Andre Gregory Boeken

"We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be."--Richard Avedon, 1974The preeminent stars and artists of the performing arts from the second half of the 20th century offered their greatest gifts―and, sometimes, their inner lives―to Richard Avedon. More than 200 are portrayed in Performance, many in photographs that have been rarely or never seen before. Of course, the great stars light the Hepburn and Chaplin, Monroe and Garland, Brando and Sinatra. But here too are the actors and comedians, pop stars and divas, musicians and dancers, artists in all mediums with public lives that were essentially performances, who stand at the pinnacle of our cultural achievement. The celebrated author and critic John Lahr offers an elegant assessment of Avedon’s achievement. Four supremely talented artists from the performing arts―Mike Nichols, André Gregory, Mitsuko Uchida, and Twyla Tharp―contribute lively and moving memoirs about their collaborations with Avedon.

The autobiography-of-sorts of André Gregory, an iconic figure in American theater and the star of My Dinner with André This Is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theater director, writer, and actor. For the first time, André shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This Is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities. This Is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between André and Todd London, who together create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?