Big Dance Theater's work, entitled COMME TOUJOURS HERE I STAND, re-invents Agnes Varda's classic New Wave film, CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 for the stage. Shot in Paris in 1961, the film tracks the early evening hours in the life of a marginally talented pop singer, as she waits to hear if she has terminal cancer. The Company uses the script as a found object to create an intimate portrait of a woman shadowed by death, while still caught up in the breezy pleasures of the day: shopping, visiting, strolling. The piece serves also as a critique of the flexible and facile nature of the medium of film, when set against the hand made qualities of live dance and theater.
BDT teams up with video artist Jeff Larson to make Cleo's activities come alive via the intersection of three rolling walls and decidedly low-budget video, fracturing space to capture the agile quality of film. In a unique collaboration between costumes, set and video, the clothes, and wallpaper merge on video into one expressive medium to describe the vivid, colorful interiors of a filmic world. BDT's innovative use of dance as staging will collide the fear of death, the minutiae of everyday life, and the beauty of a city.
The work is directed by and choreographed by Annie-B Parson with co-direction by Paul Lazar , and with the original title song by Robyn Hitchcock. Commissioned by the French Institute/Alliance Francaise in New York, with residency support by Les Subsistances in Lyon France. It premiered at Les Subsistances' Ca Tchatche Festival April 2009 and had it's NY premiere at The Kitchen in October 2009. The piece went on to tour extensively in the US including presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Festival of Art and Ideas in New Haven, FUSE BOX Festival in Austin, and in France at Le Quartz, Le Lieu Unique, and Theatre National de Bretagne. In May 2012 Comme Toujours Here I Stand will be re-mounted at New York Live Arts.
Comme Toujours Here I Stand was commissioned by FIAF (the French Institute Alliance Française), New York City, with co-production, production and residency support by Les Subsistances 2008/09, Lyon France. Additional support has been provided by Altria Group, Mental Insight Foundation, the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award, the Starry Night Fund of the Tides Foundation, the LMCC Swing Space Program, the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation at Alliance of Resident Theaters/NY, and public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Comme Toujours was also developed, in part, in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Big Dance Theater’s residency at Les Subsistances was supported by FUSED, a program of the French US Exchange in Dance, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., Culturesfrance, and the New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project (NEFA/NDP).
Big Dance Theater's engagement at Les Subsistances' La Tchatche Festival in Lyon is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through US Artists International with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
US Touring for Comme Toujours Here I Stand in the 2009-2010 season is being supported by a Touring Grant from NEFA/NDP.
