Big Dance Theater 17C

Thursday and Friday, December 13– 14, 2018, 8pm Saturday, December 15, 2018, 2pm and 8pm Sunday, December 16, 2018, 3pm Zellerbach Playhouse Big Dance Theater 17c Conceived and directed by Annie-B Parson Co-directed by Paul Lazar Choreographed by Annie-B Parson and the company Tei Blow, sound design Joanne Howard, set design Oana Botez, costume design Joe Levasseur, lighting design Jeﬀ Larson, video design Performed by Elizabeth DeMent, Cynthia Hopkins, Paul Lazar, Mikéah Jennings, and Kourtney Rutherford Produced by Aaron Mattocks Aaron Amodt, production manager Ilana Khanin, production stage manager David Bova, “Elizabeth” wig design and construction Eben Hoﬀer, associate sound design Andreea Mincic, associate set design Andrew Lulling, sound engineer Jorge Morales Picó, video assistant/operator Joseph Silovsky and Infinite Studios, set construction Talla Dia/Talla Design, Karen Boyer, costume construction Written and freely adapted by Annie-B Parson from source texts by Samuel Pepys, Margaret Cavendish, Euripides, Eugène Ionesco, Claire Tomalin, e Nerd Next Door/Leesa Ricci, Jill Johnston, and annotator comments on www.pepysdiary.com. 17c will be performed without an intermission and will last approximately 70 minutes. Cal Performances’ 2018 –19 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. ABOUT THE ARTISTS 17c is the newest Big Dance eater ensemble each piece over months of collaboration with its work, built around the problematic 17th-cen - associate artists, a longstanding, ever-evolving tury diaries of Samuel Pepys. Pepys danced, group of actors, dancers, composers, and de - sang, strummed, shopped, strove, bullied, and signers. groped—and he recorded all of it in his diary, Big Dance eater received New York Dance completely unfiltered. From his bunions, to his and Performance Bessie Awards in 2002 and infidelities, to his perversions, to his meetings 2010; the company was awarded an OBIE in with the King, he needed to get his daily life 2000 and BDT company members have re - down on paper, or he felt lost. While Pepys has a ceived five other Bessie Awards and an OBIE shockingly contemporary self-awareness, he is award for their work with Big Dance. In 2007 emboldened by—and oblivious to—his unac - the company received the first-ever Jacob’s knowledged bias against women and aggression Pillow Dance Award. Big Dance eater has toward them, and writes openly about it. He is been presented around the world, including in complicated, and this makes him valuable to France, Italy, Belgium, United Kingdom, e observe, interrogate, and challenge through the Netherlands, Brazil, and Germany, and in lens of a contemporary feminist discourse. A the USA in venues including the Brooklyn startling precursor to our own social media cul - Academy of Music, Dance eater Workshop, ture, Pepys possessed a similar compulsion to e Kitchen, City Center, e Performing assign an almost constant real-time meaning to Garage, New York Live Arts, e Chocolate his daily existence, to examine himself, and ob - Factory, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, sessively report it. Under the Radar, American Realness, PS122’s Using all the data we can find—the copiously COIL Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, prolific diaries themselves, Margaret Caven - the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), dish’s 17th-century radical feminist play e Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena, On the Convent of Pleasure , three centuries of margin - Boards, UCLA Live, ICA Boston, American alia, and the ongoing annotations of the web- Dance Institute (ADI), Fusebox Festival/Austin, based devotees at www.pepysdiary.com— 17c CounterCurrent Festival/Houston, and Spoleto dismantles an unchallenged historical figure Festival USA. Additionally, in 2013 –14, the and embodies the women’s voices omitted from artistic directors and design team were invited Pepys’ intimate portrait of his life. Big Dance to create a commission featuring Mikhail eater continues its formal fascination with Barysh nikov; under the Big Dance eater cre - building systems of dance that challenge the - ative umbrella in partnership with Baryshnikov ater, while allowing the structure of the work Productions, Man in a Case toured nationally itself to bring contemporary meaning to the to Hartford Stage, Shakespeare eater in making and un-making of our subjective past. Washington (DC), Berkeley Repertory eater, the Broad Stage in Los Angeles, Arts Emer son/ Founded in 1991, Big Dance eater is known Boston, and the MCA/Chicago. Other recent for its inspired use of dance, music, text, and commissions have come from Dance Umbrella visual design. e company oen works with Festival/e Old Vic in London, Les Subsis - wildly incongruent source material, weaving tances in Lyon, Chaillot eatre National in and braiding disparate strands into multi- Paris, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art dimensional performance. Led by artistic di - Center, Carolina Performing Arts, and the Old rector Annie-B Parson, Big Dance has delved Vic/London. into the literary work of such authors as Twain, Recent Awards: 2015 Olivier Award nomi - Tanizaki, Wellman, Euripides, and Flaubert, nee (London) for Annie-B Parson ( Here Lies and dance is used as both frame and metaphor Love ); 2014 Prelude Festival’s FRANKY Award: to theatricalize these writings. For more than 25 Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar; 2014 Doris years, Big Dance eater has worked to create Duke Performing Artist Award: Annie-B Par - more than 20 dance/theater works, generating son; 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Opposite: 17c . Photo by Scott Shaw. