This book explores the relationship of the life and work of the remarkable Parisian-Jewish writer Georges Perec (1936–1983) to dance.
"Dancing" addresses art-making parallels and their personal and sociocultural contexts, including Perec’s childhood loss of his parents in the Holocaust and its repercussions in the significance of the body, everydayness, space, and attention permeating his work. This book, emerging from the author Leslie Satin’s perspective as a dancer and scholar, links Perec’s concerns with those of dance and demonstrates that Perec’s work has implications for dance and how we think about it. Moreover, it is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of the author's relationship to Perec, periodically linking their written, danced, and imagined lives.
This exploration will be of great interest to dancers, dance scholars, and dance students interested in contemporary experimental dance and contemporary dance.
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Dancing with Georges Perec: An Introduction
Chapter 2. Georges Perec’s Radical Fractures: Engaging Autobiography
Chapter 3. Looking, Listening, Listing: Attention and the Infra-Ordinary
Entracte: The Body Catalogue
Chapter 4. Bodies in Space, Bodies as Space
Chapter 6. What is Dance? Radical Acts of Embodiment
Chapter 7. Dancing into the 21st Century with Georges Perec
Index
Biography
Leslie Satin is a member of the Gallatin Arts Faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and a choreographer and dancer. Her performance texts and scholarly writing on dance’s intersections with other fields have been published in many journals and edited collections.
''Across his novels, essays, and place-based writings, Georges Perec radically expanded our understanding of how we inhabit and interact with everyday spaces. His work foregrounds questions of embodiment, in both historical and relational terms, and proposes experimental forms of engagement with the world in which we dwell. Perec’s influence is increasingly evident across multiple disciplines and fields of creative practice. In this welcome exploration of the intersections of Perec’s writing with dance, Leslie Satin urges us to consider his oeuvre in new ways while exploring its implications for embodied performance more broadly."
Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, University of Cambridge, UK
“Leslie Satin, dancer and dance scholar, deftly claims Georges Perec for the dance world. She invites him into her own family history as she imagines herself 'dancing with Perec.' Her recollections of Perec’s significant presence in her own path through a dancing life ranges from aspirational flights of fancy to embodied experiences with Perec’s ideas writ large, all through the lens of postmodern dance. Satin’s scholarship and analysis of Perec is deeply rooted in an interdisciplinary framework, while her prose metaphorically dances across time and the pages of this timely text.”
Douglas Rosenberg, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Dancing With Georges Perec is an examination of the work of an experimental French writer and his choreographic contemporaries in New York City. Leslie Satin has created an imaginative and personal work that brings them together, though neither culture had probably ever heard of the other. A fascinating enterprise.”
Yvonne Rainer, co-founder of the Judson Dance Theater; author of Work: 1961-73; co-editor of Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019
