Headlong Dance Theater's AVALANCHE Runs June 6-8

Philadelphia-based Headlong Dance Theater brings a new performance work to New York City that considers the performer's body over a lifetime of performing, and the idea of an ordinary life. Avalanche will be performed June 6-8, 2013, 8 p.m., at Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. (Tickets are $18 and available at 212-674-8112 or danspaceproject.org.) "If you keep performing," the work posits, "you find something new - something bigger and wilder, and more ordinary. You find your actual body."

"There's something about being middle-aged now where I feel my body more - in all ways, including its lumpy, tender messiness," says Headlong lead director David Brick. "Somehow it seems important to put that awareness together with the sensation of space itself - the ubiquitous substance that is not our bodies, but that presses against us wherever we are."

Avalanche was developed by Brick along with Headlong co-director Amy Smith and company dramaturg Mark Lord in collaboration with the piece's performers - Rachel Boggia, Todd Coulter, Carol Dilley, Annie Kloppenberg and Michael Reidy, all dance and theater faculty from Bates and Colby Colleges in Maine - through the innovative use of a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed for an extended residency at the colleges from 2011 to 2013. The faculty were interested in Headlong's process of making work that engages artists of fundamentally different training and backgrounds in a process of inquiry where differences are resources for thinking but not endpoints of style. Research is at the center of this hybrid performance that not only combines dance, theater and storytelling, but also presents performance as scholarship, building on the professional experiences of the cast in dance, theater and academia. Says collaborator Carol Dilley, "This piece is a logical continuation of 35 years of performance research."

The stories in Avalanche twist to become at once hilarious and heartbreaking; ultimately, the piece celebrates and laments the body that manages to be haunting, visceral and exquisitely formal:

"Bury them in an avalanche of love," says a dancer in Avalanche as she recalls her younger self, "the love you have and the love you want. Look across the wings at your friends, say a little prayer to lose 40 pounds instantly, and enter." Twenty years later, she says to herself, "Your fingers love texture. Everything in your being loves deep pressure, like being squished by a hat or a partner. When taking a bath you will be tempted to bring the laptop into the bathroom to watch 30 Rock on Netflix. Don't."

Performance Details
Avalanche
Thu.-Sat., June 6-8, 8 p.m.
$18 ($12 for Danspace members)
Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 E. 10th St. (at the corner of Second Avenue inside St. Mark's Church)
New York, NY 10003
(6 to Astor Place; N/R to Eighth Street; L to Third Avenue)

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