Good Vibrations

Anne Bogart has a restless mind. For more than fifty years, as an artist-director, a writer-thinker, and a teacher-mentor, she has conducted a gentle but relentless inquiry into what makes theatre theatre and by extension what defines the nature of aesthetic experience. In the process, she has avoided answers that are absolute or doctrinaire or reductive, preferring instead to court the ineffable at the heart of the theatrical equation. Sometimes this makes her ideas as notional as they are theoretical. She seems more interested in chasing butterflies on the wing than netting and pinning them to a mat for closer inspection because then, well, they would not be true butterflies anymore.