The Little Edges

Soloing on the page, choreographer Annie-B Parson rethinks choreography as dance on paper. Parson draws her dances into new graphic structures calling attention to the visual facts of the materiality of each dance work she has made. These drawings serve as both maps of her pieces in the aftermath of performance, and a consideration of the elements of dance itself. 

Divided into three chapters, the book opens with diagrams of the objects in each of her pieces grouped into chart-structures. These charts reconsider her dances both from the perspective of the resonance of things, and for their abstract compositional properties. In chapter two, Parson delves into the choreographic mind, charting such ideas as an equality in the perception of objects and movement, and the poetics of a kinetic grammar. Charts of erasure, layering and language serve as dynamic and prismatic tools for dance making. Lastly, nodding to the history of chance operations in dance, Parson creates a generative card game of 52 compositional elements for artists of any medium to cut out and play as a method for creating new material. Within the duality of form and content, this book explores the meanings that form itself holds, and Parson's visual maps of choreographic ideas inspire new thinking around the shared elements underneath all art making.

ANNIE-B PARSON is a choreographer and artistic director of Big Dance Theater. Parson has also made choreography for rock shows, marching bands, symphonies, movies, museums, objects, augmented reality, and people: David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Laurie Anderson, Nico Muhly, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Co. SIOBHAN BURKE writes on dance for the New York Times and other publications. She teaches at Barnard College.

New edition of one of the founding works of Language writing. 

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language — — the things people say and the ways they say them — shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Silence: Lectures and Writings is a book by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992), first published in 1961 by Wesleyan University Press. Silence is a collection of essays and lectures Cage wrote during the period from 1939 to 1961.

Most of the works are preceded by a short commentary on their origins, some have an afterword provided. Several works feature unorthodox methods of presentation and/or composition. "The Future of Music: Credo" juxtaposes paragraphs of two different texts. The text of the first part of "Composition as Process" is presented in four columns, the text of "Erik Satie" in two. "45' for a Speaker" is similar to Cage's "time length" compositions: it provides detailed instructions for the speaker as to exactly when a particular sentence or a phrase should be said. "Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?" is presented in several types of typeface to better reflect the concept of the lecture, which was originally presented as four tapes running simultaneously. "Indeterminacy" is a collection of various anecdotes and short stories taken from life or books Cage read: the concept is to tell one story per minute, and to achieve the speaker has to either speed up or slow down, depending on the length of the story.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

[Ahmed] is the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Since 2014, أحمد [Ahmed] have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music.

[Ahmed] – Writing (EXV01) gathers together the [Ahmed] ‘paper’ texts from the last decade: liner-notes; covers of the releases; and writing by the band members – Antonin and Joel have written two fresh ones for this book, Seymour’s have appeared alongside the records, and some of Pat’s come from a time (long) before [Ahmed]. “Together, the ideas-energy in these things gives a sense of what we have done, do, think together (and apart) in living music, how our different ways come together, and how, together, we learn through be-doing [Ahmed]… These texts are woven together (the etymology of text is from weave) through (and into) a rich fabric of enquiry. A collaborative weaving together of difference(s) to make a whole (thing).” (Seymour Wright)

Contributions by Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip, Robert Levin, James G. Spady, John Chantler, Edward George, Fred Moten

Edited by [Ahmed]
Series Editors: Stoffel Debuysere, Jef Lambrechts, Will Holder
Initiated by Stoffel Debuysere
Produced and designed by Will Holder [lps’ original design: Maja Larsson]

This most substantive monograph yet published on the work of German-born, New York–based multimedia artist Andrea Geyer focuses on her recent explorations of the marginalized yet pivotal role that women have played in the formulation of American modernism, tracing and honoring the ephemeral acts, initiatives, and stories that shaped it. Featuring full-color images of Geyer’s artworks and research materials, including documents, found photographs, and previously unpublished photographs by the artist, Dance in a Future with All Present offers insight into Geyer’s art and the multiple histories of modernism.

Includes texts by Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, Andrianna Campbell, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle A. Jackson, Alhena Katsof, Kristan Kennedy, Thomas J. Lax, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Gabriela Rangel, Jeannine Tang, and Soyoung Yoon.

Copublished with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019.
Edited by Alhena Katsof, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder. 
Design by Dante Carlos.

A political and aesthetic critique of racial capitalism and modes of social experimentation in the form of resistance to the colonial commons.

Stefano Harney (born 1962) is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He now teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management.

Preface by Jack Halberstam.
Collective translation (original title: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013).

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).
 
published in February 2022
 
French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
208 pages

Pivot is an experimental, book-length poem exploring the profound act of "turning", with the Haitian Revolution as its cornerstone.

Pivot moves beyond historical narrative, scrutinizing this epochal event through its pivotal moments—critical junctures of rupture and radical reorientation. Mason Jordan masterfully employs repetition, metaphor, and other minimalist abstractions of language to delve into the visceral and conceptual mechanics of turning: a turning away from colonial subjugation, a turning towards new vocabularies of freedom, and the cyclical turning of memory. Through linguistic architectures and etymology, akin to the likes of Fred Moten, N. H. Pritchard, and M. NourbeSe Philip, Pivot examines international revolt, revolutionary fervor, and the development of Black Marxism(s) through a critical reflection on Haitian revolutionary history.

A subversive collection about Palestinian resistance, liberation and art. 

Written across Palestine and its diaspora—from Gaza and the West Bank to the United States—Intifadas is a subtly transgressive poetry collection about uprising in its many forms—in art, politics, and in our most personal relationships. Whether by dumping black paint on a park where a tank and fighter jet commemorate a war, or by trying to rescue a moth trapped in a garage, the defiant and resilient voices in this collection subvert traditional narratives of loss. Furious, tender, and darkly funny, Intifadas asks what art can do in the face of catastrophe, and answers with poems that refuse easy consolations.

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.

Multilayered lyric poems that resist systems of power and foster intimacy. 

An inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.