The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents
Interstate
At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024
A film by
Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can
Theater, Dance
This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, and it will also be screened in-person on May 20th.
About The Film
Country
United States
Language
English
Running Time
6
minutes
Year of Release
2021
Notes from the Choreographer:
When I first heard Interstate by David Lang, it immediately conjured images in my mind-- images of steps, stairs, locomotion-- a sense of on-going-ness and infinity that stairs imply. I heard the music in parts-- six parts, and thought of the dancer/ filmmaker Jennie Liu as the right collaborator, and her family as part of the film. As the invitation to work on Lang'sInterstate was during the heart of Covid, working virtually was the only possibility, so the fact that Jennie lived in LA was fine; we could work on Zoom. The world was slowed down, and our process was a slow one taking place over an eventful year. The domesticity of Covid, the home entering our work was inevitable, and we welcomed it, so when I asked Jennie to show me some staircases in her neighborhood, Jennie zoomed me in to some around her home in LA, and we presumed these staircases would be our stage. But a few months into our process, Jennie traveled to England, to her mother's home, wondering if she should stay there with her children, and we started to reimagine the piece danced on a long, narrow carpeted staircase in her mother's home in England, and it felt warm, nostalgic and domestic. Then suddenly, Jennie moved to Hong Kong and the visual plot thickened for Interstate. Interstate was now set in Hong Kong, and the dance was on an entirely different world of staircases, a completely different urban landscape-- literally around the world from the original site of LA. Inevitably, to deepen the truth of the film, Jennie's family became the cast. So like most things made during the pandemic, making Interstate is a story of adaptation, family and distance, and of course, music and dance.
Annie-B Parson, April 2022
Choreographed by Annie-B Parson in collaboration with Jennie MaryTai Liu Music by David Lang Video by Jennie MaryTai Liu Camera by Richie Fowler and Adam Ruszkowski Performed by Jennie MaryTai Liu Special appearances by Lavender, Orlando, and Andrew Gilbert Costumes by Suzanne Bocanegra Hong Kong Video Producer- Nelson Ng Chak-Hei Produced by: Bang on a Can and Big Dance Theater
About The Artist(s)
Jennie MaryTai Liu (filmmaker/Annie B Parson) is an artist working across performance, video, writing, and education. She has recently received commissions and presentations from Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, New York Film Festival/Currents section, Crossroads/San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Human Resources LA, The Mistake Room, Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and Incubator Arts Center. She has been a resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo Arts Colony, EMPAC, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Cultural Innovation. She co-founded and edited Riting.org, an experiment in writing that engages with performance being made now in LA. Funded by the Mike Kelley Foundation and in collaboration with The Box and Pieter Performance Space, she curated Knees, Schools, Urges - an exhibition and performance program engaging ten LA based artists to respond to histories of 20th century modern dance and embedded embodied histories. Jennie frequently collaborates as a performer in the work of Big Dance Theater, Adam Linder, and Poor Dog Group. Since 2021 she is based between Los Angeles and Hong Kong where she runs Center for Artists in the Making, an art education program engaging young people in methods and practices from multidisciplinary art making towards the development of their own work and platforms.
Annie-B Parson is the artistic director of OBIE and BESSIE award-winning Big Dance
Theater, which she co-founded in 1991. Outside of her company, some of the artists she
has worked with include David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Mikhail
Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Esperanza Spalding, Suzan-Lori Parks,
Laurie Anderson, Salt n Pepa, and Jonathan Demme. Additionally Parson has created
two large scale works for the Martha GrahamDance Company, and for the Sadlers Wells
Company of Elders.. Parson choreographed and did musical staging for David Byrne’s
American Utopia, a world tour that ran on Broadway and won a Tony, and was made
into a film by Spike Lee. She choreographed Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love, on
Broadway, as well as his tours with Brian Eno, and with St. Vincent. She also choreographed two concert tours for
St. Vincent. Parson recently choreographed two operas: Candide at the Lyon Opera, and The Hours at The Met.
Parson’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, and The Paris Review; her recent book The Choreography of
Everyday Life is published by Verso Press. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bessie Awards, The
Jacobs Pillow Dance Award, a USA Artist Award, The Doris Duke Artist Award, The Foundation for Contemporary
Art, two Lucille Lortel nominations, and an Olivier nomination. She has been honored by Danspace and by PS122.
With Thomas F. DeFrantz, she is co-editing a book entitled: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study.
Founded by Molly Hickok, Paul Lazar, and Annie-B Parson in 1991, Big Dance Theater is known for its inspired
synthesis of dance, music, text, and visual design. The company’s work ranges from pure dance pieces, to
dance/theater works with sources from found text, literature, plays, or an alchemy of wildly incongruent source
material, weaving and braiding disparate strands of text and theatrical elements into multidimensional
performance. Big Dance has delved into the literary work of such authors as Twain, Tanizaki, Euripides and
Flaubert, and dance is used as both frame and metaphor to theatricalize these writings. For 32 years, Big Dance
Theater has worked to create over 25 large-scale dance/theater works, generating each piece over months and
years of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving family of actors, dancers,
composers, and designers.
Big Dance Theater has been presented at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theater
Workshop, The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society,
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena, On
the Boards, UCLA Live, Spoleto Festival USA, and Tanz Im August, Berlin. Internationally, the group has performed
in France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, and the Georgian Republic. Commissions have come
from Les Subsistances in Lyon, Chaillot Theater in Paris, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Walker Art Center,
Wexner Arts Center, Carolina Performing Arts, American Dance Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, The Kitchen, La
MaMa, Onassis Foundation, Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, NCCAkron, Carolina Performing Arts, and the
Old Vic/Dance Umbrella, London.
7
Most recently, the company premiered The Mood Room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will tour this work
to The Walker in 2024. Other works for BAM include Supernatural Wife, which played at the National Theater in
Paris, and Alan Smithee Directed This Play which premiered at Les Subsistances in Lyon, France in 2014. The
BDT production, Man in a Case, featured Mikhail Baryshnikov and premiered at Hartford Stage and toured to
Berkeley Repertory Theater, Broad Stage in Santa Monica, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Big
Dance Theater received two New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2002 and 2010, and the
company was awarded an OBIE in 2000. Additionally, BDT company members have received 5 distinct “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. In 2024, Big Dance is co-publishing Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study with
Wesleyan Press and Dancing Foxes, co-edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson.