About Stacking: Accumulation, Collapse, and Choreographic Writing

STACKS is a production I choreographed and directed in 2008, which collapses the traditional expectations for what a dance, text, or sculpture can be. This project began as a gradual and multi-dimensional evolution of Anne Carson's writing, which in recent years has become increasingly collaborative with other disciplines. Following her investigative research on the properties of dance, contemporary choreography, and its strategies, Carson initiated a residency in Michigan with three dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Carson and the dancers explored material on the self-reflective properties of pronouns, the human body in motion, and the histories of language and choreography. The resulting project, Possessives Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets, was created in collaboration with the dancers Andrea Weber, Rashaun Mitchell, and Julie Cunningham. Possessives originated as a text written by Carson, which was brought together with movement material by the dancers, who in turn were recorded on camera by Robert Currie. Subsequent editing produced a document that includes Carson's voice as a soundscape. The resulting video was then used as scenography for performances of Carson's text, during which she read live, and was accompanied live by the dancers.

Possessives is relevant to the development of STACKS, because it illustrates the unique nature of how Carson has used multi-disciplinary collaboration to create circumstances for artistic production: text, movement, and visual design are interwoven into a transformational whole. Possessives served as a benchmark occasion in which Carson incorporated other media into the presentation of her work. She also ventured into live performance herself: during a presentation in Minnesota at the College of Saint Benedict, staged blocking was incorporated into her readings of the text for the first time. In addition, Carson has sought to bring aspects of this collaboration into greater, more fully staged realization. With goals for deeper research and impact, Carson approached me in 2007 to invest greater time into choreographing, in her words, "to" a text. As Carson's new texts were so substantial, I spent a year in New York, and on a Cornell University Fellowship in Rome, to formulate a more expansive choreographic vision, structure, and methodology for the piece.

Carson also solicited thematic ideas from me, and from our joint research, we began an investigation into the nature of collapse, as manifested in human anatomy and grammar. In late 2007, Carson mailed me a draft of STACKS that she had compiled after viewing some of my recent choreography. She expressed the difficulty of working between abstraction in dance and the linguistic abstraction in verse—a classical conundrum, which was also a focus of this project.

Shortly thereafter, Carson made a visit to the Brooklyn studio of Peter Cole, where she encountered his recent series of conical assemblages: piles of objects, junk, detritus, and found materials towered vertically into poetic landscapes of human content. As seen in Cole's scenography for STACKS, his exploration of piled objects, which subverts the tradition of walkaround sculpture, in conjunction with thematic concerns of collapse, catalyzed the formation of the STACKS text and staging for our eventual interdisciplinary collaboration.

The production enjoyed a 2008 premiere at New York University's Skirball Center. The production also toured to Mount Tremper Arts in 2008, and to The Moore Building in Miami in 2010, designed by Zaha Hadid, as part of the "O Miami" Poetry Festival.