When You Rise Up: Performance Texts

by Miguel Gutiérrez

When You Rise Up collects texts by relentlessly exploratory choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, who engages artistic community in a radical sense, interrogating physical encounter at all scales, from the collaborating performers to the world where the work takes place. Standing alone from their original contexts, these pieces radiate with the physical urgency of a life committed to art and performance.

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Max Valerio]

I enjoyed this collection of performative texts that work easily as poems on the page. Direct, surprising, quirky and deeply felt, these poems transport the reader. There is real music in these poems, and you can feel that rhythm on the page whispering at your ear. Read this for the urgency of the voice, the kinetic immediacy and the pleasure of being engaged. Gutierrez is a dancer and a choreographer and the poems lift from page to eye to ear easily, and you can imagine a dance someplace -- as the writing enunciates feeling.

[Branden]

this is a super-slim little collection of performance texts culled from various dance-theatre shows by Gutierrez, a few of which i've seen. i thought, for some reason, that they might die on the page, but actually they really held up for me - weirdly emotional for something so 100% ego. if this were any longer than it was, it might make me want to kill myself, but you really breeze through it and it definitely left me in at a place i liked the feeling of.

[Jennifer]

Miguel is funny as hell and serious as a heart attack - his performance texts, which are poems or sometimes prose with line breaks in the written form, are achingly good and true. You go, Miguel! Poetry I can actually read, not like whatever is in the New Yorker, which continues to excel in all other areas but that one!

[T]

Not five stars because I wanted more. Maybe that's not quite fair...