Daniel Sack is Professor in the Department of English and the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of the books After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (Michigan, 2015), Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (Routledge, 2016), and Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying (Michigan, forthcoming). He is the editor of Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (Routledge, 2017), which received the 2018 Award for Excellence in Editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He is also the founding editor for imaginedtheatres.com. Daniel has published more than forty essays, chapters, and reviews on contemporary international performance in a range of academic and non-academic venues, and serves as a contributing editor for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and Theater magazine.
Submissions
TRASH ONLY (B.S.) : Gloss
The Storehouse: A Live Magazine [Manifesto Excerpt]
The public wanders through a collection of rooms, each with a different performance, exhibit, reading, meeting, game, discussion. Their experience is not fixed. They wander without moorings, the way a curious reader meanders through the pages of a magazine, not knowing what they’re searching for.
[UNTITLED] Water, Perspex, Soil, etc.
Can you see it? A huge expanse of water, crystal clear, a cliché. Dotted with little floating heads.
Imagining the Nonmaterial
These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by extremists on extremist forums.
Correspondence : Gloss
Maybe these letters and numbers help me imagine a catastrophic snowfall in Shelby County, KY, or the action in Correspondence. But really the numbers aren’t for me. They’re for my laptop.
A Plastic Theatre : Gloss
A plastic theatre is deathless, staticky, sticky, silent. It is scary and strangely safe. Creepy and clinical but also ubiquitous.
From Here to There : Gloss
Is it any different from anyone else? Is anyone even listening? The musician doesn’t know.
Imagining the Nonmaterial : Gloss
Code is written to be performed, not read. The residue of these performances appears on the screen.
The Art of Forgetting : Gloss
Acting requires us to forget our part in order to implement the "instrument of discovery."
The Art of Forgetting
They must fully learn the role, but then are given an appropriate span of time to forget it sufficiently.