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Grants to Artists Award: Annie-B Parson; 2013 about David Byrne, among others. Her work for New York Foundation for the Arts Artist theater, opera, and film includes plays by Lucas Fellowship: Annie-B Parson; 2012 United States Hnath, Sarah Ruhl, and Suzann Lori Parks, Artists Fellowship : Annie-B Parson; 2010 New as well as the Meryl Streep/Jonathan Demme York Dance and Performance Bessie Award movie Ricki and the Flash and Nico Muhly’s for Outstanding Production: Comme Toujours opera Dark Sister . She has also choreographed Here I Stand. for orchestras and bands, including a full-length work for the ETHEL string quartet. Annie-B Parson co-founded Big Dance eater Her awards include the Doris Duke Per - in 1991. She has choreographed and co-created forming Artist Award (2014), an Olivier Award more than 20 works for the company, ranging nomination in choreography (2015), a Founda- from pure dance pieces, to adaptations of found tion for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists text, plays, and literature, to original works Award (2014), a USA Artists Grant in theater combining wildly disparate materials. Her work (2012), a Guggenheim Fellowship in chor e - with Big Dance has been commissioned by ogra ph y (2007), two Bessie Awards (2010, organizations including the Brooklyn Academy 2002), and a “Frankie” Award (2016). Parson of Music, National eater of Paris/Chaillot, was honored by PS122 in 2016; has been nom - Japan Society, Walker Art Center, Les Subsis - inated for the CalArts/Alpert Award seven tances in Lyon, and many others. times; and has received three Lucille Lortel Outside of Big Dance, Parson has created Award nominations (2014, 2012, 2011). She choreography for opera, pop stars, television, was a YCC choreographer at the American movies, theater, ballet, symphony orchestras, Dance Festival, and she is currently a Fellow at advertising, objects, museums, augmented re - the Center for Ballet Arts. ality, and 1,000 amateur singers. Most recently, Since 1993 Parson has been an instructor of Parson directed and choreographed David choreography at New York University’s Experi - Byrne’s new American Utopia tour; and earlier mental eater Wing. She was featured in this year, a dance for Sadler’s Wells/Co. of Elders BOMB magazine, and has contributed articles in London. Other work includes David Byrne’s to Ballet Review and Movement Research musical Here Lies Love at both the Public Journal , a drawing to e Brooklyn Rail , and a eater and the National eater in London; piece for Dance USA on the state of dance/the - Byrne’s 2012 world tour with St. Vincent and a ater in the United States. Parson has also given marching band; and Byrne’s and Brian Eno’s a talk on the synthesis of poetics and the film 2008 world tour. Parson also created the stag - script Terms of Endearment at the Poetry Cen - ing/choreography for St. Vincent’s 2017 and ter. As an artist curator, she has curated shows 2014 world tours, as well as St. Vincent’s collab - including Merce Cunningham’s memorial We oration with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Give Ourselves Away at Every Moment, Dancer e Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon , and e Crush at NYLA, and Sourcing Stravinsky at Late Show with Stephen Colbert . Parson cur - DTW. Parson tours a lecture on abstraction rently has two large-scale works in repertory in called e Virtuosity of Structure, and her book the Martha Graham Dance Company, and she Dance by Letter is published by 53rd State Press. created a solo for Wendy Whelan commis - She is at work on drawing a dance autobiogra - sioned by the Royal Ballet. Parson choreo - phy in charts. graphed 1,000 singers for a work by David Lang at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Paul Lazar (performer ) is a founding member She choreographed the world premiere of of Big Dance eater. He has co-directed and David Bowie/Ivo Van Hove’s Lazarus at New acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, in - York eatre Workshop, which opened in cluding commissions from the Brooklyn Aca - London in 2016 at the King’s Cross eatre . Her demy of Music, the Walker Art Center, Dance dances are featured in the film Ride, Roar, Rise eater Workshop, Classic Stage Company, and PLAYBILL ABOUT THE ARTISTS the Japan Society. Outside of Big Dance, Lazar will settle for a humid summer in New York.

Load more