“Language has to be performed,” says Stanley. “Performance is the only way that we know it.”

Before different audio/visual narratives are danced into physicality during his forthcoming piece, Stanley emphasizes his interest in choreography—the Greek root “chorea” referring to movement and “graphia” referring to the writing of movement. In his analysis of the term, choreography is a technology of bodily movement that interfaces with bio politics, wherein bodies can be controlled in certain ways, and one of those ways might be writing.

Can writing be performed on its page? Gertrude Stein positively answered this question, and Stanley agrees that the dark shapes on a sterile page can render the mechanics of writing as a visible, performative act of reading.

“Gertrude Stein is someone who really does that. She makes you aware that you are reading writing. You’re not reading something that’s been written,” says Stanley. “You’re reading the act of writing itself.”

With his interest in modern and experimental language poets, like Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein, Stanley applies his and their knowledge to how we develop inscriptions of ourselves in writing. When we inscribe ourselves into a piece, we come to realize how little of it is actually ourselves. This reverts back to the relationship between the habits, attachments, phrases, and colloquialisms we collect as we grow up, the objects and places of our lives milking the meaning out of us and onto things outside of us, and eventually into our relationships with others and with writing.

It all reads romantic, and Stanley’s upcoming performances seem to burden a certain nostalgia, inviting affectionate discovery. In one of his sound pieces, “What We Talk About When We Think About Love,” Stanley combines a droning sound composition with spoken word: “Once under my skin, I peel the flesh back/Standing against the window/We imagine we are framed as in a movie/We imagine we are framed as in a cry.” The words contort inside of us, escape in a tear, maybe in the shape of a heart or the memory of a long embrace.

However, Stanley seems more than a romantic. He’s more of an optimist of romance and, later, a realist about relationships. He has friends who say things like “I don’t know what love is. I’ve never been in love.” It’s not the case for him. He walks down the street, and his heart flings itself into others.

“I see a beautiful person and think ‘I love you’ and ‘come home with me.’ My work has a propensity towards romance,” says Stanley. “On the other hand, I feel like I constantly need to be in bad, unfulfilling relationships so I have something to write about.”

Likewise, one of Stanley’s future aspirations opposes the permanency of a relationship to his own writing. Besides applying to Northwestern’s Performance Studies PhD program, he would like to write a number of pieces, over the course of maybe five years, deliver them once and then burn them. He also wants to write poems on a bunch of loincloths and have people stand around in them, so readers have to read someone’s crotch in order to read the poetry.

Treading between sound, performance, and writing, the effects of Stanley’s work reveal a great deal about the way he and the receptors of his work can experience the “erotics” of art. Rather than a poetics of work, he says, there can also be an erotics of work.

“An erotics of your practice could detail how your work changes, how people relate to each other,” says Stanley. “My idea of art is maybe both a poetics, a way of knowing, and an erotics, a way of practicing or a way of that knowing being put into action.”

In other words, this action into movement — our basic human right.