Caught in the act

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Caught in the Act is an exhilarating look at multimedia performance with front-row-center photographs by Dona Ann McAdams. Her unique vantage is in part due to the enormous respect she has earned from the performers, and it is her key to documenting this ground-breaking type of theater that continually challenges the definitions of all the arts. It is this collaborative approach that has allowed McAdams to faithfully represent the rage, courage, integrity, and creative force of such varied artists as Diamanda Galas, Holly Hughes, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, DANCENOISE, Ethyl Eichelberger, and David Wojnarowicz - and this is only a small sampling of the performers featured here. Caught in the Act celebrates the spirit that links all these artists across their different disciplines and aesthetics. The wonderful coexistence of disparate sensibilities in this publication underscores the very nature of this hybrid art. At the same time, it features many artists who, while focusing primarily on a particular medium, have expanded the context for that medium and pioneered the boundlessness, the marvelous sense of possibility that so distinguishes this contemporary manifestation of performance. A performance poet in the beat tradition who has been reading and performing since the early seventies, Eileen Myles also contributes a moving Afterword with her poem, "The Troubador."