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This performance and discussion coincides with a Brodsky Gallery installation of work from Upstage (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), a book in which words by Bruce Andrews and visuals by Sally Silvers combine to explore distinctive looks, textures, and language of pandemic-era Asbury Park, NJ.

About the Poets:

Poet, performance writer, poetics theorist, sound designer, & retired social scientist, Bruce Andrews was born in Chicago, earned a BA and MA from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD from Harvard. He moved to New York City in 1975, where he taught Political Science & Political Economy at Fordham in the Bronx (specializing in U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, covert activity, cultural studies & the JFK assassination) for the next 37 years. Closely associated with the post-1970s experimental literary movement, so-called Language Poetry, he coedited the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Charles Bernstein. He has published 30+ books including Edge, Film Noir, Wobbling R + B, Love Songs, Give Em Enough Rope, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened), I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut up, or Social Romanticism, Tizzy Boost, EX WHY ZEE, Lip Service, Designated Heartbeat, Swoon Noir, You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, A Change Is Gonna Come, & The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman. His essays on literary theory & poetics are collected in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Long involved in collaborative multi-media projects — including the performance group Barking (started with Sally Silvers & Tom Cora), staging large cast theater/performance spectacles in the 1980s — for decades he has been Sally Silvers Dancers’ main music/sound collaborator — composer,sound designer, & improvising music mixes & editing texts live in performance.

Sally Silvers is an award winning choreographer who also has published articles, essays, and poems in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies. She continues to have an on-going fascination with the poetic as well as the social meanings of movement, offering a no-holds- barred exploration of movement possibilities often tilted toward the eccentric, awkward, and unexpected. Silvers has performed in South Korea, London, Puerto Rico, France, Mexico, Berlin, Sweden, and Denmark, at the Joyce Theater, and many other national and international venues. She was a core member of the faculty at Bennington College Summer Choreography Project for 5 years and a guest teacher at the European Dance Development Center in Holland for a decade. She is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & is known for several community curatorial projects including TalkTalkWalkWalk (combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of “live choreography’ – starting a new dance live in front of the audience on the spot).. From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer. She has been collaborating with poet/writer/sound designer Bruce Andrews since the early 1980s. For more information visit SallySilversDance.com.