Rising Above Random For the Audiences Sake

An aging life insurance salesman, a widow dressed in electric green, an elusive pet fish: curious characters collide in Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here, and under curious circumstances too. In this collage of theater, dance, and music, a quirky cast of six drifts back and forth between the daily goings-on of a rural Japanese village and the proceedings of a global conference of insurance salespeople. A recipe for awkward juxtaposition and bizarre, fragmentary chaos? As it turns out, not at all.

Since founding the New York-based Big Dance Theater in 1991, co-directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar have earned a glowing reputation for fusing movement, music, text, video, and visual design in fearlessly creative ways. The Other Here explains why. While reveling in the unusual, the unlikely, and the startlingly beautiful, Parson and Lazar manage to accomplish a refreshingly simple task: telling us a story, or, at the very least, giving us some narrative threads to hold onto.

The making of The Other Here, according to the program notes written by Parson, began with “a pile of disparate materials:” two stories by the 20th-century Japanese writer Masuji Ibuse, pop songs and traditional dance from the Okinawa region of Japan, audio tapes from an American life insurance conference, a large table, and a zither. What evolved, somehow, was a versatile landscape that effortlessly spans time and space: past and present, rural and urban, East and West. Behind a veil of red bamboo curtains, framed by a couple of sparsely decorated trees (one of them a microphone in disguise), a giant white table becomes the nexus of the action, where tea-drinking, business-conferencing, and music-making take place. In this imaginative realm, spoken lines mingle with electronic music, buoyant dances spring organically to life, and pop songs translate into surprisingly poignant live performances.

It is here, too, that the double life of an old man named Mehdi (played by Lazar) unfolds, spinning the loose narrative that runs through the work. Equal parts grumpy villager and ambitious insurance salesman, he swings from ornery to exuberant as he chastises his shiftless servant, rants about the necessity of risk-taking (financial and otherwise), and strikes an insurance deal with the sweet, wide-eyed widow of his deceased schoolmate.

But Mehdi’s most pressing concern is of a more whimsical nature. Long ago, the same schoolmate gave him the gift of a carp, asking, in return, for the promise of his sincere friendship. Throughout the work, the image of the translucent white fish swims in and out of view. Projected onto the side of a wooden basket, the panel of the table, the transparent curtains at the back of the stage, it becomes a poetic presence in the midst of one man’s stubbornly practical life.

Our punchy emcee (Jess Barbagallo)—clad in a man’s suit and bare feet—is a persistently witty presence on the scene, narrating, directing, and sometimes participating in the action. Periodically, she brings the lights up on the house, sometimes for a friendly “check-in,” and once, hilariously, to conduct a staged Q&A between viewers and performers-turned-panelists.

Many of today’s dance/theatre-makers, like Parson and Lazar, find inspiration in peculiar combinations of movement, sound, and visual media, hoping to bend audience expectations in unusual ways. The results, however, often border on mere incongruence, disquieting spectacle, or self-indulgent experimentation. What is so likeable about Big Dance Theater is their devotion to the audience. The artifacts culled together in the making of The Other Here—unrelated though they may seem—don’t just exist to unsettle us; they do the work of telling a colorful tale while taking us somewhere new in the process. The results are creative, witty, beautiful, and smart—and all without a trace of ego.