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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Jennie Marytai Liu, Haven Burton, and Molly Hickok in The Other Here, 2007. Photo: Paula Court. All photos courtesy of the photographers and Annie-B Parson.
I first met Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar in the late 1980s at BACA Downtown, a now-defunct Brooklyn arts center. They were performing and directing as part of Irondale theater, and I was performing a monologue, and what they were doing seemed like what I was doing except there were other people in their piece. In 1991, when they broke off from Irondale and founded Big Dance Theater, I was lucky enough to be one of the players in their first show, The Gag, which we performed at Dance Theater Workshop. Before the actual show there were rehearsals, and during those rehearsals, which went on for almost a year, I got a taste of how they worked: slowly, and improvisationally, with layer upon layer of meaning folded into the piece as we added, subtracted, and played with the constantly evolving material. Unfortunately I’m not a dancer, and so that first time was also the last time I performed with them. They went on to create a number of dance/theater pieces, including A Simple Heart (1999), Another Telepathic Thing (2000), Shunkin (2001), and Plan B (2004). Along the way they worked with singers (Cynthia Hopkins) and writers (Mac Wellman and Len Jenkin), creating a body of work that is intellectually challenging and emotionally engaging. Often a story, and more often a number of thematically related stories, is acted out on stage, and the dancing serves as both a diversion and a link, creating a unified experience from the many disparate elements.
For over 15 years Big Dance Theater has successfully straddled the line between the theater world and the dance world. Parson won a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, and Lazar has been in numerous movies (Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs and Married to the Mob, as well as Bong Joon-Ho’s recent film The Host). Their newest work, The Other Here, originally commissioned by The Japan Society in New York City, is being performed at Dance Theater Workshop this September. Based on short stories (including “The Carp”) by the Japanese novelist Masuji Ibuse (1898–1993) and on transcripts of life-insurance sales seminars, it features performances by some of Parson and Lazar’s students at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing, and by Molly Hickok, their longtime collaborator.
The first part of the interview was conducted via email with both Parson and Lazar, but we began to think that it might be easier to meet and just talk. A few weeks later I met with Annie-B at her house in Brooklyn. Occasionally the phone would ring and once her son, who was practicing bass guitar downstairs, came into the room. Because we were having some problems with the digital recorder, most of what we said was lost. In fact, all of it was lost until we got the machine to work.
