Image courtesy Emily Davis.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase tickets
For OPEN STUDIOS, Big Dance Theater invites artists from Big Dance: Big Tent – a long-standing, ever-evolving group of Big Dance associate artists, including actors, dancers, composers and designers – to share works-in-progress. Jess Barbagallo started performing with Big Dance 18 years ago! Jess and Anne Gridley are currently creating a new work with Paul Lazar. Anne Gridley joined BDT's tent in 2017 for Big Dance's rendition of Anne Carson's Antigone. Both Emily Davis and Kimiko Tanabe are artists whose work Paul Lazar and Sara Pereira da Silva have been following with admiration, enthusiasm, and interest.
For this program, Emily Davis, in collaboration with Jess Barbagallo, is telling stories from her time in Texas: how familial methods of communication and expression have evolved and converged in light of the extraordinary limitations imposed on her brother and father, the former a traumatic brain injury survivor, the latter diagnosed with aphasia. A hoot and a holler!; Anne Gridley shares Watch Me Walk, snippets of disability told first hand – bags included; and new Big Dance collaborator Kimiko Tanabe shares a new playful and whimsical dance work in process centering an investigation of plushie beets, sugar beets, anime aesthetics, and Asian sensuality all within the Japanese-American imagination.
View the Program
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
About the Artists
Jess Barbagallo is an actor, playwright, director, and teacher. He has performed with Big Dance Theater, Half Straddle, Theater of a Two-Headed Calf (and its Dyke Division), and The Builders Association. Most recently, Jess appeared in Amanda Horowitz’s Bad Stars True West at STARS Gallery in Los Angeles. Currently running at Soho Rep: Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month, directed by Jess and devised in collaboration with Becca Blackwell, Amanda Duarte, and others. His writing has been featured in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Culturebot, and 53rd State Press. Film (Youtube, really): Christmas on Earth/Joe Ranono’s Yuletide Log and Other Fruitcakes; The Puzzlers 1 + 2. TV: Law & Order: SVU.
Emily Davis is an actor based in Brooklyn who has been making work with Jess since college. She has worked with theater company Half Straddle as a performer since 2009, premiering work in the US and abroad. She originated the role of Reality Winner in Is This A Room (The Kitchen, The Vineyard Theater, Broadway's The Lyceum Theater), for which she received an Obie Award, The Lucille Lortel Award, and a Drama Desk nomination. TV: American Rust, The Patient, Tulsa King, High Maintenance, and Servant. Film: Loophole, The Plagiarists, The Harbinger.
Anne Gridley is a two-time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido. In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University.
Kimiko Tanabe (she/her) is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist. She explores the mediums of performance art, dance, writing, and origami, and is in a committed partnership with her .38 Muji pen. She is forever fascinated with Japanese folklore and as a lover of literature she finds herself making important life decisions under the eyes and influence of fiction. Her work combines her background in contemporary dance with her literary tendencies to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting, and that gives platform and power to the Asian-American emotional experience. For Kimiko, art is intimate and inexact. Kimiko graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance. She is a 2022 BAX Space Grant Recipient, 2022 Gallim Moving Artist Resident, 2022 Colorado College Artist in Residence, 2021 Artist in Resident at The Floor, and 2021 Fresh Ground Pepper PlayGround PlayGroup Residency Cohort Member. She currently performs with and glenn potter-takata and Shannon Yu and has performed with marion spencer, Catherine Galasso Projects, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, and Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell.
Founded in 1991, Big Dance Theater (curator) is known for its inspired use of dance, music, text, and visual design. The company often works with wildly incongruent source material, weaving and braiding disparate strands into multi-dimensional performance. Led by Artistic Director Annie-B Parson, Big Dance has delved into the literary work of such authors as Anne Carson, Twain, Tanizaki, Wellman, Euripides, and Flaubert, and dance is used as both frame and metaphor to theatricalize these writings. For more than 25 years, Big Dance Theater has worked to create over 20 dance/theater works, generating each piece over months of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving group of actors, dancers, composers and designers. Big Dance Theater received New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2002 and 2010; the company was awarded an OBIE in 2000, and BDT company members have received five other “Bessie” Awards and an OBIE award for their work with Big Dance. In 2007 the company received the first-ever Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Big Dance Theater has been presented around the world, in venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, City Center, The Performing Garage, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, Under the Radar, American Realness, Tanz Im August (Berlin), PS122’s COIL Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena, On the Boards, UCLA Live, ICA Boston, American Dance Institute (ADI), Fusebox Festival/Austin, CounterCurrent Festival/Houston, and Spoleto Festival USA. Recent commissions have been from Les Subsistances in Lyon, Chaillot Theatre National in Paris, BAM, Walker Art Center, Wexner Arts Center, Carolina Performing Arts, the Old Vic/London, Spoleto Festival USA, American Dance Festival, NCCAkron, and the new Perelman Arts Center in New York City.