Dance Poems

These poems were written in the darkened theater, during the performances mentioned in the titles of the poems. Care was taken to preserve the spacing of the originals, handwritten on small grid-ruled pads. Since the writing surface cannot be seen during the writing process, there is a certain element of chance involved in the composition. Likewise, lines scrawled in the dark are not always easily deciphered, so this is another layer of translation (or decomposition) from the initial, generative event. Insofar as the poems are written in “real time” as the performance is taking place, they constitute a kind of synesthetic transcription of the original dances in verse form. In order to preserve the abstract quality of sound and motion, music and dance vocabulary was specifically avoided, only when no other word would do. The poems are the dances’ siamese twins—discrete sentient entities, but fundamentally conjoined; they are intended as such, please refer to the original dance pieces whenever possible when considering the poems.