At what point in one’s lifetime does one retire from performance and decide that it might be better to withdraw from the stage, from rehearsals, from choreographing and designing the next piece? Is retiring from a professional career a kind of retreat or simply a relocation? And how would I begin to narrate the changes that affect me, and perhaps all the others that I experienced throughout this life in the theatre and in teaching performance to younger art students?
If the following appears to be autobiographical, it is in fact intimately related as well to a reflection on many years of writing about performance. I joined PAJ as a contributing editor in 1985, while teaching theatre studies at Yale University, just prior to taking off for Texas to start directing and choreographing my own version of a media augmented Tanztheater. My initial article for the journal, after I had...