue included an essay on Gertrude Stein, who was written about often in the journal, and we also published two of her books in our book division. Within the first two or three years, the journal featured articles on influential artists of the time, such as Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Mabou Mines, and Theatre of the Ridiculous. Other selections featured Philip Glass’s notes on Einstein on the Beach, John Willett on Piscator’s New York Dramatic Workshop, writings by Augusto Boal, Peter Handke, Sam Shepard, Stanley Kauffmann; interviews with Edward Bond, Joseph Chaikin, Susan Sontag; contemporary plays by Maria Irene Fornes, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Michael McClure. At the time many of the avant-garde artists in the 70s were ignored by the establishment, and now many of them have become canonical. They are the basis now of the contemporary curriculum.

Nick Lindsay: Do you feel PAJ played a role in bringing them into the canon?

Bonnie Marranca: Many people have expressed that sentiment in letters and private responses. Current scholarship and the curriculum are evidence of this development. Getting information about international theatre and about exciting movements, artists, and works downtown are what they have considered valuable about PAJ in educating audiences over the course of decades.

Unlike many other theatre publications, PAJ was never based in an academic institution; it was really part of our independent press, which was also publishing books at the time by and about many of the same people in the journal. We have remained outside of academia and, for the most part, not tied to its theoretical and academic kind of writing. I’ve always encouraged people to be more journalistic and to write in a literary language, and not with the academic jargon which has increased in recent decades. The idea is to give more freedom to the critic’s voice. In other words, to publish essays and articles and thinking about art, not theories about art.

Nick Lindsay: How did PAJ evolve during its history that might not be as evident to the rest of us? Is there anything you may have done differently?

Bonnie Marranca: The journal was initially called Performing Arts Journal. By the late 1990s, we changed the name to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, because we moved a lot more toward visual arts—not painting or sculpture, but visual arts as it pertained to performance art or video or installations. 

In the last fifteen years or so PAJ began publishing portfolios of performance and drawing, which was very unique for a theatre journal. I invited Bob Wilson to initiate that series and he gave us his drawings from The Threepenny Opera production. He was in the first issue in 1976, and now he’s in the last issue with his drawings of Moby Dick, which just opened in Germany. Needless to say, over nearly fifty years we have had longstanding ties to certain kinds of work and artists. And in our final issue, we have drawings representing a younger generation, those of Kelly Copper from the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.

PAJ is also known for its attentiveness to the question of the spiritual dimension of art. In one issue, I published a discussion with Meredith Monk on art practice as spiritual practice. We did an entire issue in 2023 on “spiritualities,” for which I invited many contributors to address this question as an alternative to the highly politicized and ideological writing on the arts that fill academic journals. The pervasive influence of spiritual thought for more than a century, exemplified by the work of major figures, is one of the distinguishing qualities of the avant-garde and modernism, in all the arts. Plus, the entire dimension of Black culture is so tied to church rituals and forms.

I feel that the journal not only reflects aspects of contemporary thinking, but that it should also lead the way and point to important themes that may not be so much on the surface. It should both rediscover the heritage and educate readers in alternative perspectives on the arts.

Nick Lindsay: When you look at the grand scope of everything you’ve done since you started PAJ, is there anything you might have done differently?

Bonnie Marranca: One of the things that I always wanted to do was include investigative reporting: to look at the cultural policies of organizations and examine the way that awards and grants and programs are administered and promoted. I also think looking at publishing practices and the issues of rights and intellectual property is something that needs exploring. 

Of course, I’m examining this from the perspective of more than four decades of work. It was not on my mind in the beginning of the journal, but knowing what I know now, I see that the theatre field is very naive in terms of protecting scholars and journals and understanding contracts of book publishers regarding their own material. In the visual arts and literary worlds there are lots of artists who have been very outspoken about the policies of institutions and museums. But it just doesn’t happen in theatre, maybe because the resources are so scarce and both artists and academics are afraid of losing their jobs and grants.

Nick Lindsay: Are there fields that you wish you would have covered earlier, or more extensively?

Bonnie Marranca: Occasionally one misses an artist, and there are some artists I wish we had covered more. A lot of times it’s a question of what is out there and who people are writing about. At different times there are certain theories or subjects that take over the field, even certain vocabulary words—like “embodiment” does now. And then people move on. These last ten years, people have been interested in aging, borders, media, disability, and AI. They’re interested in race and gender.

