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- Writing in Motion
A treasure trove of writings by America's only dancing philosopher.
Kenneth King is one of America's most inventive postmodern choreographers. His dancing has always reflected his interest in language and technology, combining movement with film, machines, lighting and words both spoken and written. King is also conversant in philosophy, and some of his most influential dances have been dedicated to and in dialogue with the work of such philosophers as Susanne K. Langer, Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche. Since the 1960s, he has performed his dance to texts both spoken and prerecorded—texts intended to stand separately as literary works.
Writing in Motion spans more than thirty years and is collected here for the first time. It includes essays, performance scripts of King's own work, art criticism, philosophy and cultural commentary. Dense with movement, these writings explode and reconfigure the familiar, crack syntax open, and invent startling new words. Dancing, to King, is "writing in space," and writing is a dance of ideas. Whether referencing Aristotle, Langer, Simone de Beauvoir, MTV, Maurice Blanchot or Marshall McLuhan, King's delightfully lavish prose is very much "in motion."
PART 1 Transmedia
Digital Body/Millennial Wor(l)d
Through Me Many Voices
WORD RAID (Impossible Tongue Twisters for E. E. Cummings)
From Out of the Field of Vision (Or Finally: The Internet)
The Telaxic Synapsulator (The Future of Machine)
PART 2 Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex: Julie Taymor – Seiji Ozawa – Jessye Norman
Writing Over History and Time: Maurice Blanchot and Jackie O.
Dreams and Collage
Sight and Cipher
A Pipe of Fancy (Vision's Plentitude): Joseph Cornell, An Appreciateion
PART 3 Autobiopathy
The Body Reflexive
Metagexis (Joseph's Song)
Appeal to the Unknown Prayer to the Great Void (Mappings for a Metatheology)
KENNETH KING is a dancer, choreographer, writer, teacher and philosopher. He lives in New York City and has performed widely there and in international venues. DEBORAH JOWITT is Professor of Dance at New York University and author of Time and the Dancing Image.
""Kenneth King is a visionary choreographer whose writing is inimitable. Like his dancing, his writing is poetic, surprising, energizing, intricate, wry, resonant and marvelously full of word wit.""
~Sally Banes, author of Terpsichore in Sneakers
"Writing in Motion makes a significant contribution to both the artistic and critical investigation of the relationship between dancing and writing that has been so provocative in recent years."
~Peggy Phelan, The Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts, Stanford University
"Kenneth King is a visionary choreographer whose writing is inimitable. Like his dancing, his writing is poetic, surprising, energizing, intricate, wry, resonant and marvelously full of word wit."
~Sally Banes, author of Terpsichore in Sneakers