Man in a Case (2013)
Surveillance cameras, instructional videos, and the verbatim text of turkey hunters coalesce with Chekhov in Big Dance Theater’s Man in a Case. In two short stories (“Man in a Case” and “About Love”) the audience follows two of Anton Chekhov’s protagonists, embodied here by world renowned performer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, in collaboration with Big Dance veteran performers and designers. Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar bring their signature style of theater, dance, music, and video to the world premiere adaptation of these two anti-love stories.
Short Form (2015)
Inspired by disciplines of the concise — novellas, folk tales, diary entries, pencil drawings, thumbnail sketches and the single page of a notebook — Big Dance performs five distinct short works, each a New York premiere, that embrace the brief, granular, close range, anecdotal and microscopic. Downsizing is prized.
Solos, duets and group work feature the beloved, veteran Big Dance performers who, under the artistic leadership of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, have honed a distinctive performance style that has influenced the downtown scene in NYC for the last 25 years.
This Page Left Intentionally Blank (2016)
THIS PAGE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK will deconstruct the role of the docent and museum audio tour via an encounter with theater and dance, subverting and reconsidering how we experience art in the museum context. Through a performative examination of how we see and talk about art, and what we bring to the art that we see, the piece strives to disrupt, awaken, dismantle, confuse and thus revivify the viewer’s perception of art, animating their imagination around viewing. The project will extend the life of one selected artwork into a physical, imaginative, kinetic, theatrical and intellectual space through the use of misdirection, alienation, confession, obfuscation, and dance, theater, sound and costumes.
Alan Smithee Directed This Play: Triple Feature (2014)
Big Dance Theater directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar sample fragments of iconic film scripts and novels, divorced from their narrative contexts, to create a kinetic collage of political rhetoric, pathos, paranoia, and suburbia.
Lawn chairs, telephones, fur coats, and pistols mingle on a stage with Astronauts, Bolsheviks, and American nuclear families as revolutionary Moscow collides with late-20th-century Houston.
Alan Smithee Directed This Play: Triple Feature contemplates the slippery nature of creative control, history, its fictions, and the inextricable link between the personal and the historical.
17c (2017)
17c is built around the problematic 17th-century diaries of Samuel Pepys. Pepys danced, sang, strummed, shopped, strove, bullied, and groped — and he recorded all of it in his diary, completely unfiltered. From his bunions to his infidelities, to his perversions, to his meetings with the King, he needed to get his daily life down on paper, or he felt lost. A startling precursor to our own social media culture, Pepys possessed a similar compulsion to assign an almost constant real-time meaning to his daily existence, to examine himself, and obsessively report it.
