The Wendy Perron "Concepts in Performance" collection is a part of the Downtown Collection at the Fales Library, New York University. The Fales Library is the primary special collections division of the NYU libraries, housing nearly 200,000 volumes of English and American literature from 1700 to the present. Strengths of the collection include the development of the English and American novel, with an emphasis on the Gothic and the Victorian novel. The Fales Library's collection of Wendy Perron's "Concepts in Performance" column, published in The Soho Weekly News, spans from 1976-1978. In her column, Perron reviews a range of experimental performance practices that flourished in New York during the late 1970s. Among these are Steve Paxton's Contact Improvisation, Laurie Anderson's sound performances involving electric violin, Trisha Brown's Accumulation pieces, and Merce Cunningham's integrations of dance, music, and theatre. Other artists and ensembles whose performances Perron reviews are John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Michael Kirby, Jackson Mac Low, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Stuart Sherman, Squat Theatre, and Robert Wilson. Perron's column is important for several reasons. First, she is among the earliest critics to write about a new genre known as "Performance Art." In the 1970s, "Performance Art" came to designate experimental forms of embodied expression that fell outside the conventional categories of theatre, dance, or music. Secondly, Perron combines thick description and critical analysis. This combination not only allows readers to visualize the performances that occurred, but also sheds light on the aesthetic, political, and theoretical issues underlying a given piece. Thirdly, Perron is knowledgeable about the historical circumstances under which performance art emerged in New York, she is thus able to identify the central characteristics informing performance art of the 1970s, distinguishing it from 1960s experimental theatre.
