Love Like Light: Plays and Performance Texts

Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work. Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves with lithe and associative grace through histories personal, political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.

Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive, multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh Silverman, “continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for.”

A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.

Daniel Alexander Jones exemplifies the artist as energy worker. Jones’s boundless body of work includes performance pieces, plays, essays, recorded music, digital media, and teaching. Daniel was named the 2021 PEN America/Laura Pels Awardee in Theatre and has been a Doris Duke Artist, an Alpert Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Creative Capital grantee among many other accolades. His work has premiered at The Public, Soho Rep, Penumbra Theatre Company, Pillsbury House Theatre, and Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre. His latest work, Aten is produced by CalArts Center for New Performance. www.aten.life