Writing Dance

'Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it's all there when you work whether you want it there or not.' Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer's Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Varamo Press is an artist-run, independent publishing house founded in 2018 by Mette Edvardsen and Jeroen Peeters. It takes inspiration from César Aira's character Varamo, a clerk whose chance encounter with a trio of publishers in a bar inspires an unlikely collaboration that yields a masterpiece of experimental literature.

In 2022 Varamo Press launched the series Gestures, small format books that come with a grey cover and a unified design. The series experiments with the essay genre and provides a platform for shorter texts we'd like to make available for wider readership and unexpected encounters. Gestures include commissioned essays as well as translations, reformulations and yet other alternative editions of existing material.