This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Renowned Big Dance Theater will fuse Eastern and Western elements in their new work, The Other Here, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Jan. 26-27 in the Williams Center for the Arts.
Tickets are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $18 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009. The final performance in the Footlights Series is Men-Jaro on Tuesday, March 20, $18.
Big Dance Theater will also be holding a number of educational programs. Annie-B Parson, one of the company’s directors, will present a public lecture on the creation of The Other Here noon Wednesday, Jan. 24 in the Williams Center. The performance ensemble and its technical designers will put on a public workshop 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 27 with an emphasis on interdisciplinary performance methods.
Parson will also host three workshops Jan. 24 for Lafayette students. There will be a presentation for the Modern Japanese History course taught by Paul Barclay, associate professor of history, 1 p.m. in Ramer History House; a workshop in Japanese song for the College Choir by Parson and music director Chris Giamo at 4:15 p.m. in Williams Center room 123; and a movement workshop in Japanese dance at 5:30 p.m. in the Kirby Sports Center dance studio.
With its new work, The Other Here, Big Dance Theater, called “deeply brilliant” by the New York Times, will re-imagine a classic scenario for our own uneasy times: a group of revelers drinking, eating and carousing, while a deadly “plague” rages outside. Specially commissioned by The Japan Society, with a premiere planned for February 2007, the piece will fuse and collide Western and Eastern elements—most centrally, the masterful short stories of the Japanese writer, Masuji Ibuse, plus re-inventions of ancient Okinawan dance, singing and dancing to Okinawan pop music, featuring the music of Shoukichi Kina – layered with several Western source materials.
The company recently discovered a cache of material in an unlikely, but provocative place – speeches from “The Million Dollar Round Table,” the global gathering of top life insurance salespeople. Their baroque extroversion and business drive – “fact-find, follow-through, quick start, you got a client, let’s go!” – make them the perfect boisterous foil to Ibuse’s introspection.
They also mesh with the subject matter in that they have a strange, off-kilter relationship to death and disaster, “disturbing their clients to action” by showing them that the final disaster is always death. Alexander Pushkin’s operatic short play, The Feast during the Plague provides a structural metaphor. This exhilarating combination of elements will be used to create a deeply felt, yet unsentimental look at how people react to and synthesize disaster, both large- and small-scale. Approached with Big Dance Theater’s signature wit and invention, The Other Here promises to be a beautiful and dizzying evening of theater.
The visual centerpiece of the production will be a huge dining table, made in part from Plexiglas, upon which all of the action, including dances and video footage, will take place.
As the revelers sing, dance and tell stories around this table/dance floor/stage/video screen, their impassioned linguistic and musical excesses will act as a frame and counterpoint for the Ibuse narratives. The Ibuse stories under consideration are Life at Mr. Tange’s,a servant-master tale of comic hierarchies, and The Carp, a restrained tale of loss. Masterpieces of subtle, emotional accumulation, filled with unexpected juxtapositions, these tales become a sounding board through which the revelers comprehend their own predicaments.
Non-linear and multi-layered, The Other Here will grow out of the artistic dialogue between cultures (Japanese/American) and among cultures (traditional/contemporary, theater/dance) to cast an unblinking look at the way horror, humor, destruction, and beauty co-exist in a complicated world.
Co-directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and choreographed by Parson, The Other Here will feature lighting by Jennifer Tipton, video by Peter Flaherty, with a comprehensive sound- and music-scape by longtime collaborator Jane Shaw, and costumes by Claudia Stephens. Veteran Big Dance company members Molly Hickok, and Lazar will be at the center of the six-performer ensemble.
Big Dance Theater, founded in 1991, creates original dance/theater works that mix and re-mix dance, music, literary, and found text, while offering a rich visual experience via beautifully crafted costumes, sets, lights, and props. The company has broken down proscribed genres with works that offer a surprising blend of elements from theater, dance, music, and the visual arts.
Led by Parson and Lazar, the company has created 14 original works for the stage. Though the artistic directors often find their initial inspiration in short stories and novellas, the company overthrows the usual literary interpretations for an aesthetic based on multiple disciplines and perspectives. With Big Dance Theater, plot takes a back seat to knowing the world through motion, picture, and form, and traditional tales by such authors as Twain, Tanazaki, and Sophocles become both metaphor and frame for the dilemmas of the contemporary, globalized present.
For each piece, the directors, performers, and designers collaborate over the course of the entire development period to produce every component of the production––the set, music, choreography, staging, costumes, and props. Objects are allowed their own expressive values in space, driving the narrative and forging the imagery, while repetition and precisely choreographed movement celebrate theatrical artifice. The result is works with their own inner logic, where abstraction becomes a pathway to emotional authenticity, and imagery provokes surprising meaning.
In 2002, Parson and Lazar were awarded a Bessie for Sustained Achievement. In 2000, the company was awarded an Obie Award for its “passionate practice” of the dance/theater form.
“When it comes to layering and inter-cutting disparate texts and images, no one can match Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater. The mysterious resonance that emanates from their works transcends their sources,” says the Village Voice.
Big Dance Theater’s work has been presented at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop for seven seasons. The work has also been seen at the American Dance Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Seattle’s On the Boards; UCLA Performing Arts; the Spoleto Festival, Charleston, S.C.; Washington Performing Arts Society/ Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center; Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival; Guggenheim Works and Process Series; Lincoln Center Out of Doors; and The Kitchen, New York. Internationally, Big Dance has toured to Kampnagel in Hamburg and the Theater Im Pumpenhaus in Muenster, Germany; the GIFT Festival in Tbilisi; EXIT and VIA 98 Festivals in France; the STUK Theater, Leuven; the Nieuwpoort Theater in Belgium; the Polverigi International Festival of Theater in Italy; and the Rotterdamse Schouwburg in the Netherlands.
This tour of Big Dance Theater is made possible by a grant from Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program. The performance residency by Big Dance Theater is also supported by a grant from the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation.
The 2006-2007 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, James Bradley Fund, and Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour; the F.M. Kirby Foundation, Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts.