“We really wanted to look at this idea of climate change and how it's affecting our daily lives and� the grief that surrounds that,� says Performa/Dance artistic director Jennifer Hart, “but we didn't want to make a sad show and we didn't want to make a show about climate change.�
“I remember when Jennifer first started bringing me this idea of what she wanted to do and she really wanted to work more with people on the theater side of things,� adds Alexa Capareda, Performa/Dance’s assistant director. “I connected her with Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw, who is a director and playwright, and I thought� their energy was a great fit together, and with Kelsey Oliver, who we worked with on our� last couple of Performa/Dance productions.�
Hart, Shaw, and Oliver started creating the piece together. “So we spent about a year just having conversations about stories and how to tell a story that looks at the idea of loss or the idea of transition,� Hart says. “We experience that in our own lives through human loss and so we just � with the dancers in the studio � we started building the story, what they called devising. We devised it as we went along so we actually didn't know what we were gonna do until we started getting in the studio. And then the story sort of developed itself and the angle of how we wanted to talk about transition and change came through this personal loss, this idea of personal loss. So that's how the story came about.�
That sounds like pretty heavy stuff but Hart and Capareda say the resulting show, titled ANTHROPOCENE, AKA: Oh the Humanity! AKA: The Big Wah Wah! doesn’t take itself too seriously. “We look at it through an absurd lens,� Hart says. “We have a lot of absurdist qualities to the work. The the show is actually pretty funny until you get to sort of the sort of meat of it and then it gets more serious.�
“I also think it speaks to how we process things as humans,� Capareda adds. “I think there are things that are so big for us to deal with, that there are ways that we protect ourselves with how we process something.�
“I think there's also a bumbling quality to the way that humans interact with the world,� says Hart. “We like to think we know what we're doing, but we really don't know what we're doing most of the time.�
Hart says working with Shaw and Oliver, along with all the performers in what she calls “a really big all-star cast� helped to make ANTHROPOCENE a more interesting artistic endeavor. “In the creative process,� she says, “they have their ways of seeing it and I think having different voices in the mix creates a much richer work, which I think is what's happened with this piece. It is not the show we started with, but it's the show that it's supposed to be.�
