Mickery Theater: An Imperfect Archaeology

This is the first full-length account of the history and working practices of Amsterdam’s Mickery Theater. Between 1965 and 1991 under its noted director Ritsaert ten Cate, Mickery became renowned worldwide for promoting and presenting significant international alternative theatre companies including La Mama, Tenjo Sajiki and the Wooster Group, and for staging its own innovative productions. Combining archival research, oral history, field observation, and drawing on personal accounts of key participants, the book illuminates the singular importance of Mickery, while evoking the unique atmosphere of both the building and the art that it nurtured.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Sijbolt Noorda, Probably not… an introduction by Arthur Sonnen and Otto Romijn, Prologue a) A short history b) A task c) A method i)Analects, An action, A story, A photograph, Coda ii)Archaeology iii) Oral history iv) All that remains d) Structure 1 Ritsaert ten Cate 2 In the attic 3 Otto Romijn 4 In the archive I 5 Frans de la Haye 6 In the archive II 7 Peter Schreiber 8 A building 9 Max Arian 10 A journal article 11 Failed conversations 12 Reviews 13 Jim Clayburgh 14 Reviews – The Performance Group 15 Photographs 16 Rob Klinkenberg 17 Reports 18 Erica Bilder 19 A lecture 20 Titus Muizelaar 21 In his own words 22 Colleen Scott 23 A video 24 Janek Alexander 25 A production programme 26 Jan Lauwers 27 A letter 28 Peter Sellars 29 A research project 30 The producers 31 A workbook 32 Jan Zoet 33 A magazine 34 Marijke Hoogenboom 35 A book chapter 36 Early days 37 Another video 38 A keynote 39 Epilogues Postscript, A quest, The reviews of Jac Heijer, Touching Time and Moving with the Pressure of the Times. On the last years of the Mickery Theatre, Index.

About the Author :
Mike Pearson is professor of performance studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University.

Review :
A superbly realised biography of a Theatre. The full life of Mickery emerges through a rich assemblage of people and events. - Edward Scheer, University of New South WalesThe Mickery represented a moment of efflorescence and freedom in the history of theater, a free-floating party where high spirits reflected deep commitments - political and social but also personal, intimate, metaphysical and ecstatic. In our own era of shock and reversal, it is refreshing to revisit an era of idealism charged with imagination and wildness, and exchange based on radical equality. Progressive momentum tinged with pleasure, and debate informed by delight seem a long way off at the moment and to taste these things again reactivates our senses and renews our sense of the imperatives that face us today: we must retake this ground and then move beyond it. - Peter SellarsThe Mickery Theatre 'meant so much to so many'. So will Mike Pearson's book. An invaluable and beautiful meditation [on theatrical transmission as such, and] on a [particular] project that re-imagined the possibilities for theatre at the end of the twentieth century. - Joe Kelleher, Roehampton University, London