However, in the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so consciously as now. I wrote about sixty of them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong, though not vice versa. A bows to the audience stiffly and repeatedly for a minute. A goes away.
B looks after A. zebra a metadrama someone enters dressed as a zebra.
All rights reserved. Portions of this text appeared in Malthus in 1987 and are copyright 1987. For performance permissions, please write to Dick Higgins, P.O. Box 27, Barrytown, NY 12507. Return to Light and Dust Poets Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry.