Drawing the Surface of Dance

A Biography in Charts

Annie-B Parson

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• ISBN:
  9780819579720
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Soloing on the page, choreographer Annie-B Parson rethinks choreography as dance on paper. Parson draws her dances into new graphic structures calling attention to the visual facts of the materiality of each dance work she has made. These drawings serve as both maps of her pieces in the aftermath of performance, and a consideration of the elements of dance itself. Divided into three chapters, the book opens with diagrams of the objects in each of her pieces grouped into chart-structures. These charts reconsider her dances both from the perspective of the resonance of things, and for their abstract compositional properties. In chapter two, Parson delves into the choreographic mind, charting such ideas as an equality in the perception of objects and movement, and the poetics of a kinetic grammar. Charts of erasure, layering and language serve as dynamic and prismatic tools for dance making. Lastly, nodding to the history of chance operations in dance, Parson creates a generative card game of 52 compositional elements for artists of any medium to cut out and play as a method for creating new material. Within the duality of form and content, this book explores the meanings that form itself holds, and Parson's visual maps of choreographic ideas inspire new thinking around the shared elements underneath all art making.

1

Charts of Works 1991–2018

Pre-Big Dance Theater, this was the first of the many large-scale dance/theater works I made. The piece, as I vaguely remember it, was concerned with feminism and brides, Americana, kitsch imagery, and the start of a long-standing fascination with the properties, promises, and assumptions of the iconic red velvet curtain.

Based on the dry, ironic and moving short story of the same name by Gustave Flaubert, with two dancers dancing the role of the protagonist simultaneously. An early exploration into compositional notions around complex symmetries, reverse mirroring, and duality.

Based on both Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger and illicitly taped audio from Paul Lazar’s movie auditions,¹ we combined two very disparate sources to talk about despair and aspiration, the after-life and magic. Big Dance made the piece at and for Dance Theater Workshop, and later it was made into a film by Jonathan Demme.

Another Telepathic Thing, 2000: Tymberly Canale and Stacy Dawson

Commissioned by Japan Society, this piece is based loosely on a short story by the early 20th C. novelist Masuji Ibuse. To bring it to our own world we conflated his writing with inspirational speeches by American life-insurance salesmen, set to live Okinawan pop music. Dragging the past into the present continues to be a subject matter in my choreographies; I feel that we hold our past(s) deeply in our bodies, and I want to show that on stage. Dance curator David White described our work as “historically promiscuous,” and, like most of the work of Big Dance, this one is roundly a-historic. Created with Paul Lazar and the Company.

Based loosely on the language and tone of the absurdist play, The Lesson by Ionesco, a student enters a tutor’s home and encounters a woman playing a man playing a bush moving in reverse. Ionesco is upended here, excavated solely for his flat tonality, his simple sentences and his stage directions. The subject matter of the piece became about learning and studying, in recognition of the tremendous amount of their lives dancers spend in class.

A favorite Big Dance piece, created by re-purposing a screenplay by Agnes Varda.² I intentionally did not watch her film, but instead used the script as a map for a dance/theater work. A formal investigation on the intersection of film and theater, created about and in Lyon, France, at Les Subsistances.

Co-created with Paul Lazar and based on a skeletal edit of the Anne Carson translation of Euripides’ play Alcestis.³ Euripides’ ironic and emotional play begins with a woman sacrificing her life for her husband—and ends with her eerily returning from the dead. The play is simply the deepest writing I have ever read about grief and regret and is the most personally resonant script I have worked with. I came to feel that I knew Euripides as a human being. It is strange and thrilling to feel close to someone who lived thousands of years ago.

A dance/play created from a script by Sibyl Kempson, written in an invented language.⁴ Medieval in tone, full of strange rituals and brutal behaviors. Design by visual artists—costumes by Suzanne Bocanegra and set by Joanne Howard—are equally as important as the script or the choreography. Directed by Paul Lazar. Performed during Halloween in the basement of The Chocolate Factory during Hurricane Sandy for a tiny and intrepid audience. Looking back, we were all pretty sure our enacting of this play caused the storm, but we can’t prove it.

Ich, Kürbisgeist, 2012: Paul Lazar and Eric Dyer

A pop-eretta by David Byrne, the first musical that I have made dances for. I spent so many years working on Here Lies Love that at some point I made a chart of it. Though the elements and objects selected are not my own, they seeped into the choreography and became iconic in my mind.

A very complicated piece that held narrative and abstraction as one, I rewrote the script of Terms of Endearment into multiple poetic forms.⁵ Although I had employed poetics for choreographic structures, I had never used them to repurpose text. Other sources included a very skeletal edit of Dr. Zhivago. Underlying the work was the simple structure of crossing the stage from one side to the other. Co-created with Paul Lazar.

Alan Smithee Directed This Play, 2014: Paul Lazar, Elizabeth DeMent, Cynthia Hopkins, and Tymberly Canale

A solo concerned with factuality and unrelated actions as content, and de-sequenced to free these actions of any implied narrative. The beginnings of this solo involved a slavish determination to “dance” all aspects of a Stravinsky nocturne that I could perceive, and then erase the music and leave the “erasure marks” of the music for the audience to see in the dance, but not hear. In this case, erasure marks would refer to rhythm, tone, emotion, kinetics, tempo, and phrasing in the original music. The music was eventually replaced with a percussion work by Julia Wolfe for four hi-hat drums. There are two Short Ride Outs, one female, danced by Wendy Whelan at the Lynberry Theater/Royal Ballet in London, and the other for Aaron Mattocks at the Kitchen—the first cousin of Whelan’s Short Ride Out.

Short Ride Out, 2015: Wendy Whalen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Stuff An Essay
• Chapter 1: Charts of Works 1991–2018
• Chapter 2: Structures and Scores
• Chapter 3: Big Dance In Photos
• Chapter 4: Elements of Composition A Deck of Cards
• Rearrangements On Annie-B Parson
• About the Author/Acknowledgments
• List of Works Pictured
• Copyright