Upsidedown and Backwards

“[This tape] gives a clear picture of the consistency of Jonas’s concerns. The performance was based upon the merging of two fairy tales — The Frog Prince told backward and The Boy Who Went Out To Learn Fear told forward. These two tales become intertwined into a single text whose transformations are effected through fragmentation, demonstrating a process “unhitched” from time, as free from the laws of physics as are the fairy-tale sources. “

—David Ross, “Joan Jonas’s Videotapes” in Joan Jonas: Scripts and Descriptions, 1968-1982, ed. Douglas Crimp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)