Describing the cultural, social, and historical context of Fornés’s first artistic home, the Judson Memorial Church, and its radical arts ministry led by associate pastor (and Fornés’s future collaborator) Al Carmines, which gave dancers, musicians, visual artists, and performance makers the freedom to experiment in their work without fear of censorship while also making space available for the development, rehearsal, and presentation of their work. This contribution will explicate how Judson’s community of interdisciplinary artistic experimentation activated the foundational aesthetic (and ethic) that would guide Fornés in significant ways for the rest of her career.

Although music theatre is typically associated with composers, a closer look at the unusually prominent place of music in the Fornésian catalog demonstrates how her work as a lyricist and librettist establishes Fornés as a formidable force within the ever evolving form of music theatre. Trevor Boffone’s essay surveys Fornes’s use of song and dance to punctuate or drive works as as varied as Promenade (1965), Molly’s Dream (1968), The Red Burning Light or Mission XQ3 (1968), Aurora (1972); Cap-a-Pie (1975), Sarita (1984), Lovers and Keepers (1986), Terra Incognita (1992), and Balseros/Rafters (1997). Boffone’s essay also explicates how Fornés’s many works of music theatre open the question of what a Fornésian musical might be, even as her legacy of experimentation continues to prompt innovative new ways of making music theatre.

Chapter 2 examines how the Mall in St James’s Park – the prime location for promenading in eighteenth-century London – became a key site for writers and artists who turned a humorous eye on the social ambitions of London’s middling sorts. Here, men and women congregated “to see and be seen, to censure and be censured”, as one account put it, and comic accounts of the promenade frequently describe the Mall as a battleground in which new, commercial wealth clashes with forms of inherited status. The literary and visual satires examined here respond to concerns about the blurring of distinctions by suggesting, albeit wishfully, that attempts by the middling sorts to imitate those higher up the social scale are always transparent, and true rank and status always reveals itself.