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[DANCE REVIEW] Big Dance Theater at Jacob's Pillow
7.13.07
JACOB’S PILLOW
Big Dance Theater
The Other Here
Doris Duke Studio Theatre
July 12-15, 2007
Review by Seth Rogovoy, editor-in-chief and critic-at-large, Berkshire Living Magazine
(Becket, Mass., July 13, 2007) – Like some bastard offspring of David Mamet and David Lynch, Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here, playing through the weekend in the Doris Duke Studio Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow, defies easy pigeonholing as dance or theater at the same time it utterly entertains and provokes.
One of the funniest performances you’re likely to see at the Pillow—or anywhere—this summer, the avant-garde theater piece blends Okinawan music, dance, and stories, with motivational talk drawn from transcripts of an annual gathering of top insurance salesmen.
While this isn’t a dance performance per se, there is dancing within it, which mostly appears and disappears organically as part of the “plot,” such as it is. But in a greater sense, the entire piece, which takes place on multiple levels and in layers of innovative movable staging, is strictly choreographed as a movement piece, such that even when people are ostensibly walking, talking, or gesturing as actors, they do so with clear, dance-like intention.
The piece features actor Paul Lazar, a co-founder of Big Dance Theater with Annie-B Parson, and who is perhaps best known for his work as a film actor in Silence of the Lambs and The Host. But there’s not a weak link in the six-member cast that seamlessly morphs from insurance salesmen to characters in a mythic Okinawan tale about a servant and a fish.
With brilliant staging, intoxicating music, fun dancing, evocative lighting, audience participation, and dialogue so good it could only be real, Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here is one of the summer’s greatest hits.
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