“Let’s Not Get Used to This Place” is a publication on the work of choreographer Meg Stuart and her network of collaborators. The book compiles a wide variety of texts—essays, reflections, interviews, poems, performance texts, scores and exercises—from people who have worked with her, and includes a significant amount of image material accumulated over the past 15 years. These images are primarily documentation of performances taking place in different venues and settings, often photographed by different photographers. One of the main questions in designing the book became how to best represent Meg’s work through this material.
The starting point for the design comes from the difficulty in trying to represent dance and performance-based work when it’s translated into the format of a book. Together with the artist and editors, we decided to avoid the use of traditional image reproductions, and instead use the material conditions of offset printing to propose an alternative representation of her work, specific to it being reproduced for a book.
The primary gesture of the book is the printing of full-bleed, full-colour images on black paper for the first 256 pages, in reference to the majority of Meg’s work being performed in a black box theatre setting. To achieve this technically, the printers worked with us in making image separations where instead of printing the images as CMYK, they are printed CMY, and the black (K) channel is the paper itself. Because metallic ink is more opaque and doesn’t absorb into paper like standard offset ink does, a layer of silver ink was printed first as a base for the CMY ink to print over.
The text layout is straightforward, and primarily uses one typeface set in one type size and weight. Due to the quantity of images needed to be included, text and image run parallel, with the text overlapping the images for the majority of the book, only moving out of the way when space is needed to be made for a performer on the page.
