Dancing with Anne Carson

Photo: Liza Voll at the New York Times

The collaboration between poet and critic Anne Carson and dancer-choreographer Rashaun Mitchell has resulted in a multi-layered mash-up of poetry and dance. Carson’s Nox, her most recent book, and Mitchell’s Bracko, her most recent dance composition, were presented by Summer Stages Dance and the Institute of Contemporary Art in a piece that illuminates how poetry can manifest itself in a physical medium. Carson used the poems of the Sappho and the Roman poet Catullus as part of her inspiration.

From the New York Times:

Ms. Carson’s involvement in ancient Greek literature and culture has  always been a prime component of her work. The  title of “Bracko” alludes to the many brackets that mark the fragmentary texts of Sappho’s poems, whose incomplete nature becomes obvious in live performance. (Alternating voices speak “bracket,” “sinful” and “bracket.”) Ms. Carson includes Sappho’s best-known and most complete poems (notably the classic “He Seems to Me a God”), but her larger point  is that our idea of this Greek poet is shaped by what we don’t know, and what we choose to imagine, about  her . . .