Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.
Choreographer Anna Sperber returns to The Chocolate Factory Theater for the third time with Beacons, an evening-length dance that continues her investigations into the tension between exacting formal clarity and a visceral wildness, mapping the intersections between desire and care. Sperber responds to The Chocolate Factory’s expansive architecture with choreographic experiments that aim to extend bodies beyond themselves.
A trio of performers – Tim Bendernagel, Owen Prum, and Zo Williams – play with the very adult stakes of collective safety: bounding through space like rotating satellites perfectly avoiding collision, and tethering each others’ weight against imminent collapse.
Sperber then performs a solo that fervently traces a maze of tangled gestures; strands of desire, care, and memory intermingle and compete with her own body’s limits, the boundaries of the space, and the presence of other bodies.
Through movements that are at once driving, soft, and precise, Beacons seeks an exuberant and expansive generosity of space, feeling, volume, and light; luring its audience toward a heightened sense of our collective rhythms and shared environments. An immersive, saturating sound score (by experimental electronic musician Lea Bertucci) and atmospheric lighting (by Madeline Best) create striking perceptual effects in response to the architecture and the bodies it contains; complicating distinctions between body and space; and challenging the limits of our common awareness, both real and imagined.
Choreographed by Anna Sperber. Performed by Tim Bendernagel, Owen Prum, Anna Sperber, and Zo Williams. Original Score by Lea Bertucci. Lighting Design by Madeline Best.
