My choreopoems tend to be more successful because I find them formally liberating. The testimonio—I reference Menchú here—is such a powerful mode, and I think particularly for oppressed folks, the act of “bearing witness” is intensely important and imperative. The choreopoem is a damn effective form for kind of thing. Furthermore, I’m the kind of writer who wishes that he had a talent for music, but writes instead; choreopoems have a kind of musicality and rhythm to them. I’m almost always bobbing my head to a beat as I write them.

LR: How do you negotiate the boundaries between literary and performative modes and traditions when working in a form that requires so much crossing and intersection? What can a choreopoem bring to the stage that a regular play cannot? And conversely, what opportunities are opened to the poet in writing for the stage, but which are not available to poets whose work is bound to the page? What challenges does mixing genres pose for you while you’re writing, and how do you address them?

TR: I tend to find that conventional playwriting is more about action and character than it is about wordplay; I think chorepoems put the words themselves a little more center stage than even the characters, and that appeals to me. It means that the audience has to listen as much as—if not more than—they have to watch. That also means that improvising lines for a choreopoem is not necessarily as appealing as it would be for a “conventional” stage play. As far as the whole page/stage thing . . . a lot of my early academic work was fascinated by that very question. I used to have this very totalizing opinion (shared by a lot of spoken word artists) that all poetry is inherently oral anyway, that every “page” poem is also always a “stage” poem, when rhetorically that’s of course not always the case. Still, I would assert that there’s no such thing as work that’s “bound” to the page—discourse can always materialize. Even the page is a stage itself, yes? But I will say that the act of performing—any kind of performance, including a standard poetry reading—always possesses the potential for conjuring what Victor Turner calls communitas, a kind of ritual sense of community building and togetherness. There’s something socially and politically potent about “live” performance—it’s why the entire field of performance studies exists—that print media does not necessarily achieve. And then, regarding mixing genres . . . perhaps it’s because I never received super-formal training, I don’t really approach my work as “okay, I’m going to mix poetry and drama together now.” It comes out hybrid because that’s how I honestly feel like writing. Staying “in genre” is harder for me, and that is something I have to exert a lot of intentionality doing.