Overview

In The grass is greener when the sun is yellow, poets Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte engage with the work of dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Through research into these innovative women's dances, ideas, and lives, Rosenthal and Witte use language from and about the choreographers to create a series of co-written sonnets that are interwoven with letters between the two poets. These letters describe the process of composing the poems and branch into discussions of dance, poetics, gender, transgression, the unfolding disaster of the current political scene, and much else, in the associative weave that epistolary form enacts. Together, the poems and letters construct an environment of reflection, intimacy, and vulnerability, one that is both challenging and invitational.

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9781946031679

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Reviews

Witte and Rosenthal approach the linked figures of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer from multiple viewpoints, and indeed from different attitudes toward dance itself--rather like the attraction and repulsion anyone sensible feels toward this energy. Witte resents dance's powers of exclusion, while Rosenthal responds to its open invitation, and they debate these positions with extreme generosity, each taking the other into account and tracking her through question, dare, a step forward, two steps back, across the lines of geography and social system. Just when you think you've got them placed, the book comes to a shattering close. But don't worry, folks, Rosenthal and Witte keep dancing with the work of Rainer and Forti ... this party's just getting started. --Kevin Killian

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