Authors: Ruthie Knox and Mary Ann Rivers
First Readers: Kelly Lauer, Julie Darby, Marian Whitaker, Barbara Homrighaus, Rachel Hollis
Copyeditor: Kelly Lauer
Cover Photography: Jishnu Guha Digital Designs
Cover Models: Santiago Quintana and Melina Montesino
Photography Art Direction: Marian Whitaker
Cover Design: Book Beautiful
Proofreader: Beaumont Hardy Editing
Interior Art: Book Beautiful
Interior Design: Williams Writing, Editing & Design
Contact improvisational dance is integrated into many arts, dance, and theater programs all over the world. The Dark Space is fiction, and as such takes elements from this kind of contemporary dance, as well as from acting study theory, and dramatizes the class Winnie and Cal found themselves in. As the authors, we are aware that Cal and Winnie’s experience will feel familiar to those who study drama and movement arts, and very unfamiliar, as well, to many who have not, and we want to encourage readers who are interested in the ideas presented about contact improvisational dance, or other acting theories discussed, to read about them, go to performances, and take classes.
When our intern, Marian Whitaker, read the manuscript, she was on the verge of graduation from a college very similar to Cal and Winnie’s. She found herself struggling, so much, with the book’s inevitable march to graduation, because she felt as conflicted as Winnie and Cal about the ends of things, the beginnings of others. She confessed that she held her breath the whole time she read about the period after Cal and Winnie’s spring break, worried about how these characters would end and would begin, wondering how she would. She read their graduation scene weeping until she reached a kind of catharsis. Talked to us about loss and everything after.
Marian is who we wrote this for — the Marian both of us had been during this time when late night conversations anticipated magic, and everyone seemed beautiful, and it was so easy to be lonely even while we were more intimate with others than we had ever been. Writing this, we realized we were the girls we had always been, that we had always been there, and that we were always capable of what we believed we were on the cusp of college graduation. Always. We were enough. The world needed us. Just as this book needed all these people.
Just as the world needs you.