PAJ started out in an era when perception and consciousness were important subjects—that was also true in the 60s. The journal was always interested in art forms and new artistic vocabularies. Artists and scholars are not so interested in form now. They’re interested in content. Everything is politicized and PAJ does not move in the direction of identity politics. I feel that PAJ has been able to realize the goals and themes that were important to the editorial profile of the journal, on our own terms.

Nick Lindsay: Speaking of how those themes developed, one of the things PAJ is best known for is how rigorously and closely you worked with authors to develop their articles. Can you describe what that process looked like at PAJ and how that might be different from a traditional editor-author relationship?

Bonnie Marranca: It’s funny, but a number of authors have said to me that no editor ever said anything about their work. They just submitted it, and no one helped them in the editorial process. My philosophy has been to cultivate the voice of the writers and to help them realize their ideas. Some articles are near perfect as is. You don’t really have to work on them in any way, except minor copyediting. Sometimes an article just needs a few touches here and there that can be explained either on the phone or an e-mail. 

Sometimes, things need a first rewrite then a second rewrite. I try to do this as clearly as possible and explain in an e-mail, and often the writer can get it right away when you point out what’s missing or something that needs to be further developed or something that doesn’t fit. But at other times I might just mail back the whole essay with my handwritten notes all over it, paragraph to paragraph. Sometimes it takes two rewrites but after that it might be abandoned. It’s hard to get to three rewrites. There are times when I just abandon the idea of getting the perfect article and I do a lot of the fixing up myself because you just can’t quite get there with the author. The authors are really grateful for the attention to their work because they recognize it right away. 

Nick Lindsay: Are you also suggesting other texts for authors to consider at this stage? 

Bonnie Marranca: Because I am trained in the field and a writer myself, I can see the historical methodologies and whether the person writing is familiar with foundational books and does not leave out influential texts. 

This has been a problem in recent years since theatre history has been mostly abandoned by theatre departments, and dramatic literature has too, as the academic world has been dominated by theoretical approaches. Younger scholars have begun to see how the impact of theory has led to the absence of certain kinds of studies and histories that are necessary for teaching. Plays have given way to “devised theatre.” Professors tell me that students now have difficulty reading plays. We’ve always published a play in each issue of the journal and many anthologies of plays, more than 1000 plays translated from nearly two-dozen languages. In the final issue of PAJ, there is a new play by Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek. A recent Nobel Prize-winner, Jon Fosse, was published in the journal last year.

Nick Lindsay: Now that PAJ has published its final issue, what do you think its long-term contribution has been? How do you think people will view PAJ in, say, ten years time?

Bonnie Marranca: I think PAJ has made a major long-term contribution as an intellectually rigorous and independent voice. Most of the people who write for PAJ are now in academia, but they are encouraged to write for our journal in a more personal way and to develop a unique voice. 

We’ve focused on more styles of writing than the typical academic essay. We’ve also made contributions through the many different directions we’ve taken, like performance and drawing or spirituality or dance writing. And, more than any journal publishing in the English-speaking world, we include artists’ writings. I love artists’ writings and have been educated by them. PAJ is known for this emphasis, too.

Overall, what we’ve contributed has been the combination of theatre and visual arts and dance and the publication of artists’ writings. We always believed in working within a historical context, not pitting one generation against another, and supporting the artists who created the foundations of the field. We always included that history in PAJ, along with artists new to the scene.

My basic idea with the journal—and I started this in the 90s in my teaching, lecturing and editing—was to bring together the two histories of performance: one that is taught in the visual arts and the other taught in theatre. They are two different trajectories and lists of artists, with some overlapping. PAJ’s goal was to bring together these two histories for a more comprehensive history of performance ideas.

Nick Lindsay: If PAJ was a real singular home for work that would likely not find a home in other more traditional journals, where is that work going to go now?

Bonnie Marranca: That’s a good question. Some people in our final issue are wondering where they are going to publish their work or where artists’ writings can be published. It remains to be seen whether writers who identified with PAJ on topics that were off the fashionable circuit can influence other editors to open their formats, and whether if they’re writing in a less academic manner, they can publish widely in other journals.


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