About the Book

In the 1950s, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and a handful of other young artists based in New York’s Greenwich Village set out to challenge the practices and principles of professionalized dance. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of choreographers Anna Halprin, Robert Dunn, and Merce Cunningham, as well as composer John Cage, they were determined to change what dance is and can be. In One Thing Follows Another, a boundary-crossing collection of ten experimental-poetic essays, poets Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal explore the work of dancer-choreographers Rainer and Forti, both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment.

Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push the authors to unexpected places — including the zoo, the dance studio, the street corner — and via innovative forms and techniques, such as collage, erasure, and their own artistic inventions, they deconstruct the essay form to examine what they as poets, each with their own highly charged relationships to dance, can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern performance art.

About the Authors

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. In collaboration with Valerie Witte, she has published the hybrid work The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her short film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades on the film festival circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, and New York Mills. She lives in San Francisco, where she manages projects for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, works as a life and professional coach, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury.

Valerie Witte is the author of A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie Press, 2023) and a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015). In collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, she has published the hybrid work The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019) and she has published multiple chapbooks, most recently Listening Through the Body (above/ground press, 2021). Her work has also appeared in literary publications such as VOLT, Diagram, Dusie, and Interim. Her previous collaborations include projects with artist Jennifer Yorke, who produced two artist books based on Witte’s manuscript Flood Diary, and an installation based on her manuscript A Rupture in the Interiors. The works were exhibited in Berkeley and Chicago, respectively, and their collaboration included a residency at La Porte Peinte Center for the Arts in Noyers, France. Witte has also attended residencies at the Hambidge Center and Ragdale Foundation and is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School. She edits education technology books in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband Andrew.

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