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SUPERNATURAL WIFE

Based on Alkestis by Euripides
Translated by Anne Carson

What the press are saying:

The company’s artistic directors consistently make contemporary magic from classical material.

-New York Times

It's hard to do justice to the freewheeling brilliance of Big Dance Theater's combination of dance, theater, video and idiosyncratic imagination; suffice it to say you should see the work of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar whenever possible.

New York Times

...a sublime reimagining of Euripides' "Alcestis" by this unclassifiable company. The co-directors evoke its slippery moods to poetic effect, using ... their usual multimedia wizardry.

New York Times

Big Dance Theater's newest work, SUPERNATURAL WIFE, is a dance/theater adaptation of Euripides' play, Alkestis, using Anne Carson's translation. Ms. Carson's spare and accessible translation of Euripides is set against Big Dance Theater's ability to make theater that fluidly and fluently moves between genres. The production penetrates Euripides' piercing exploration of death, grief and self-sacrifice via a free-wheeling mix of theater, music, dance and video, to reveal the tonal swings from irony to earnestness in Euripides' play.

Sourcing and re-thinking the pulsing, profound and very old movement of Pontian Greek Dance, this production puts dance back into its rightful place in Greek drama. The live choral singing uses various musical motifs, from French medieval Hocketing to Meeting House hymns. The expressionism of the great Yiddish theater actor Solomon Mikhoels from the early 20th century is the stylistic template for the King. The truth of melodrama in Yiddish theater and the stylistic invention that veers from realism is an appropriate fit for the scale and emotionality of the story. At its core SUPERNATURAL WIFE is about basic human contradictions: our desire to live against the immutability of morality; our desire to be autonomous in the face of our undeniable inter-connectedness; and the playful nature of theater against the innate tragedy of reality.

The play is taken from the mythic tale of King Admetos, who avoids death by arranging to send a surrogate to the world below in his stead. His wife volunteers for this assignment. The sound score includes the searing minimalist music of "men" by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang as well as the pulsing rock of Brunk. The play takes place in a distillation of a bisected palace. A television in the carpeted living room keeps the guest, Herakles, occupied; on the other side of the house, the King slowly discovers what his decision to let Alkestis die for him truly means.

See photography from the performance.

Directed and Conceived by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar
Choreography: Annie-B Parson and the Company

Set: Joanne Howard
Lights: Joe Levasseur
Sound: Jane Shaw
Video: Jeff Larson
Costumes: Oana Botez-Ban
Music: 'men' (2001) David Lang
Choral / Vocal music: Chris Giarmo
Additional Music: Brunk / Bert Vanden Berghe
Production Management: Aaron Rosenblum
Technical Director: Josh Higgason
Project Producer: Estelle Woodward Arnal

Performers:
Molly Hickok, Tymberly Canale, Chris Giarmo, Elizabeth DeMent, Aaron Mattocks, Pete Simpson

Supernatural Wife is co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Théâtre National de Chaillot, Les Subsistances – Lyon, and Le Quartz – Scène Nationale de Brest.

Supernatural Wife was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust.

Production Residency for this work was supported by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Support was also provided by The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Supernatural Wife is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Additional support was provided by the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation and the Mental Insight Foundation. Individual support was provided by Nancy Crown, Micki Wesson, Mary Sharp Cronson, Hope Hickok and Barbara Parson, Jenny Sewall, Brian Rogers, Mim Rosen, David Parker, and Sean Elder, among others.

Supernatural Wife was developed, in part, in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. It was also made possible by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space program; space at 14 Wall Street is donated by Capstone Equities. Further residency support was provided by a space grant from BRIC in Brooklyn, New York.

General operating support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts and the MAP Fund with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.