Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

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.

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.