Dancing on the Edge is the first monograph dedicated to Clara Gibson Maxwell’s work. Written by art historian and researcher Larisa Oancea, the book combines a history of Maxwell’s life in dance (including her long-term collaboration with jazz musician and classical composer Ornette Coleman, bringing his “Harmolodic” music theory to choreographic creation) with an Aby Warburgian-inspired set of plates juxtaposing images from Clara’s own projects with kindred illustrations from Western and non-Western art. A carefully crafted, transdisciplinary work that also functions as an opera aperta, the monograph, like Maxwell herself, both blends and interrogates dance, philosophy, literature, avant-garde film, experimental music, the visual arts, and architecture, politics, and ecology as well as somatic practices (Pilates, the Alexander Technique, etc.).
