a book that simply will not sit still

Annie-B Parson's The Choreography of Everyday Life is 6 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches and 96 pages.

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If  Annie-B Parson didn’t tell you on the first page of this extended essay that she’s a choreographer, you would know it anyway. Her writing moves differently. Her favorite stylistic choice— to set the last few words of a paragraph to float on their own, in a new stanza (example below)— is a physical flourish. Your eyes must leap! It’s a step. It’s the decision of someone who understands a movement’s flow and how to interrupt it, how to manipulate it, how to get us all to follow it. 

The Choreography of the Everyday is an extraordinary project.  There’s a scrap-book quality, visually and thematically. The pages are sprinkled with her photographs, her drawings, her post-its, or diagrams, or images of an ancient stele with dancing figures on it. 

And the subjects of the book are: whatever Annie-B wants! It’s about dancing, of course (spontaneous; theatrical). But it simply will not sit still! Its topics include: coincidence, dogs on leashes, duration, book selection. A wild artistic war-game between de Kooning and Rauschenberg. The toxic nature of the choreographer-dancer dynamic. Spontaneous dancing in the street after 2020 election results, the rigidity and backslide of the pandemic’s six-feet distancing rules. Tributes to Hilda af Klimt, Louise Bourgeois. So much of it is about The Odyssey, which Annie-B doesn’t even read until close to the end of the book! But as she listens to her husband and son discuss it, even before she glances at a page, she’s already choreographing its scenes.

It’s so fantastic to read a book that doesn’t make any promises, gives you no indication of its destination and just moves you there anyway. It simply slides through dozens of scenes, impressions, thoughts. Did everything coalesce? No! Did I ever wonder why some subject was included? No! Annie-B can carry off a cascading structure and take us with her. That’s her talent, that’s her gift, that’s her job. She can get us to move exactly how she wants us to.