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Book Review ‘Form both holds and creates meaning’

FIONA O’CONNOR recommends a books that draws attention to imaginative ways of looking at ourselves in space

The Choreography of Everyday Life
by Annie-B Parson
Verso £14.99

ANNIE-B Parson is an eminent Brooklyn-based contemporary choreographer.

Much of her work involves language: from dances for ancient Greek plays to work created from New York street signs, she moves fluidly between the body and symbolised thought.

Within this slight (96 pages) book is found a lifetime of craft through a playfully elegant dance of ideas.

At one point the reader takes part in the choreography of meaning, physically inhabiting the text by following instructions.

In short sections interspersed with small images, Parson’s mastery of rhythms of spatial form is worked across the pages.

Our everyday life of ordinary tasks is viewed by the artist, transforming the invisible rituals that connect us.

In reading of the myriad ways in which we are physically reproducing our spaces, we join in the dance.

Starting from our most intimate spatial gestures, our breaths, opening to the woman’s domestic domain of ancient Greek society, the oikos, on to the spontaneous ecstasy of street dancing generated by Donald Trump’s loss of the presidency: history’s corpus a winding dance of human feet.

This small but perfectly formed book gathers in the sacred and profane, the virtual and visceral, poetical and political, the shared experience of pandemic lockdowns — which realised acute spatial awareness.

Parson interweaves imaginative legacies from Homer and Euripides through to contemporaries Anne Carson, Louise Bourgeois, and fellow choreographer, Trisha Brown, among others.

Throughout she stages fascinating comparisons — the loneliness, for instance, underlying Twitter rants, seen against the chain of movements involved in the writing, sending and receiving of a letter.

“Form both holds and creates meaning,” Parson writes.

These meanings, virtual or not, evolve in real time. Parson shows us her poetics as “world-actualisation rather than self-actualisation” drawing attention to imaginative ways of looking at ourselves in space.

This is the work of a master craftswoman, beautiful and moving.

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