Anne Bogart's Blog

SITI Company: The Legacy of Radical Presence

TDR (The Drama Review) September 2024 issue has a special section dedicated to the legacy of SITI Company, now available online as well as in print. "Assemblage as a way to make art carries the expectation that existing elements will be combined with other existing elements to make something new, to expand impact, to enable new perceptions. One might argue that the SITI Company (Saratoga International Theater Institute, 1992–2022) were masters of assemblage."

Latest SITI Emeritus Artists’ Creative Projects

SITI will update this post monthly with information about projects Emeritus Artist have going on. J. Ed Araiza Ellen Lauren The heroic journey and challenges that Russian families opposed to Putin’s war on Ukraine face here in New York, as they each await their asylum verdict. This ongoing project will culminate with a presentation on… more

Metaphor

I share an ongoing friendly debate with Elizabeth Streb, the remarkable creative force behind the STREB Extreme Action Company.  She insists that she does not use metaphor in her work. I try to impress upon her that, in my eyes, all theater is metaphorical.

World-Making

I grew up in a Navy family and almost every year we packed up and moved to another state, sometimes even to another country.

Fear and Attention

In 1989, when I was selected as the next Artistic Director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, I was living and working in San Diego, California. Jack O’Brien, the acclaimed Broadway theater director and, at the time, the long-time Artistic Director of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, telephoned to invite me for dinner at his home.

Planting Seeds

I am constantly surprised by and reminded of how little control I actually exert over the unfolding events of my own life. My best intentions are often hijacked by distraction.

Tracks

"The artist's work is to lift people out of their usual sense of their own cosmos into a higher vision of what's going on up there." ~Peter Sellars

Problem, Objective, Task

“If you want to paint anything worthwhile you shouldn’t be afraid of stepping up the pressure.“-David HockneyKonstantin Stanislavsky did not have a high opinion of his own writing. The Russian actor and director was aware of the provisional nature of his findings on acting because throughout his life, he was always moving on to new ideas and abandoning old ones...

Memory, the Present Moment, and the Imagination

I began writing this blog in Rijeka, Croatia, a town on the Adriatic Sea, while re-staging a production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that we had premiered shortly before Covid shut down most of the world. I was staying in the exact same apartment that I was in during our February 2020 rehearsals and… more

How Do Directors Train?

"The artist rummages through the world, attends lovingly on everyday things and tells their story." -Byung-Chul Han