Book Review of Emergency INDEX 2011

Emergency INDEX is a book of wonders, a kind of bestiary. Open it to any page and you will find something worth thinking about: a performance that “brings the internal sounds of the human body to our ears” (171); a cultic dance/theater experiment choreographed around an enormous plas- tic “sac” (90); a “performative” lecture on UFOs, ley lines, and visionary architecture (312); a display of public/private breakdown in a Brooklyn IKEA (338); a restaging, with child performers, of Peter Handke’s 1966 play Offending the Audience (112); a Twitter-fed simultaneous “group walk” through multiple cities (16); and much, much more. The venues are equally wide-ranging, from Jay Scheib at the Kitchen in New York City (22) and XXXY / Yehuda Duenyas at Rensselaer’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (168) to Annette Arlander’s stark environ- mental work on Harakka Island, Finland (64) and Felipe Faúndez Funtes’s milk action staged “alone outside of a gallery in the streets of Belfast” (407). One performance took place at the banyan tree gates outside the Sultan’s Palace in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (431).