Collaborations stack up--or not--at Skirball

Stacks--presented in a packed, one-night-only affair at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts--felt to me like a tug of war between Anne Carson's poetry on one side and the rearrangeable sculpture of Peter Cole and rearrangeable dancers of Jonah Bokaer on the other. I found myself mightily tugged in the direction of the visuals. I figure I can always go back and read Carson's lines in peace. And, in quiet, I'd like to watch the re-piling and tossing and kicking away of Cole's clutter of cardboard boxes and the clean-air look of Bokaer's movement, the silky, resilient way handsome bodies make plain the space around them as well as within them. I had a similar but less regretful reaction to Bracko--the juxtaposition of a Rashaun Mitchell duet with Carson's translation of Sappho. These artistic encounters did not work for me, which is not to say they could not be someone else's perfect arrangement.