The Choreography of Everyday Life

Choreographer Parson (Drawing the Surface of Dance) examines dance in life, literature, and everyday actions. Simply walking the dog in a public place has issues of time, tempo and space. She listens to a phone call between her husband Paul and son Jack discussing Homer’s Odyssey, and that sparks ideas for her own work. “Poetic structures into choreography” are considered. Paul and Jack’s conversation provides a framework. She connects Athena to Trisha Brown by citing Athena’s transformation in a structural retrograde, which is something Brown invented for dance. The Great Tragedians are the “first known ironists,” according to her. She discusses a MOMA retrospective of Louise Bourgeois. She remarks that “we move like nature” and sees the three points of a triangle as book/reader/world. An example of negation and deletion is the “Erased by de Kooning Drawing,” by Robert Rauschenberg. There is much interweaving with her thoughts and the Odyssey discussion. She also calls both Zoom and TikTok art forms. Interesting photos appear throughout, which accentuate the text.