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Chapter 3 - Einstein on the Beach
“Doing the Facts of Feelings”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2025
Summary
A reading of the best-known experimental work of 1976, Einstein on the Beach, that traces the sources of its imagery in mass media, popular culture, and art history, and that studies how the kinetics and contingency of live performance complicate the classical decorum associated with Robert Wilson’s theater. The chapter also discusses the performance styles of Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton, the relationship of the opera to mathematics, the value of error and the handmade, and the persistence of emotion despite the production’s apparent coolness.
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- American Performance in 1976The Evolution of an Avant-Garde, pp. 156 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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