Conjunctions #28: Secular Psalms

Working outside the established "classical" and "musical theater" venues, a number of exciting artists are pushing the boundaries of new music theater, incorporating everything from film and video to puppets and punk bands. The composers/dramatists who launched this movement -- Robert Ashley, Meridith Monk, Lee Breuer, Ann Greene, Leroy Jenkins, Thulani Davis -- are joined by younger artists who are taking up the call to produce progressive music theater: John Moran/Ridge Theater, Ruth Margraff, Yasunao Tone, Mikel Rouse, and others. Their radical libretti/scores -- rarely published as texts per se themselves -- are, in fact, remarkable blueprints which provide a glimpse into the very process of performance development. Production stills, stage directions, musical notations, composition notes, and artworks, give imaginative readers a chance to recreate for themselves their own variations of these, multimedia events.