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Festival Biographies
Joan Retallack
Joan Retallack's conversations with John Cage, MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words. Art. Music, won the 1996 America Award for Belles-Lettres. (A three-volume Spanish translation is currently appearing in Chile.) She has published widely on Cage, with particular attention to relations between his experimental attitude, contemporary science and utopian aesthetics. Ms. Retallack has performed in and served as dramaturge for several Cage productions, including Lecture on the Weather and James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, in which she played the role of Buckminster Fuller. She has lectured, exhibited and performed her own work internationally, including at the Universities of London, Cambridge, Salamanca, Coimbra (Portugal) and the Sorbonne; the Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Guggenheim SoHo, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MoMA. She is the author of The Poethical Wager; Gertrude Stein: Selections; and a critical introduction to Yale's 2012 republication of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation. Among her eight volumes of poetry, the most recent-Procedural Elegies /Western Civ Cont'd /-was named a best book of 2010 by Artforum. Ms. Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.