The Choreography of Everyday Life

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A renowned choreographer explores the dance of everyday life and reveals that art-making is as natural as walking down the street 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. “‘Bodies in space.’ I have heard Annie-B use this phrase dozens of times. It occurs to me this phrase refers to choreography and dance, but is also a transposable life philosophy.”
—St. Vincent “I’m a long time fan of Annie-B’s work. I see in it the quotidian made extraordinary … the familiar made foreign.”
—David Byrne “Parson’s path is one that continues to push the boundaries of dance.”
—Dan Meyer, Playbill“The choreographer who democratized dance.”
—Financial Times“In this quiet, minute and understatedly virtuosic text, Annie-B Parson walks us through the intricate dances of pedestrianism and domesticity. Gently but firmly pressing back against linear heroic narratives that have tended to efface the practices of women artists, she braids together strands of beauty, resistance and reverie, slyly pulling her readers into an exquisite, inclusive choreography of living.”
—Barbara Browning, author of The Gift “A gorgeous meditation on dance, visual art, and literature, as well as living, loving, and mourning. Parsons brings to the page the starling quality of her introspective, astounding, and lyrical stage work, urging us to look more closely at those small and large moments that steer us through the dance of life.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Create Dangerously“This book parses the quotidian through the lenses of choreography (temporality, rhythm, spatiality, gesture, relationality, and so on). This is a book for people who are interested in life, in affect, in experience and in artistry as a fundamental part of daily life.”
—Drawn & Quarterly Annie-B Parson is an award-winning choreographer and co-founder of the OBIE and Bessie Award–winning Big Dance Theater. Ms. Parson has created choreography for opera, pop stars, television, theater, ballet, symphonies, objects, museums, augmented reality, and 1,000 amateur singers. Among many others, she has choreographed for David Byrne, St Vincent, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Esperanza Spaulding, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. GB

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