MANCC Welcomes Big Dance Theater, Hatchery Project Artist
Alan Smithee Directed This Play
Big Dance Theater
Big Dance Theater (NY) Hatchery Project Artist | September 16th – 22nd, 2013
Big Dance Theater will be in residence to develop Alan Smithee Directed This Play, which treats iconic film scripts from the 1960-80s as found texts and uses them as a choreographic source. “Alan Smithee” is the pseudonym used by members of the Directors Guild when a director, dissatisfied with the final product, leaves a film for lack of creative control, effectively erasing his participation in the project.
With this new dance/theater work, Director/Choreographer Annie B Parson and Director Paul Lazar liberate film scripts from their narrative moorings to reveal a stunning series of pure film tropes, which meld pathos and politics from iconic films of the American70’s and Cold War Russia. On a stage littered with fur coats, lawn chairs, and telephones, decades merge; renegades draw guns on their adversaries; astronauts self- congratulate, revolutionaries pontificate; tragic lovers bid farewell under the threat of nuclear war; and American suburbanites grapple with abortion, debt and divorce. Using a flurry of mind-bending dance and theater fragments, Big Dance seeks to create an irrational – and highly entertaining – Dada landscape where 1918 Moscow mingles with 1970s America in ways that evoke our own 21st century moment.
While at MANCC, Big Dance will mine film/utilize scripts primarily for stylistic tropes, acting styles, movement and emotionality, rather than narrative. Alongside movement generation, Parson and Lazar will be focused on developing and integrating the sound components of the work.
” > Big Dance Theater – Annie b and Paul
Public Entrypoint
Lecture/Demonstration
FSU School of Dance
Montgomery Hall
Nancy Smith Fichter Dance Theatre
Sept 18, 10:30 am
Annie-B Parson will discuss the history and theory of post-modern dance through the prism of science, nature, and commerce. Through parsing out the elements in abstract work, she presents the tools used in art-making as applicable to concepts in other fields. Parson focuses on creative thinking for those who consider themselves non-artists but are looking to gain new perspectives on their own work and expand their creative capacities.
To reserve a seat for this event or for additional information please visit the Big Dance Theater profile.
Founded in 1991, Big Dance Theater is known for its inspired use of dance, music, text and visual design. The company often works with wildly incongruent source material, weaving and braiding disparate strands into multi-dimensional performance. Led by Co-Artistic Directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Big Dance has delved into the literary work of such authors as Twain, Tanizaki, Wellman, Euripides and Flaubert, and use dance as both frame and metaphor to theatricalize these writings.
For over 20 years, Big Dance Theater has worked to create over 15 dance/theater works, generating each piece over months of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving group of actors, dancers, composers and designers. Big Dance Theater received New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2002 and 2010; the company was awarded an OBIE in 2000 and BDT company members have received 5 other “Bessie” Awards and an OBIE award for their work with Big Dance. In 2007 the company received the first-ever Creativity Award from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
Please visit the Big Dance Theatre profile or email info@mancc.org for additional information about Big Dance Theatre’s residency.
The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), at the FSU School of Dance, is a choreographic research and development center whose mission is to raise the value of the creative process in dance.