Once upon a time in a library, an extraordinary work is encountered -- like the arrow-indicated links to red and green sections in a Boulez score that Caydance had unpacked in the music library at Berkeley, like Six Dances by Nancy Karp, the director of Nany Karp + Dancers, that Caydance had held in her hands one morning in the Flaxman Library. When she opened the Six Dances box, six miniature accordion-fold books were revealed, each a visual symbol-laden score of a pattern dance that the company performed: First Light, Dot Bunch, Relay Relay, Running Dance. River Canon, Reminiscence.
In her notebook she had copied the documentation:
"Each of the six books in this portfolio measures 6 x 6 cm. Each booklet is accordion-folded and tied with a ribbon. These six leporellos are visualizations of the dances..."
Other than the spare beauty of these concertina-folded leporellos, what she wanted to say to her class was that this was an example of inside a box, outside the box thinking -- of creating an artists book that had meaning that reached far beyond the spare markings that coded the geometric patterns of each dance.