Black Mountain Press

CPR's own publishing division

Black Mountain Press is the publishing house of the Centre for Performance Research. It produces groundbreaking works by scholars and practitioners from throughout Europe. The European Contemporary Classics Theatre series documents innovative methods, theories and approaches to making and understanding theatre.

"The works of Black Mountain Press provide valuable reflections upon the creative process and mark those profound moments of personal artistic revelation so often lost in the push to produce overview and polemic. They help recover the anecdotal and incidental as part of the discourse of the practitioner. The craft of the artist is here matched by the craft of the publisher. An estimable project"
Professor Michael Pearson

"Mae gwaith Gwasg Black Mountain yn cynnig myfyrdodau gwerthfawr ar y broses greadigol ac yn nodi’r ysbeidiau o ddatgeliad celfyddyd personol a dwfn sydd yn mynd ar goll yn aml iawn yn y brys mawr i roi golwg gyffredinol a chynhyrchu polemeg. Maen nhw’n helpu i adfer y anecdotaidd a’r atodol fel rhan o ddisgwrs yr ymarferwr. Yma mae crefft y cyhoeddwr yn gweddu i grefft yr artist. Prosiect clodwiw"
Yr Athro Michael Pearson


UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS

To celebrate CPR’s move into expanded premises at The Foundry, we are also expanding our publishing division, and have a wide range of exciting texts in production. These texts reflect CPR’s history and mission: to broaden appreciation and understanding of performance – its history, its cross-cultural manifestations, and its potentials.

Watch this site for further news about the following Black Mountain Press publications:

Critical Decade: A Performance Research Reader.
Scheduled for publication November 2007
For 10 years, Performance Research Journal has promoted a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice. Interdisciplinary in vision, international in scope, it has published ground-breaking, thought-provoking articles on all aspects of performance. To celebrate its first 10 years, we will publish a compilation of some of the best articles. Edited by Claire MacDonald, contributors include Rustom Bharucha, Philip Auslander, Enzo Cozzi, Ric Allsopp, David Williams, Eve Dent, Ken Friedman, Misha Myers, Erin Manning, Richard Schechner, Elaine Aston, and many many more.

Theatre Arts Monthly: Highlights of Performance History
The early 20th century was a fertile era for world performance, as travellers were seduced by Balinese Dance, Mexican rituals of remembrance, Chinese opera, and so much more. The American publication, Theatre Arts Monthly (TAM), brought a stunning array of international performance arts to a wider audience, who were inspired by the creativity found throughout the globe. CPR plans to publish a selection of lavishly illustrated articles from the first 50 years of TAM later this year.

POLISH THEATRE: TRADITION OF TRANSFORMATION
CPR, in conjunction with the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, Poland (www.grotowski-institute.art.pl), is in the process of publishing a series of three volumes on key Polish theatre phenomena. The general editor of the series – supported by the Polish Book Institute (www.instytutksiazki.pl) – is the Programme Director of the Grotowski Institute, Dr. Grzegorz Ziółkowski. For years, CPR has been one of the main UK proponents of Polish theatre, hosting groups and practitioners in Wales.

The series will include:

Through Theatre – Beyond Theatre (Przez teatr – poza teatr), edited by Dr. Ireneusz Guszpit (Wrocław University)
Juliusz Osterwa, a Polish actor and director, co-founder of the Reduta Theatre in the mid-war period of the 20th century, is almost totally unknown in the West. His ideas and practices strongly influenced Jerzy Grotowski and mainly through him reached younger generation of theatre makers. The selection of Osterwa’s writings – translated for the first time into English – creates an exceptional insight into the vision of this key theatre reformer of the past century. The extended introduction by Dr. Guszpit, publisher of three volumes by Osterwa in Polish, will underline the importance of Reduta in its days and for the following generations as well as contextualize its achievements.
To be published in 2008.

Big Small Vehicle (Wielkí maly wóz), by Prof. Lescek Kolankiewicz
Written by one of Poland’s best teatrologists, this touches on the high points of Polish theatre history post-1989, and focuses on the finest directors (Jarocki, Lupa, Grzegorzewski, Kantor, Staniewski and Grotowski). Each piece is described and interpreted in terms of the social and political context within which the piece was made.

To Be A Whole Man: Polish Authors on Grotowski, edited by Dr. Grzegorz Ziółkowski (The Grotowski Institute, Wrocław; Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
The anthology devoted to Jerzy Grotowski’s artistic trajectory from theatre to art as vehicle gathers texts – unavailable in English before – by remarkable Polish authors such as: Małgorzata Dziewulska, Ludwik Flaszen, Leszek Kolankiewicz, and Zbigniew Osiński, among others. The title for the volume comes from Adam Mickiewicz, Polish bard of romanticism, who challenged a human being to be complete and confront not only social and historical demands but – equally – the demands of his/her own individuality. The works and life of Jerzy Grotowski constituted an exceptional answer to Mickiewicz’s phrase, understood not as a hollow formula but as alive challenge.
To be published in 2009.

Big Small Vehicle (Wielki mały wóz), by Prof. Leszek Kolankiewicz (Warsaw University)
Written by a leading Polish theatre scholar and published for the first time in 2001 the volume touches on the high points of Polish theatre history in post-1989 period. It focuses on the master Polish directors (Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Jerzy Jarocki, Tadeusz Kantor, Krystian Lupa, Włodzimierz Staniewski, and Jerzy Grotowski), with an exception for a chapter devoted to Eugenio Barba and his Odin Teatret. Each part is dedicated to a performance by one of the artists, which is described and interpreted within historical and social contexts. The last essay, Grotowski in Search of the Essence, traces the artist’s creative path back from late 1970s to his death in 1999.
To be published in 2010.


Polish Theatre of Transformation [Polski teatr przemiany], by Dariusz Kosiński
This book contains the historical overview of the highlights of Polish theatre from Mickiewicz via Słowacki, Wyspiański and Osterwa to Grotowski.

Practicing Romanticism [Praktykowanie romantyzmu]
This is a collection of essays on new Polish theatre in the late 1990s and in the 2000s – an expedition into Polish theatre from Gardzienice to ZAR; it will be published in 2012.


As well as publishing our own titles, CPR also works closely with Routledge publishers. We have a series of titles scheduled for publication with our colleagues, including:

Routledge Companion to Theatre Practitioners: Meyerhold – ed by Richard Gough, Nick Sales and Daniel Watt.
The Meyerhold Companion is intended to combine original primary material, which will be published for the first time in English, alongside scholarly essays on a broad range of themes. Extensive coverage of Meyerhold’s methods of Biomechanics will be included. Scheduled for publication early 2008.

Routledge Companion to Theatre Practitioners: Kantor - ed by Richard Gough, Krzystof Plesniarowicz and Daniel Watt
The Kantor Companion will include much new primary material that has not appeared in English translation, alongside critical reflection from leading international scholars and from those who worked with Kantor in Poland.

Black Mountain Press Catalogue:

99 Georgian Songs - A collection of Folk, Church and Urban Georgian songs. : By Joan Mills (editor) with an introduction by Edisher Garakanidze This practical workbook for singers of Georgian songs in the West was the inspiration of the renowned and much loved ethnomusicologist, Edisher Garakanidze. UK customers can order direct from the bookshop section of our website, alternatively (and for overseas or bulk orders) please contact Siu-lin Rawlinson - slr@aber.ac.uk / 01970 622 133. Paperback: ISBN: 1 902 867 06 8 , price £ 25.00

99 Georgian Songs Teaching CD : By Mills, Joan and Bright Field Harmony parts and example verses performed by Bright Field,an informal, singing group, formed to sing a cappella songs both new and traditional. The CD is a teaching aid. It is aimed at those who have probably had some experience of learning some Georgian songs and may want to check their part, learn a different part, or practise outside choir rehearsal times. It aims to be a help also to those who want to learn these songs and do not read music. Bright Field is at present: Linda Gwillim, David Kendell, Becky Knight, Joan Mills. UK customers can order direct from the bookshop section of our website, alternatively (and for overseas or bulk orders) please contact Siu-lin Rawlinson - slr@aber.ac.uk / 01970 622 133.

Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland followed by 26 Letters from Jerzy Grotowski to Eugenio Barba : By Eugenio Barba Land of Ashes and Diamonds publishes for the first time a series of letters from Jerzy Grotowski to Eugenio Barba. Written during the early ‘Theatre Productions’ phase of Grotowski work in the 1960’s. The letters are contextualised in an extended autobiographical essay by Barba, which chronicles his early contact, and lifelong friendship, with Grotowski and his close collaborators, and charts their deep significance to his own life and work. Detailing the precise, concrete, sustained, and measured work upon which the Grotowski laboratorium was founded, Land of Ashes and Diamonds offers new insights into the work of two great masters of twentieth century theatre. UK customers can order direct from the bookshop section of our website, alternatively (and for overseas or bulk orders) please contact Siu-lin Rawlinson - slr@aber.ac.uk / 01970 622 133. Hardback: ISBN: 1 902 867 009, price £ 25.00 Paperback: ISBN: 1 902 867 017 , price £ 12.95

The Dead Memory Machine: Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre of Death : By Krysztof Plesniarowicz Krzysztof Plesniarowicz’s The Dead Memory Machine, translated into English by William Brand, is a hugely revised, expanded and updated version of the first book-length study of Kantor’s Theatre of Death, originally published in Polish in 1990, including many additional images and illustrations. "When man and his work cease to exist, memory remains, a message sent into the future, to the coming generations..." This book is "this message" in its careful exegesis not only of what the archives remember about Kantor via the stored materials, but also, and maybe more important, of how one can intersect with Kantor's memory machines– The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, I Shall Never Return, and Today is My Birthday. This is a highly nuanced analysis of spatial memories materialized in the manifold of Kantor's space of representation. This analysis complements Part I of the book which focuses on the contours of Kantor's biography and cultural lineage as well as Kantor's experiments with the (eternal) avant-garde art of the second half of the XXth century – the Informel Art, Emballages, Happenings, and his own 'theatre of essence' and ephemeral memories. Michal Kobialka, Professor in History/Literature, Department of Theatre, Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota.’ UK customers can order direct from the bookshop section of our website, alternatively (and for overseas or bulk orders) please contact Siu-lin Rawlinson - slr@aber.ac.uk / 01970 622 133. Hardback: ISBN: 1902867 04 1, price £ 29.95 Paperback: ISBN: 1902867 05 X , price £ 16.95

Theatre - Solitude, Craft, Revolt : By Eugenio Barba Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt is a highly illuminating and provocative professional autobiography by one of Europe’s leading theatre directors. It is a collection of essays dating from 1964 to 1995 by Eugenio Barba, director, theorist and founder of Odin Teatret. As a chronicle of over thirty years’ sustained work with a permanent ensemble, it reveals the meaning of his influential theatre practice, his life’s work and guiding principles. The book is a transformation of Barba’s previous publication Beyond the Floating Islands (1985), focusing on theatre practice and the meaning, the ‘Why’ of doing theatre. As such it forms the ideal companion to his other book The Paper Canoe (1995) which expands his theories on the work of the actor and also theatre Anthropology. The peculiar relationships between disciplines and revolt (craft and its denial, training and its betrayal) are revealed as creative strategies throughout these texts. But most of all a singular capacity for mutation- which paradoxically affirms a will to remain oneself, protecting ones identity-emerges as a key to Barba’s professional biography and explains in someway Odin Tetret’s longevity. An illustrated appendix compiled by Fernando Taviani comprehensively catalogues the productions of thirty five years work. UK customers can order direct from the bookshop section of our website, alternatively (and for overseas or bulk orders) please contact Siu-lin Rawlinson - slr@aber.ac.uk / 01970 622 133. Hardback: ISBN: 1 902 867, price £ 35.00 Paperback: ISBN: 1 902 867 033 , price £ 14.95