About

Since my 20s, I have been extraordinarily fortunate to live and work as a writer, academic, educator, and collaborating/creative artist and performer. It is a long story and I have a dense C.V. But the basic facts revolve around my professional career and engagement with artists and friends, mainly in Philadelphia and New York, in addition to productive and satisfying years as a college teacher and professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance program at Arizona State University.

Born in the Bronx, my idea — which was actually a gift from a remarkable Uncle — was to be a writer. This led to years of excessive reading, attempts at acting and terrible poetry. By 1960, my parents left New York and moved to New Jersey and through high school I rode along with social and political changes of the day. I read a lot, kept writing, began a journal; had fun but couldn't wait to leave. Went to college at Ohio University — a remarkable place where I found the freedom to discover ways to weave together my literary interests, acts of imagination and proclivities for theory, philosophy, avant-garde writing, talking and the modalities of contemporary experimentation in the arts. Today, we would call it an interdisciplinary education. Also met and learned from artists and scholars. Studied and taught a course in African-American Literature and worked on educational programs for penitentiaries. Picked up a Master's Degree at O.U. after a summer at Oxford, where I read Shakespeare and modern theater. Kept meeting people, reading and thinking about getting to New York.

On the way, I began living in Philadelphia and spent a year teaching in Trenton High School and doing more prison work. Hung out, met writers, poets, musicians, media artists, freelanced for newspapers, magazines, alternative publications. Gave a poetry reading, met the woman I have been with ever since, burned the poems. Wrote hundreds of articles and reviews, nearly all with a direct focus on living writers and artists, performance, experimental literature, and the expanding aesthetic and theoretical vectors in America and Europe. Was hired to teach Humanities at Drexel University and courses at the evolving University of the Arts.

Through the 1970s–1980s, Philadelphia was as much of a locus for the arts as anywhere. While teaching, I became a contributing writer, project organizer, administrator and sometime performer for The Relâche Ensemble for Contemporary Music and The Yellow Springs Institute. This resulted in work on various projects and events, including: Six Saturdays at Yellow Springs, Soundposts, an NPR Broadcast Radio Series and New Music America 1987. Had a couple of NEH Grants (Princeton University, 'Borges and the Latin American Novel' and 'Performance Theory and Theater' with Herbert Blau at the University of Wisconsin). A major project occurred in 1983 after the death of writer, musician, conceptual and media artist and friend, Annson Kenney (1944–1981). Collaborating with others, a selection of his language-based neon art took place in 1983 at Philadelphia's Moore College of Art.

Still finishing a PhD, I became a founding member of a newly created department at Arizona State University in 1991. In collaboration with like-minded artist/scholars we conceptualized and developed a B.A. degree program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance (IAP) with interdisciplinary courses in the areas of theater, music, visual arts, media/technology and performance. My key role was to establish a theoretical and historical foundation for the study of interdisciplinarity in the arts as the basis for the education of artists at a university. To that end, I created a two-semester core course on the history and theory of the avant-garde and experimental art traditions — beginning with Futurism and Dada to digital art and performance in sound, video and interculturally.

In December, 2019 I returned to Philadelphia as a Professor Emeritus and working writer. Though I lived in Phoenix for over two decades, I also kept a home in Philadelphia returning just at the beginning of the Covid years. An often-read and translated article that illuminates my educational practices is 'On the Dialogics of Pedagogy and Performance' (in Teaching Performance: Theory, Practices, Pedagogy. Stuckey, Nathan and Cynthia Wimmer, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. 259–285).

""

—