Richard Kostelanetz
- Preambles
- All Along the Edge
- Choice Bits
- Las Vegas Performance
- Book of Kostis
- Contemporary American Literacy
- Modern Polyartistry
- End of Intelligent Writing, reprint
- More On Innovative Music(ian)s
- Autobiogaphies at 50 & 60
- Book-Art & Alternative Publishing
- A Literary Life in America
- Animated Music
- Artists in America
- Arts & Artists in America
- Master Minds, rev. ed.
- The Maturity of American Thought
- Great American Comedians
- Continuing Tradition of the New
- Charles Ives and the American Imagination
- Special Sounds: The Art of Radio in North America
- Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin
- Sports & Sportsmen
- Elizabeth Streb
- More Crimes of Culture
- The Fall and Rise of the Rockaways
- Home & Away: Travel Essays
- American Composers in Their Own Words
- The Art of Literary Demolition
- Possibilities of Longer Poetry
- Alternative American Autobiographies
- The American Tradition in Poetry
- John Cage's Poetry
- Foster Damon's Uncollected Writings
- Libertarian Tradition: American Anarchist Thought
- E.E. Cummings ReConSidered
- Conceptual Dance: Choreographic Comedies
- An Emma Goldman Reader
- American Composers as Writers
- AnOther Ogden Nash
- Classic Essays on Rock
- New American Radio Plays
- Second Anthology of Merce Criticism
Proposal for SEDUCTIONS, a performance piece with audience-participation
The text comes from my book More Short Fictions (1980). It contains sixteen different seduction stories that, set in sixteen different typefaces, are interwoven one sentence at a time with one another. For live performances, sixteen readers, who need not all be male, are recruited from the audience. They are given individually marked parts, as musicians would say, in which the lines that each of the sixteen is required to speak are underlined in red. With the entire text in hand, each speaker should know well in advance when he (or she) is required to speak again. In my experience, the performance is at once erotic and comic, the former because of the explicit content, the latter because the speakers are discovering their characters, and the coherence of each of their stories, along with the audience (which after all includes one another). The performance should take less than a half hour. While I need not be present, it would be useful to have one person take charge, not only to recruit the speakers from the audience but also to assist or replace, should any of the individual readers get lost or fall away. I found that Seductions can be performed on successive nights, as long as new speakers are recruited, for the real performance comes from the discoveries and interactions noted above. For further information, as well as copies of the marked parts, please contact the author at the address above.