“The Road Awaits Us” is a dance-theater piece that jumps off from The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, and ends with a small scene from the end of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. The choice of The Bald Soprano came in January 2017 when the word “absurd” wouldn’t leave Annie-B Parson’s mind. A student of English, and an avowed theater-hater, Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano by copying directly from his English primer. This is how the theater of the absurd operates: To talk about seeing, put a blind man on stage. Parson resonated with this approach, for its dry irony and ruthless truth-telling. The Bald Soprano, to use an Ionesco’s term, is an “anti-play”. It uses anti-language as an expressive, romantic, motivating, anti-thinking, anti-writing, anti, anti, anti. In the context of today, this play felt good – even righteous. The piece will be performed by a cast of senior dancers so we can hear the wisdom in the text through their experienced bodies and voices.
