Assemblage

By Rebecca Serrell Cyr
March 19 - 21, 2015

PERFORMED BY
Aretha Aoki, Alex Escalante, Eleanor Hullihan, Rebecca Serrell Cyr

VOICE
Catherine Taylor-Williams and Bob Ross

COSTUMES
Emily Meister

LIGHTING
Ben Demarest

SOUND ENGINEER
James Lo

Bessie-winner Rebecca Serrell Cyr will present her first evening-length work, weaving together previous dance investigations, concerned with improvisation within pre-fabricated constructs, the phenomenology of performance, and the idea of wilderness within the human realm.

Curated by Stacy Grossfield

Over the last five years, Bessie-winning dancer Rebecca Serrell Cyr created a series of dance investigations united by the underlying idea of “saying yes to everything." Through a radical decision not to edit anything out, she has collected an abundance of disparate material and assembled it into a cohesive whole, organized as a sequence of solo and duet events. The resulting piece – Assemblage – takes advantage of kitschy stereotypes associated with a theatrical performance.

Assemblage, employing four performers, borrows its title from the realm of visual arts. The first episode presents two bodies competing and aiding each other in controlled athletic exercises. Two masked figures interact with random objects and in reaction to them produce a multitude of spontaneous gestures, culminating in an entropic environment full of possibilities. In the final segment, more structured and technically demanding material is introduced as a dancer performs combinations drawn from elementary, classical and eclectic dance vocabularies. This brings a stark contrast to the first half as the dance seeks to reduce itself and the performer to sheer simple presence.

“I am mostly interested in polarities within dance; wild and controlled; unsystematic and designed; sincere and irreverent,” explains Cyr when asked about the content of the piece. Cyr – a celebrated performer who has over the last decade lived in the idea-generating and decision-making worlds of other artists – finds herself questioning how much of the "dance stuff" she creates is hers, and how much is derivative of the masters she admires. Is it possible to shed the layers of accrued identity and find an honest and original voice?