Parson founded Big Dance Theater in 1991 with Molly Hickok and
Paul Lazar. She has since choreographed and co-created dozens of works for the company, ranging from pure dance pieces to adaptations of plays and literature, to original works combining wildly disparate materials. Her work with Big Dance has been commissioned by the
Brooklyn Academy of Music,
The National Theater of Paris, The Japan Society, and
The Walker Art Center. Parson describes Big Dance as "a group of people who are interested in pushing dance into the theatrical realm and pushing theater into the dance realm."To her, Big Dance has a "total greediness for all the pleasures of theater and dance" Critic Helen Shaw wrote of Big Dance as a "fluid gang of performers and designers clustered around the married co-directors, choreographer-director Annie-B Parson and actor-director
Paul Lazar. The company is – as it says on the bottle – a hybrid group, ignoring customary divides between dance and theatre." The company began as a loose but dedicated and generative alliance, made up largely of women including Stacy Dawson, Molly Hickok, Tymberly Canale, Cynthia Hopkins,
Rebecca Wisocky, and Kourtney Rutherford. This group ebbed and flowed with others joining in over the years. The work of Big Dance is almost always non-linear, and frequently disinclined to have a narrative ("I don't think life is very narrative," Parson says. "Mine isn't. And the narrative elements that have happened in my life, as I look back on them, become more fictionalized.")
Works with Big Dance Theater Sacrifice (1991) Sacrifice was the first of Parson's large scale works and her first work at
Dance Theater Workshop, curated by David White, who would champion Parson's work for decades. Set in something like a beauty parlor, this piece incorporated some text from
Harold Pinter and was accompanied by a score of repetitive gestures executed by five pairs of men and women.
The Gag (1993) The Gag premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in 1993. This large-scale work was based on the myth of the
Cassandra figure in Greek mythology and the piece incorporated the text of radical feminist writer
Andrea Dworkin. Molly Hickok played the central role, starting a decades-long collaboration between her and Parson. The piece was also inspired by the writings
Christa Wolff with text by
Aeschylus,
Pinter and
Marguerite Yourcenar. It featured original music by
Walter Tompson, performed live. Four monitors on the floor included footage of small scampering animal babies.
The New York Times described The Gag as “a bouillabaisse of a theater-dance piece...There's a little Greek tragedy, a bit of Harold Pinter, a dab of
Tennessee Williams and a large dose of fashion and comic high jinks.”
Bremen Freedom (1993) Presented by the Cucaracha Theater, and originally made for NYU Students,
Bremen Freedom, by the west-German playwright
Rainer Fassbinder, told the story of Geesche, a woman so sick of being controlled by the men in her life that she methodically poisoned them, and ultimately herself.
The Village Voice wrote that the production included “a little cabaret shtick, some cross-dressing, a few dollops of disjunction, plenty of stylized tableau-making, a pinch of Catholic imagery, several actresses playing the same role, a bit of lovely/creepy choral singing, and heaps of that unmotivated goofy dancing that made
Brace Up such a hoot.” Although the reviews referenced some of the performative similarities to Cabaret, (Stacy Dawson as the Master of Ceremonies recalled
Joel Grey), the
Village Voice insisted that “these kids come on like innovators, not imitators, and they know how to deliver a spectacle piping hot.” A reviewer for the Toronto Arts Journal CallTime wrote that Parson was the “most refreshing voice among a new generation of choreographers,” and that her blend of dance and theater had “created a movement language which is accessible to any audience member regardless of age, race, gender, or previous knowledge of dance” The piece also played at the
Dance Theater Workshop in NYC (1995),
Fall for Dance Festival in NYC (2004), and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hula Girl (1995) Don Juan Comes Back from the War (1996) Don Juan Comes Back from the War premiered at
Classic Stage Company NYC in 1996. It was a joint production by the Classic Stage Company and the Cucaracha Theater, with Lazar and Parson as co-directors and her choreographing.
The New York Times lauded their direction, writing that they had constructed a “witty and elegant interpretation” of
Odon von Horvath's bittersweet play. The play follows Don Juan as he returns home from the
first World War in search of his fiancé, who, unbeknownst to him, has died. Her ghost follows him throughout the play. Horvath, a Hungarian playwright who wrote in Germany until he fled the Nazis, set his play in the immediate aftermath of World War One, but the play is full of “philosophical jibes” at his enemies. The piece employed minimal use of language, instead relying on “spare yet rich vignettes” to tell this simple story with a dry tenderness, intended to match the tonality of the Flaubert.
