“I was bored with my work, pretty generally,” Carson told me. “And he said, ‘Well, let’s put dancers in it.’ So we did.” Together, they turned a sonnet cycle into a grand spectacle featuring modern dancers, live and projected on a screen, arranged around Carson reading. They’re now planning to blow up that spectacle into something even larger: a choral work featuring dueling choirs, with somewhere between 200 and 10,000 voices. (Carson says that their collaborator, a former member of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, wants to use 10,000 Estonian singers — “which,” she said, “is the whole population of Estonia.”)
The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson
