TCG Publishes 'Conversations with Anne' by Anne Bogart

Theatre Communications Group (TCG) today announced the publication of Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews by Anne Bogart. A noted theatre director and teacher, Ms. Bogart is highly regarded for her work with Tina Landau in distilling the philosophy of the innovative acting technique, Viewpoints. Since 2002, Ms. Bogart has conducted a series of interviews with major artists and cultural thinkers at her Siti Company studio in New York City before live audiences. This book collects and documents these remarkable conversations between Bogart and the artists and thinkers she most admires, who collectively have had a profound effect on shaping the arts in America for the last twenty-five years. 

“After 9/11, I noticed that people were gravitating with gusto toward one another to converse, to consider, to listen and to discuss… There seemed to be a need for mutual exchange under standard light, without artifice or the separation of stage and audience… In this spirit, I began an initiative in Siti Company’s studio entitled Conversations with Anne.” – from the Introduction by Anne Bogart

In this volume of interviews, Bogart and her guests discuss such free-ranging topics as the driving forces in their work, the paths their lives have taken and their visions for the future of the theatre field. These extraordinary conversations include: JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Ben Cameron, Martha Clarke, Oskar Eustis, Zelda Fichandler, Richard Foreman, André Gregory, Bill T. Jones, Tina Landau Elizabeth LeCompte, Eduardo Machado, Charles L. Mee, Jr., Joseph V. Melillo, Meredith Monk, Mary Overlie, Peter Sellars, Siti Company,  Molly Smith, Elizabeth Streb, Julie Taymor, Paula Vogel, RoBert Woodruff, and Mary Zimmerman.

To celebrate the launch of Conversations with Anne, TCG and the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space presented “In Conversation with Anne Bogart” on Monday, March 5 at 7pm. The sold-out event consisted of a conversation between Ms. Bogart and playwrights: Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) and two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room or the vibrator play). A video of this event and others in TCG’s 50th Anniversary series, “TCG Playwrights in Conversation,” can be seen here: http://www.tcg.org/fifty/playwrights_streaming.cfm.

Anne Bogart is the Artistic Director of Siti Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. She is the author of three other books: A Director Prepares, The Viewpoints Book (with Tina Landau) and And Then, You Act. 

Siti Company, a seven-time OBIE winner, is recognized throughout the world as one of theatre’s most important artistic collectives, creating groundbreaking work while training artists from all over the world. SITI has visited twenty-one countries on five continents and created more than thirty new productions.

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