Welcome back to Danceletter Convos, the interview series that will now be landing in your inboxes once a month. For this edition, I’m thrilled to bring you a conversation with Annie-B Parson and Thomas F. DeFrantz, two artist-thinkers I’ve long admired — and the editors of the genre-defying new book Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, a co-publication of Dancing Foxes Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Annie-B’s New York–based company, Big Dance Theater.
I say “book,” but it’s hard to know whether to refer to this text in the singular or the plural, one aspect of its unclassifiable nature. It is actually 12 separate, chapter-length volumes by a glorious group of 12 choreographer-writers: mayfield brooks, Maura Nguyễn Donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne, as well as Tommy and Annie-B. A 13th volume takes the form of a large fold-out page: on one side, an image of a forest; on the other, a bright, dense intermingling of drawings by Annie-B and text by Tommy, a kind of introductory manifesto. “The forest and the trees,” it begins. “Not either/or but both-and, always and not-quite-yet. This is our proposal to you.”