The French Line

Abstract

PAJ 95 (2010), pp. 51–54.  51 Since 1991, when Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar founded their Big Dance Theater, the couple (she specializing more in choreography, he more in acting) has been evolving a distinctive performing style that is as entertaining, amusing, and accessible as it is disciplined. Often experimental theatre can be punitive and solemn, forcing the audience, in the name of some avant-garde ideal of austere difficulty, to “eat its spinach,” so to speak, by attending to languid permutations and repetitions. Big Dance Theater takes the opposite approach, keeping up a rapid pace of quick-changing, ebullient theatrical bits that alternate outbreaks of dance, singing, mixed media screens, wry dialogues, and melancholy soliloquies. Often the “glue” holding it together is an interpretation of some foreign culture— in their last three productions, they have moved from Japan (The Other Here), to ancient Greece (Orestes), and now to France—which may have as much to do with following funding sources as aesthetic interests. The company’s latest production, Comme Toujours Here I Stand, was commissioned by FIAF (the French Institute Alliance Francaise) and premiered at Les Subsistances in Lyons, before playing to sold-out houses at the Kitchen.