Poet Carol Snow and choreographer Alex Ketley of The Foundry co-created “Syntax,” a staged reading where the underlying structure of language was accompanied by and echoed in the physical patterns of dance. The finished 40-minute work explored how “A dance could be choreographed—not to music and not the content of a reading—but to the linguistic patterns of what is read.”
Carol Snow involved choreographer Alex Ketley from the very beginning of her writing process. The two conferred over drafts of the text. The provisional manuscript was organized into segments to be revised, lengthened, shortened, and/or re-ordered according to needs of the dance. As the choreographic movements and structure developed, Snow rewrote and polished her presentation.
Carol Snow’s third collection of poetry was published in spring 2004 by the University of California Press. She has received of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Poetry Center Book Award, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. For Snow, this project represents her first collaborative venture and builds on her previous, extensive work with poems structured in series.
The Foundry, established as a collaborative between Christian Burns and Alex Ketley in 1998, was driven by an intense desire to look at how process is applied and challenged in the creation of dance work. Many of its projects were interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Also participating as members of the Foundry were dancers Andrea and Justin Flores.