The Village Voice wrote that Parson and Lazar had created a “cold, compelling world of emotional disintegration.” In describing the play,
Time Out New York gave up on theatrical labels and instead turned to psychological terminology, writing that “the work is schizophrenic, manic, occasionally melancholic and, more often, hysteric.” Watching it was “both an alienating and enchanting experience.” It was performed by Tymberly Canale, Stacy Dawson, Molly Hickok, Cynthia Hopkins, Paul Lazar, and David Neumann, and featured original music by Cynthia Hopkins. “At once cynical and spiritual, the work centers on a charismatic stranger whose visit shatters the peace of a mythic hamlet. The medieval setting is echoed by a contemporary Hollywood reality, with a script that braids Twain's sublime writing with ‘found’ text from years of auditions. It culminates in a subtle and startling exploration of the fragility of our human condition.” The show was also extremely well received in Germany. Reviewer Susanne Lang described the stage as “a snow-globe that can be shaken to see the world, at least for a moment, through the dreamlike flurry of artificial snowflakes…everything is moving, everything is carried by the music.” The Münstersche Zeitung lauded the piece as a “highly successful mix of dance- and spoken-theater…acoustic spaces are created through speech and song, which seamlessly create a superstructure for the dance. By bringing this piece, Pumpenhaus has not only brought a premier to Münster, it has brought an exceptional piece of dance theater.” Jonathan Demme filmed a live performance of the piece in 2000 at Dance Theater Workshop in NYC. The film was screened at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in June 2015.
Plan B (2004) Plan B, an original piece with text by Len Jenkin and the company, premiered in 2004 at the
Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. "As in a well-cooked dish," wrote the New York Times, “ingredients blend in works by the Big Dance Theater, creating elusive flavors and textures.”
Plan B combined elements from Nixon's Watergate tapes and the adult diaries of Kaspar Hauser, the 19th century “wild child” who was found at age 16 at the gates of the city of Nuremberg, after living abandoned in a German forest for 12 years. His subsequent socialization proved tragic. Lazar explained that the two texts connected when they discovered a section of the tapes where Nixon and his advisors were trying to find the right person to do certain things on their behalf. “What a perfect foil Kaspar might be,” said Lazar, “because he's so malleable and so innocent.” “Combining all these disparate sources might have been a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands,” writes Susan Reiter for the danceviewtimes, “but Big Dance Theater blends and transforms them with a sureness of vision... creating a work that tells a quirky, ambiguous tale with resonant strangeness and delicate beauty.”
Plan B also played at the Bonn Biennale in Germany (2004), Dance Theater Workshop NYC (2004),
Under the Radar Festival in NYC (2005), and the
Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in PA (2005).
The Other Here (2007) The Other Here was an original work based on the writing of
Masuji Ibuse. It was commissioned by the Japan Society, who asked that the piece in some way be engaged with Japanese culture. The director of the Japan society, Yoko Shioya, suggested they consider the works of Masuji Ibuse. Parson and her team began with a selection of source materials- the Chekhovian stories of Ibuse, verbatim text from transcripts of American life insurance conferences, traditional Japanese dances, Japanese pop music, a large table and a zither. Slowly, through collective exploration, the themes between these disparate materials are discovered, and a story begins to emerge. A man trying to give a speech at a conference is interrupted to watch a hand clapping dance, to perform a dance of his own, and to receive the gift of a fish. The fish becomes central. Theatre Forum noted that the piece, exists at that point of collision between form and substance” and that “the intricacy of that subtle emotional palette is one of [its great strengths."
The Other Here was developed at the CUNY Festival of New Work in NYC, 2005. It then played at Lincoln Center Out of Doors (2006) and at the University of Maryland (2006). Its official premiere was at The Japan Society in February 2007.
Orestes (2009) From the pen of “one of the most exciting poets writing in English” (New York Times) comes the world premiere of Anne Carson's vibrant new translations of the ORESTEIA myth. This grand kaleidoscopic compilation gathers together the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to tell the fall of the mighty house of Atreus. A Classic Stage Company presentation of three plays in three acts. “Agamemnon” and “Elektra” directed by Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas. “Orestes” directed by Paul Lazar and Associate directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. This piece performed at the Classic Stage Company, New York in March 2009.
