Bessie Award winning choreographer Beth Gill, with long-time design collaborators Thomas Dunn and Jon Moniaci, returns to the Chocolate Factory for a new site-specific performance inspired by the imagination and subconscious inhabiting a dreamlike, sensory-rich world that draws the audience into an immersive act of witnessing. Gill creates an intimate, surrealist space building on the formalism of her past several works (Electric Midwife, New Work for the Desert), while forging new psychologically driven terrain through explorations of role, the gathering and layering of meaning and being, and ultimately, disappearance.

Choreography by Beth Gill. Lighting by Thomas Dunn. Sound by Jon Moniaci. Performed by Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Marilyn Maywald Yahel. Vocalists: Rachel Kara Perez and Peter Sciscioli.

Catacomb is co-commissioned by The Chocolate Factory, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Live Arts Bard at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, and developed as part of LMCC’s Extended Life Dance Development program made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Catacomb was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts; and is supported, in part, by the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards program and a 2015 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. General Operating support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Catacomb was made possible in part with a research and development residency and co-production support by The Hatchery Project, a multi-year collaborative residency partnership between The Chocolate Factory Theater, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, RED Arts and Vermont Performance Lab with lead support by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional funding by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional residency support was provided by Gibney Dance Center’s Dance in Process program, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and by a Creative Laboratory residency at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University. Additional commissioning support by the Jerome Foundation.

“Beth Gill’s ‘Catacomb,’ Dreamlike and Site-Specific”  – Gia Kourlas, New York Times