Never a dull movement

WILLING AND TABLE Lazar stars
in Big Dance’s latest project.

Photo: Paula Court

It performs adaptations of Flaubert and plays by Mac Wellman. It sends Japanese short stories crashing into fragments of Chekhov. It has racked up a teetering pile of Obie and Bessie Awards. Nevertheless, Big Dance Theater has not been seen by many of New York’s most devoted theater folk. Why? Because of an old and arbitrary line, drawn woozily between the worlds of theater and dance.

Big Dance Theater, the 16-year-old collaboration of choreographer Annie-B Parson; film and occasional Wooster Group actor Paul Lazar; and dancer Molly Hickok, started off in the dance world. In 1991, when Dance Theater Workshop found itself with a programming gap, it offered the three ex–Irondale Ensemble members the slot. Ever since, DTW has acted as a gracious host, never bothered by the group’s evolution into a movement-theater hybrid. The company has been feted from Berlin to Jacob’s Pillow (where it won the festival’s first Award for Creativity), and Parson’s choreography scored her a Guggenheim fellowship this year.

Still, despite an unmistakable choreographic sophistication, Big Dance draws a stronger bead on narrative than any of its downtown contemporaries. “They work from a strong literary base, and they never seem trapped by classifications,” says DTW head Carla Peterson. “We’ve chosen not to worry about whether they’re dance or theater.” Wellman is firmer: “Neither world seems to know what to do with them, but they’re smarter than either.” The company varies its modus operandi, either performing a set text (as with Wellman’s prankster version of Antigone) or adapting its own (the beloved rock musical Shunkin, created with Cynthia Hopkins and based on a Junichiro Tanizaki story). But in every case, Big Dance keeps a death grip on story, cheerfully beating against modern dance’s antinarrative current.

One hopes that the company’s latest, The Other Here, will be the one to penetrate theatergoers’ foggy preconceptions. This salad of Masuji Ibuse stories and recorded seminars for life-insurance salesmen is eminently dramatic. Lazar plays an arrogant policy-hawker; Hickok is his trusty servant. Their interactions wheel around a sweet story about a carp—a gift that soon grows into a nuisance—which stimulates meditations on loss and responsibility. Creating a stylized Japanese world out of a rolling table and a microphone garlanded in fake greenery, The Other Here simultaneously pokes fun at the insurance trade and celebrates it for staring death in the face. The combination is a delicate sensation of amused rue, a kind of long-form joke about inevitable disappointment.

Roles among the three founders have stayed relatively flexible over the years, with Parson as the outside eye. The others joshingly hail her as “the Decider.” She also holds enormous sway over a work’s inception, which emerges from her musical choices—in this case Okinawan pop—and the vocabulary of dance. Parson’s tendency to compress movement and shun “emotional” gestures also underpins the company’s rare ability to understate and maintain a consistently arch elegance.

On the other hand, Lazar has been known to direct while wearing a girl’s pink bicycle helmet. “I consider directing without a helmet to be irresponsible,” he says in his best deadpan. Hickok, the “dance dramaturg,” claims that controlling him is a full-time job: “We spend most of our time trying to stop Paul,” she says, miming throwing a blanket over the rambunctious Lazar. Parson looks momentarily worried: “Are we stifling your creativity?” she asks seriously. But company manager Jake Hooker chills them out. “That feeling of sublimated goofiness is the locus of the work,” he asserts.

Humor is the key. Parson describes the long gestational process as akin to “developing an inside joke. Some people call what we do developing a ‘shared vocabulary.’ But for us, it is really much more like being on a road trip and finding things, over time, that only we find funny.” Regardless of grim subject matter such as premature entombment (Antigone) and the Nixon tapes (Plan B), there does always seem to be a sense of just-silenced laughter in the room.

This combination of rigor and lightness is what makes a Big Dance piece so charming. Lazar and Parson are also married, so their work often goes home. Their son Jack may be only five years younger than the company, but he has already displayed a directorial bent. At age four, he cast an imaginary Wizard of Oz, and his father asked to audition. “But when I did my monologue, I guess I was playing it a little broad,” Lazar recalls. “He told me, ‘Dad, be more particular.’ I’ve been taking that note ever since.”

The Other Here is at Dance Theater Workshop through Sept 29.