Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room explores Reagan-era consumerism and more (photo by Maria Baranova)
THE MOOD ROOM
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 30 – December 7, $35–$55
www.bam.org
www.bigdancetheater.org
Tickets are going fast for Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room, coming to BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space November 30 to December 7. The sixty-minute world premiere, presented in association with the Kitchen, combines music, dance, theater, opera, and text, adapted from Guy de Cointet’s 1982 play The Five Sisters and Anton Chekhov’s 1900 classic The Three Sisters. In a program note, BDT cofounder, choreographer, and director Annie-B Parson explains, “Sometimes you find an artistic soul mate in the simple act of opening a book. This is what happened to me when I read the late 20th c. ‘plays’ of visual artist Guy de Cointet. You see, they are not really plays, they are visual events with texts that bask in the hot mess of the non-narrative posing as narrative — a state I would call living! Here is where de Cointet and I intersect: he is devoted to detours, departures, tonal shifts, and the unconfirmed. An atmosphere of codes, exits, and non-results permeate the writing. He quotes without substantiation or reason, he is a-historic, is liberated from achieving even a glimmer of resolution, and his authorial voice is intentionally cracking. His theater is both textual and visually based, without any hierarchy for language, truth, or the answer — and the physical objects in the texts have no stable meaning throughout the play. No one changes; no one learns anything.”
The multimedia piece takes place in Los Angeles in the Reagan 1980s of rampant consumerism and trickle-down economics. Elizabeth DeMent, Theda Hammel, Kate Moran, Myssi Robinson, and Michelle Sui portray the five sisters, with an experimental score by Holly Herndon, sound and recomposition by Mark degli Antoni, set design by Lauren Machen, costumes by Baille Younkman and Samantha Mcelrath, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and video by Keith Skretch. You should always expect the unexpected with BDT, whose previous works include Comme Toujours Here I Stand, Antigonick, and Short Form, and it sounds like The Mood Room will be no different.