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SMALL ACTS OF REPAIR: PERFORMANCE, ECOLOGY AND GOAT ISLAND. Edited by Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. 264. $125.00 cloth, $37.95 paper.
Goat Island's work is done. Their most recent piece, The Lastmaker (2007), was their last after twenty years of performances, workshops, and written reflection in "schoolbooks" and "reading companions." In the spirit of those texts, Small Acts of Repair offers a montage of texts and images of work in Chicago and elsewhere, from their first performance, Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987), to their penultimate; this montage does not so much "document" or "critique" those works, as the book's blurb implies, as re-present the processes of collection, transformation, and enactment that constitute their performances. The book invites readers who have followed all or part of Goat Island's history to re-envisage those processes through and against source texts and comments by participants and observers that accompanied performances. At the same time, published in the wake of their decision to end their formal collaboration, it also offers a record of work distinguished not only by the modesty suggested by "small acts," but by a sensitivity to the ethics and aesthetics of those acts, differentiating them both from more emphatic political actions and from the ironic distance associated with postmodern performers like the Wooster Group.
Readers coming to Goat Island for the first time might best begin at the end of the book. A timeline lists performances and documents participants, especially performer-writer Goulish and director Lin Hixson, who formed the core of the company throughout, and collaborators such as...