Comme Toujours Here I Stand (2009) This original piece was inspired by Agnès Varda's 1962 French
Nouvelle Vague black-and-white film,
Cleo From 5 to 7, and was commissioned by the
French Institute Alliance Française. The film follows Cleo, a young pop singer anxiously awaiting the results of a biopsy test for cancer. The film follows her in nearly real time for two hours, as she distracts herself with composers, lovers, friends, a fortune teller, and a soldier. The Big Dance production simultaneously honored, appropriated, reinvented, and departed from the model of the film. In the words of Philip Lopate, writing for the Performance Arts Journal, Parson “zeroes in on the very French (think of La Rochefoucauld) theme of humanity's egotistical cruelty.” When creating the piece, Parson used the screenplay, but didn't watch the film itself until late in the process, so as not to be (in the words of Lazar) “under the claw” of Varda's influence. The New York Times wrote that in the piece, “meaning accrues from a complex yet spare interplay of actions and objects: a French folk song, video by Jeff Larson, luscious costumes and props evoking French couture, even a razzle-dazzle dance routine that refers to choreography from a Godard film.” The piece premiered in
Les Subsistance's Ça Tchatche Festival in April in Lyon, France. It also played at Le Quartz in Brest, France, Le Theatre National in Rennes, France, MCA/Chicago,
The Kitchen, NYC October 2009, and
New York Live Arts, NYC. It is a signature work of the company and the entire company and design team won a Bessie for it in 2010.
Supernatural Wife (2010) During a residency at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2010, Parson and Lazar began working on
Supernatural Wife, an adaptation of Euripides' play
Alkestis. Parson edited the translation by Anne Carson to create a spare skeleton for the piece. The play is based on the myth of King Admetus, who is offered eternal life by Apollo on the condition that he send a surrogate to the underworld in his stead. His wife, Alcestis, volunteers. Parson describes the subject matter as primal: "matters of birth, death, grief, mourning and the gods." Annie-B Parson made her
Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in the Harvey Theater with
Supernatural Wife in 2011. The piece toured to La Filature in Mulhouse, France,
Les Subsistances in Lyon, France, Le Quartz in Brest, France,
Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, France, and the
Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Ich, Kurbisgeist (2012) Ich, Kurbisgeist was co-commissioned by The Chocolate Factory and
Performance Space 122. It premiered in October 2012 at the Chocolate Factory in Queens New York, and later played at NYLA in 2013. The show was created in collaboration with Playwright Sibyl Kempson, and was written in a language invented by the playwright, which no one in the world, except those involved in the production, speaks—or has any knowledge of.” This “impressively inscrutable” play is, in the words of the playwright, an “olde-tyme agricultural vengeance play for Hallowe’en.” The piece was set in the Middle Ages, in a largely barren land that seems to produce nothing but pumpkins, many of which were to be smashed during the performance. When asked how
Ich, Kurbisgeist fit into the history of what Big Dance does, Parson said she craved doing something where language was abstract as movement, something “tiny and intimate" and felt it should be seen "in some kind of site-specific, really, really intimate venue. I thought it needed to be something that you're very close to, so you're not just thinking of language as meaning, but you're also thinking of language as a kinetic experience, because the language is extremely kinetic.” Writing for
L Magazine, Alexis Clements noted that Parson and Lazar seem to “enjoy feeling like outsiders looking in on a culture or subject that they are not familiar with.” For them, there was a “value in the experience of having to acknowledge one's own ignorance,” it freed them to take in information that contradicted their previous ways of thinking, it allowed them to do something familiar in a wholly new way. Parson choreographed and directed the piece, which used her original adaptations of two lesser known
Chekhov short stories, “Man in a Case” and “About Love”, in combination with live music, dance, and surveillance-style video footage. Baryshnikov's performance was widely lauded, and Elizabeth Bruce described the "melancholy crispness" of the performance as "utterly Chekhovian." The piece was performed at
Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.,
Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California,
ArtsEmerson in Boston MA, Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California, and the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois.
Alan Smithee Directed This Play: a Triple Feature (2014) Alan Smithee Directed This Play: a Triple Feature was co-commissioned by
Les Subsistances (Lyon) and
Brooklyn Academy of Music. It premiered at Les Subsistances in France in March, 2014 and then played at
Jacobs Pillow, Les Subsistances,
Tanz im August Berlin and
Brooklyn Academy of Music. The piece was an adaptation/ mashup of the films
Terms of Endearment,
Le Cercle Rouge, and
Doctor Zhivago. It began when Les Subsistances suggested Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar work with a short excerpt from the 1970 Franco-Italian crime film, Le Cercle Rouge. Wanting to work with other iconic films from other time periods and countries, they added Doctor Zhivago and Terms of Endearment. In classic Big Dance form, the piece wove together disparate performance styles, and included seven performers speaking text, dancing, and precisely performing the movements of actors from the films, which were, in turn, being projected on a large wall of blinds behind them. A moment of theatrical staging might be accompanied by an entire score of choreography, a dance might be underscored by fully staged theater. Parson says she is most interested in “simultaneous systems putting pressure on each other, and seeing what happens. That's the magic point.” The piece had its world premiere at the Solange MacArthur Theater in the American Dance Institute in Rockville, MD in 2015. Its New York premiere was at the Kitchen in New York, New York, and it toured to the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank (2016) This Page Intentionally Left Blank made its world premiere at the
University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts’ CounterCurrent Festival 2016. This performance-based docent tour deconstructed “the role of the docent and museum audio tour via an encounter with theater and dance, subverting and reconsidering how the docent typically leads viewers to observe art in the museum context.” Big Dance sought to democratize the museum space, to “disrupt, awaken, dismantle, confuse and thus revivify the viewer's perception of art.” The audience wore headphones and toured the space in groups in groups of twenty, as the docent (Tymberly Canale) spoke about the art with a (“don't look at that,” she says at one point, “that's not part of the tour.”) The audience traveled from the Menil Collection's main building to Flavin's Untitled, 1996, described by Arts And Culture as “a kind of journey deeper into Tymberly's psyche as she worms her way into our own.” Movement and theater gradually begin to take over the piece, and ultimately, the audience became part of the performance. The piece was also performed at
Mass MoCa- the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in January 2016.
