In editing this selection of works by Dick Higgins, Bonnie Marranca aims to strengthen the position of Higgins as a significant figure in the avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, but also to encourage an engagement with his work in the twenty-first, and to claim for Higgins a status of innovator in areas and media in which he is not as well known.

“At this moment in history, his untiring experimental thinking and making can serve as an example for other artists working across art forms […]. The desire to imagine new models of existence in theatrical space is still a driving force for many artists, scholars, and audiences.” (p. xi – xii)

Higgins' work as publisher, editor, anthologist, and encourager of others is widely documented and has been discussed in recent publications including Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press (Steve Clay and Ken Friedman eds., Siglio Press, 2018) and A Something Else Reader (Primary Information, 2022). These publications focus on the important work Higgins did as publisher and thinker in avant garde writing and art scenes in the U.S. and abroad. Marranca through new research in the Dick Higgins Archive brings attention to scores, scripts, and other material related to a range of performance practices, crossing between, mixing, and testing the boundaries of theatre, music, dance, drawing, poetry and film.

“Dick Higgins gathered into his work all the freedoms he could imagine to envision his theater of possibilities.” (p. xii)

The nature of Higgins' practice, as well as his multiple activities, means that there are masses of scattered works, ephemeral, flimsy, reiterated in different forms, revisited in new contexts, and involving other artists and performers, that makes writing or organising a comprehensive catalogue particularly difficult. Marranca is not attempting to catalogue Higgins outputs in these fields but wants to share the variety and diversity of Higgins work. She describes “the two histories of performance” (p. xii) and the problem of two distinct paths of makers and commentators described by these. Higgins, for Marranca, is an exemplary figure who both bridges or blurs the gap between the two histories and someone whose reputation has suffered because of that gap. As a scholar Marranca, feels faced with a paradox:

“Higgins seems to me the ideal illustration of this dilemma. His theater work is largely left out of visual arts documentation and his plays and performance scores are equally disregarded in theater histories […].” (p. xii)

Marranca’s work in this book draws out the range of Higgins’ practice and situates it in a performance history that connects both strands. She organises the materials into four sections, ‘Plays and Performance Scores’, ‘Performance and Drawing’, ‘Music and Dance, and ‘Writings’. Even these headings suggest there may be overlaps and intersections between the groupings, and it is indicative of Higgins prodigious output, that the works gathered here are only a fraction of his creation. “Already by the mid-sixties he noted that he had written over two hundred plays. As brief as one page and as long as three hundred pages” (p. 175) Many of his works operated as numbered series, such as the Graphis works of which there were over two hundred (p. 135) or the sections of Clowns Way: A Drama in Three Hundred Acts (pp. 57-96). This multiplicity allowed for shuffling and recombination, like cards in a deck or letters in a Scrabble game, and resisted any sense of a monumental or final version.

“xxvii – movie frames flickering

all the episode cards are repeated

superimposed

one onto another

their ends into their beginnings

and each part onto each part

the curtain opens and shuts repeatedly random times (from Twenty-Seven Episodes for the Aquarian Theater, p. 32)

As Marranca’s focus is on performance theory and history, she frames the each of the four sections with short prefatory essays. These give some historical and critical context for the works, and offer background information on productions, or publication, gathered from the archive, or through correspondence with collaborators, performers, family and friends of Higgins. Marranca acknowledges these, and the librarians, archivists, and scholars who helped her add this informative layer and context to the selection of materials.

It is interesting to consider Higgins’ work in a wider context of peers and subsequent generations, where parallels can be seen in work of the German postdramatic theatre and dance movement such as by Pina Bausch, or in the US in avant-garde theatre works such as 365 Plays/365 Days by Suzan Lori-Parks, or the work of Forced Entertainment in the UK. These companies draw on parallel intentions where narrative and character are less central to communication, and the focus may be on action, incident or event; where humour, cliché, and popular culture references are mixed with activities involving everyday objects, such as power tools, clothing, and food. These parallels are also evident in the other history as Marranca might term it, in contemporary performance art, or actions and events that are made for gallery rather than theatre spaces. Often these works are more explicitly political or activist than Higgins’ output might appear, but looking across Higgins’ varied output, there are threads of queer content, and a resistance to consumer capitalism and the official version of America. Working in an international context, with an avoidance of consumption, intent on leaving a legacy but not attached to that in an ego sense, Higgins work continues to offer interest and possibility in the present. Marranca’s carefully gathered selection makes these works available for critical comment and, also, for potential performance.