About the Book

Somewhere between an artist's book and a score, Nancy Karp's Six Dances sits happily on a coffee table with museum catalogues, on a record shelf near books about music and dance, or on a writing desk next to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies. Included in the box are six leporellos: a type of folded booklet named for Don Giovanni's servant who, in the Mozart opera, produces such a scroll from his pocket during the catalogue aria of the great Don's amours.

These six leporellos are visualizations of the dances, FIRST LIGHT, DOT BUNCH, RELAY RELAY, RUNNING DANCE, RIVER CANON, and REMINISCENCE. They represent the patterns made by the dancers in each work. Nancy Karp devised this simple scoring method in 1978 to record the patterns of her dances. Each work may have up to 100 drawings. The drawings chosen do not attempt to cover an entire dance, but rather, key moments. The drawings have been laid out consecutively as in each dance, but do not necessarily flow into one another. They represent single moments in time.