“An unexpectedly moving volume, in which visual lightness is anchored by emotional weight. Julie Mehretu’s 'mind breath' sketches, Laurie Anderson’s chalky smears, Trisha Brown’s wobbly, fragile lines: these and other drawings disclose the eloquent 'hesitations of the thinking body,' as Ann Hamilton calls them. Other pages compel attention by the artists’ fierce concentration, their determination to save ideas before they disappear. Throughout (as Joan Jonas says in a sentence that could apply to this whole, beautiful book), 'drawing…does draw you in.' ”
—Marc Robinson, Yale University, author of American Performance in 1976

“A thrilling selection and wide-ranging survey of artists utilizing drawing as a mode of visual thinking and conceptualization for theatre performance and dance-related works.”
—Ann Butler, Director of Library and Archives, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

"The Theatre of Drawing is an extraordinary book showing drawing as a way to think, drawing as memory, which captures the process of thinking and living."
—Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director, Serpentine, and author of The Interview Project

Bonnie Marranca is cofounder and editor/publisher of the Obie Award–winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She has published four volumes of essays: Timelines: Writings and Conversations; Performance Histories; Ecologies of Theatre; and Theatrewritings. She has also edited several collections of plays, essays, and interviews, including Conversations with Meredith Monk; Alchemies of Theater: The Plays, Performance Scores, and Writings of Dick Higgins; The Sun on the Tongue: Etel Adnan; and Plays for the End of the Century.

Daniel Sack is the author of three books: Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying; After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance; and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. He is the editor of the award-winning collection Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage and the founding editor of the online journal Imagined Theatres. His essays on contemporary international performance have been published in books and journals, including Theatre Journal, Theater magazine, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Preface: The Afterlife of Drawing
By Bonnie Marranca

Fields of Composition

• Annie-B Parson: Stuff—The End
• Richard Foreman: Getting a Handle
• Peter Schumann: The Stations of the Cross
• Meredith Monk: Drawing Time and Space
• Robert Wilson: The Threepenny Opera Drawings
• Ralph Lemon: Untitled
• Cathy Weis: What’s My Line?
• Jibz Cameron: Gratification Now!
• Karinne Keithley Syers: Free Finding
• Suzanne Lacy: Drawings from a Seven-Day Meditation

How It Works

• Jay Scheib: Becoming Something Else
• Carolee Schneemann: Drawing as a Venous System
• Elizabeth LeCompte: Notebook Drawings
• Elizabeth Streb: The Methodology for Choreographing Extreme Action
• John Zorn: Theatre of Musical Optics
• Robert Whitman: Sketches for American Moon
• Lin Hixson: The Place of Drawing
• Judith Malina: Antigone Notebook
• Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born: Process Notation
• Alexandro Segade: How to Share an Imagination
• Jon Kinzel: Portable

Invent a Score

• John Cage: Ryoanji—Solos for Oboe, Flute, Contrabass, Voice, Trombone with Percussion or Orchestral Obbligato
• Dick Higgins: Graphis
• Lucinda Childs: Melody Excerpt
• Raven Chacon: For Zitkála-Šá
• William Hellermann: Visible Music
• Aki Sasamoto: Diagrams in Performance
• Alison Knowles: Fluxus Long Weekend
• Madeline Hollander: Hydro Parade Notations and Scores
• Jeffrey Lependorf: Two for Shakuhachi
• Ken Friedman: Graven with an Iron Pen?

Intimacies of the Line

• Joan Jonas: Drawing My Way In
• Trisha Brown: Geneva, Handfall
• Ann Hamilton: The Event of a Thread
• Gyun Hur: Drawing as Witness
• Kelly Copper: Life Drawings
• Laurie Anderson: Drawings from Delusion
• Julie Mehretu: Notation after The Ring
• George Quasha: Axial Drawing
• Tony Orrico: Voyage of the Transfer
• Mina Nishimura: Scribbles Becoming Portals—Maps to Nowhere
• Clifford Owens: Pocket Paper