Ugly Duckling Presse: Upstage

About the Authors

Poet, performance writer, poetics theorist, sound designer, Bruce Andrews moved to New York City in 1975, teaching Political Science at Fordham in the Bronx (specialties: U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, covert activity, cultural studies & the JFK assassination) for the next 37 years — (for 5 minutes of entertainment, google his stand-off with Bill O’Reilly as ‘Outrage of the Week’). 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 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, and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters. His essays on literary theory & poetics are collected in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Long involved in multi-media collaborations — including the performance project BARKING (started with Sally Silvers & Tom Cora), staging large-cast theater spectacles— for decades he has been Sally Silvers & Dancers’ main music/text collaborator — composer, sound designer, & improvising live mixer.

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 Bruce Andrews since the early 1980s. Last major piece from late 2022, Pandora’s Cake Stain, sublimely mashes up the radical artist Tina Modotti with Alban Berg’s Lulu — performances archived online at Roulette.org (& a film version likely soon to come).

Praise

A caladatious omnisomantic extravagantorium
Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee

With a choreographer's eye for pattern and pratfall, Silvers' photos show us the local at the end of its rope, anything standing in for everything. Andrews' blocks of word energy invite us to experience the thrill of canny juxtaposition. There's a constant sense of 'Who knew?' leading to 'Now we do.'
Bob Perelman

Thank you two for ruining my breakfast with gut-curdling, unpretty photos, & heart-burning, clotted prose. Knocked out by its daring.
Douglas Dunn

I love this book. If someone put Set and Reset, the dance/photography collaboration of Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg, between covers, it might look something like Sally and Bruce’s collaboration, but Upstage is funnier, livelier, more urban, and way more portable. It demonstrates that poetry resides in how we see and how we listen.
Elizabeth Zimmer

Up-stage, down-stage, in-the-round-and-through-stage, this is a pandemonium for the pandemic. It’s also a paideia—an education system, a fun house, a co-imagined conflictual co-labor-ation. It’s a world. Go there. Carefully.
Dee Morris & Wendy Deutelbaum

Bruce and Sally deliver the flowing cut-up cortex graffiti with enough deadpan winks to have one more for the rowed. Everyone from Krampus poop stompers to hatriotic Batman fans will find something to super judge in this meditation on where public verbiage ends and body surfing through thought gelato begins. It's hilarious and fun and it's all right in front of you, strolling on the boardwalk at sunset.
Drew Gardner & Katie Degentesh

Kudos to Sally and Bruce; A very personal travelogue; a perfect blend what? a textual sublime what does? raw material what does it mean? abc what does it mean to look? consumption what does it mean to look at the world? what what does it mean to look at the world around us? ideology what does it mean to look at the world around us - and record what we see? witness, beauty, and not. a social sublime.
Bill Jacobson & Emily Feinstein

Axiomanic irrigating yuppie! Flummy oxen antiself hipper mothfafuckle pupurati of minimuumuu? Wrunkle my future! Potting syrup! Uranus is wa. Bungalover! Expedian monetizer orgono-speculum yellidae intwail efulger myopus. Whose vagaborgi corgi evangel! Oh moron oh plagiaroo ah choo-chortly meh fish neckoroo! Improviz-a-cow, now! Zonker doe umbral plasma. Fertility godlessness snorkels. Yahoo! Simply the best we have!* *at the present moment
Nada Gordon & Maria Damon

Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrew’s Upstage captures the essence of Asbury Park in sight and sound, seemingly random as a composition, but rack focused on what was, is and will be, dumpster diving through the past, present, and future with razor-sharp attention. 'Suntanning sawtooth amp &…more beautiful than your mirror will admit.' This powerful collaborative book reveals - to paraphrase John Cage - that signs are all around us, if only we had ears to hear them…
Nora Ligarano & Marshall Reese

Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers’ collaboration offers a portrait of the bleak, systematic chaos of pandemic times. It’s like wandering through an outdoor haunted house that is simultaneously scary and hilarious. The photos provide the anatomy while the pulsing text supplies the 'hopnotic' heartbeat. To borrow a phrase from Katerina Kolozova, this book captures 'the syntax of real.'
Elaine Equi & Jerome Sala

Upstage burns the bra in bravura!
Melanie Neilson

In a consummate marriage of the sister arts Silvers and Andrews have produced a psychogeographical tour de force that demonstrates the pleasures gained from a 'one-park stand.'
Steve McCaffery & Karen MacCormack

It was the pandemic and we'd all been waiting for a sign—for the signs—to get us through. Leave it to Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrews to have found them in Asbury Park. Through photos and found signage texts reconfigured, deconstructed, and juxtaposed, they give us the welcoming maze we all need to make our way.
Jeffrey Lependorf

uncanny hearkening harkening wanderers no minors want to be there!
Linda Austin & Jeff Forbes

These two wunderkind have been collaborating on complex projects for god-knows how many years and can still come with comparable results—I raise my glass to them for their latest accomplishment, a book no less—Read and enjoy —
Yvonne Rainer

I have followed the work of Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers for nearly three decades always marveling at their commitment to make it new (yes, Mr. Pound, that’s how it’s done!). Most importantly I have been lucky to have seen them collaborate on stage and also to have commissioned an incredible performance at the Bronx Museum with Hitchcockean music and Merce Cunningham dancers. That is to say that they just can’t seem to do anything wrong. This marvelous book is further proof. For them the entire world is just a big stage.
Sergio Bessa

In the process of being alone together, through a familiar estrangement, photography enters the sign age as the sign ages into photography. —Fifty years after Thirty Things
Matt Hofer & Michael Golston

Sally Silvers’ imagery + Bruce Andrews’ text = The tragic poetry of us. A candid, fully frontal collaboration with reality crashes our senses into a sublime nod. This is it! This is us! I love this book in the same way I love and need the marriage of hard truth with the uncanny.
Annie-B Parson

A haj to a temple of rock’n’roll, a poem blender and a photo of memory, this hybrid book unassumingly imparts geography as text. Nostalgia disrupter? Can opener to the future? Both of course at least. I think synesthetic synthesis, where meanings dance and play your mind’s music, where to read means to immerse.
Bob Holman

A true rarity: when a picture’s thousand words are so worth reading. An endless chain of signifiers float, meet and disperse in this mesmerizing interaction of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. & I.M.A.G.E., revealing Asbury’s unique strangeness to the world.
Zorica Čolić & Michael Schumacher

Asbury Park in Upstage is for lovers and thinkers: action-packed pandemic stylings, the mighty pair Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers in full shine on the Shore.
Sarah Bernstein & Stuart Popejoy