Cage Shuffle (2017) Cage Shuffle made its world premiere at Abrons Arts Center during the American Realness Festival in 2016. In
Cage Shuffle Paul Lazar speaks a series of one-minute stories by John Cage from his 1963 score
Indeterminacy while simultaneously performing choreography by Annie-B Parson. The stories are spoken in a random order with no predetermined relationship to the dancing. Chance serves up its inevitable blend of strange and uncanny connections between text and movement. With live tape and digital collage scored and performed by composer Lea Bertucci. The piece was also performed at The Poets House in March 2017; David Bryne's: This Is How Music Works in June 2017; The Walker Art Center of Minneapolis in July 2017; A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery of Northampton in August 2017; Links Hall of Chicago in October 2017; DeBartolo Performing Arts Center of the University of Notre Dame, IN in October 2017
17c (2017) 17c is the newest Big Dance Theater ensemble work, 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." In her latest piece, Parson and her team incorporated the copious diaries of Pepys', Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century radical feminist play
The Convent of Pleasure, three centuries of marginalia, and the ongoing annotations of the web-based devotees at www.pepysdiary.com. The piece "dismantles an unchallenged historical figure and embodies the women's voices omitted from Pepys' intimate portrait of his life" 17c was presented as a work in progress excerpt as part of the American Realness Festival at Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in January 2017. It then played at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival September 7–9. In October it was presented at Mass MoCa, co-presented by Jacob's Pillow Dance in North Adams. Massachusetts. Its world premiere was in November 2017 at the Carolina Performing Arts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and its New York premiere was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn New York in November 2017.
The Road Awaits Us (2017) Based loosely on an absurdist play by Ionesco, in this North American premiere, Annie-B Parson stages a birthday party for a company of esteemed dance elders, including Bebe Miller, Meg Harper, Keith Sabado, Sheryl Sutton, Douglas Dunn, Betsy Gregory, Brian Bertscher, and Black-Eyed Susan. ''This piece was originally created for Sadler's Wells Elixir Co.'' Performance history includes Sadler's Wells, London, in June 2017 and NYU Skirball in November 2019.
Antigonick (2018) Big Dance Theater's
Antigonick is a rough cut of Anne Carson's one-act, radical-feminist, philosophical take on Sophocles’ Antigone. In Carson's theatrical perspective on Antigone's role as a humanist and antagonist, the intellectual excitement of Antigonick lies in how she loses, why her peaceful resistance matters, and the sobering consequences of the Antigone/Kreon face-off. Big Dance Theater first workshopped this play, directed by Paul Lazar, in 2016 at Suzanne Bocanegra and David Lang's Home Theater. In 2017, Antigonick was commissioned and Originally Produced by Williamstown Theatre Festival with the support of Mandy Greenfield. The original group in the cast included Yvonne Rainer, Chris Giarmo, Kirstin Sieh, and Sheena See. Both of those iterations were directed by Paul Lazar and co-directed by Annie-B Parson, with original sound design by Chris Giarmo, and produced by Aaron Mattocks.
Antigonick was first performed at the Williamstown Theater Festival, Summer 2017. It also showed at Abrons Arts Center in November 2018.
ballet dance (2019) Annie-B Parson takes on ballet with her own choreographic voice. Drawing from her experience of watching and re-watching Balanchine's
Agon as well as the novel
The Complete Ballet by John Haskell, she creates a duet from the imagery, the fundamental actions, the objects, and the narratives of ballet traditions. Performance history includes the Spoleto Festival of Two World, Umbria, Italy in July 2019 and NYU Skirball in November 2019. ==Other notable projects==