WRITING
Books
The Choreography of Everyday Life, Verso Books, 2022
“Parson, an acclaimed choreographer… offers an exuberant…look at the world. Parson’s insights are a welcome reminder of the political value of dance.”
“The title to read this season… this small and precious book can tell us the oldest and most profound story of how the body experiences space, inhabits it and is inhabited by it…”
In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance—time, proximity, space, motion and tone— into text. As we follow Parson through her days—at home, reading, and on her walks down the street—and in and out of conversations on everything from Homer’s Odyssey to feminist art to social protest, she helps us see how everyday movement creates the wider world. Dance, it turns out, is everything and everywhere.
With the insight and verve of a soloist, Parson shows us how art-making is a part of our everyday lives and our political life as we move, together and apart, through space.
Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, Dancing Foxes press and Wesleyan Univ. (2024)
A multivoiced dance history book, authored by thirteen diverse choreographers, co-edited with Thomas F. De Frantz
With contributions by mayfield brooks, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne.
Published by Big Dance Theater, Dancing Foxes Press, and Wesleyan University Press with support of the Howard Gilman Foundation and Virginia and Timothy Millhiser.
“What emerges from the collection is a sense of dance history as invocation and list, elegy and collage…with twelve contributors, the book becomes polyphonic, singing that dance history goes here, and here, and here: to the border, the ocean, the ring shout; to Michael Jordan’s slam dunk, and the Lindy Hop, and big joyous parties in working-class Latinx Chicago.”
KYLE McCARTHY, The Brooklyn Rail
Drawing the Surface of Dance: A Biography in Charts, Wesleyan University Press, 2019
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.
Dance By Letter, 53rd State Press, 2018
Choreographer Annie-B Parson uses the form of the alphabet book to “speak a word for the uncanny act of dance-making.” Composed with the same virtuosic economy and exactitude as her dances, her abecedary is simultaneously primer, theory, riddle and prompt.
Articles and Essays
“Another Way to Watch the World Cup,” The Atlantic, 2022 December 11
Excerpt:
Here is what I see. Soccer is a taut group dance with a quick tempo on a green, rectangular stage. The players are arcane creatures, their four appendages reimagined; they activate their head and chest in tandem with their legs, a kind of armless reptile. The arms dangle without specific gesture, unnecessary, even illegal. The upper body spirals and rotates, dives and bows. Virtuosity plays out in the feet: sometimes strong and long, like during a goal kick; sometimes tiny and precise, like during a string of step overs. And all of this happens in concert with the other dancers. Duets and trios of bodies form and disperse in heightened tempos and tense pauses; they bend and arch in response to the possibility that the ball—that precious protagonist—will become theirs for a moment.
“Annie-B Parson On Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour,” Art Forum, December 2022
Excerpt:
In Pure Colour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Sheila Heti stages a human encounter inside a leaf. Paradoxically, this novel is a work of pure realism. It opens in a biblical mood, declaring a simple system to sort all human essences into three types: bird, fish, or bear. And as in the Bible, Heti describes multiple planes of existence with uncanny authority.
“Odysseus’s Kinesphere,” The Paris Review, 2022 July 25
Excerpt:
Paul is lying on the couch talking to someone on the phone and he’s telling them that he’s reading The Odyssey and it reads like a blockbuster movie, and I interrupt from the kitchen to ask which movie, but he doesn’t hear me because
the radio is on.
I am a choreographer by trade, and it’s an unusual profession: to make and sell dances. The material, the stuff of dance, is the body, and turning that into something transactional has always struck me as contradictory, because when people first danced, it was essentially a community in physical agreement executing poeticized, ritual actions
in a circle.
“Diary, 2008,” The Paris Review, 2022 May 6
Excerpt:
For six months I was given an office, my first and only, at a center for ballet research. I think you act and move differently in new architectures, and I spent those months constructing what an office meant to my day, to my body, to my work. It seemed to me that if I had my own office with a closed door and a desk, I should do solo time-based seated activities in silence. So, in the morning I would write a to-do list, distilling the day into a structural event in three parts.