"[6] The company began as a loose but dedicated and generative alliance, made up largely of women including Stacy Dawson, Molly Hickok, Tymberly Canale, Cynthia Hopkins, Rebecca Wisocky, and Kourtney Rutherford.
Set in something like a beauty parlor, this piece incorporated some text from Harold Pinter and was accompanied by a score of repetitive gestures executed by five pairs of men and women.
This large-scale work was based on the myth of the Cassandra figure in Greek mythology and the piece incorporated the text of radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin.
The New York Times described The Gag as “a bouillabaisse of a theater-dance piece...There's a little Greek tragedy, a bit of Harold Pinter, a dab of Tennessee Williams and a large dose of fashion and comic high jinks.”[8] Presented by the Cucaracha Theater, and originally made for NYU Students, Bremen Freedom, by the west-German playwright Rainer Fassbinder, told the story of Geesche, a woman so sick of being controlled by the men in her life that she methodically poisoned them, and ultimately herself.
She was paired with composer Richard Einhorn and the two created “City of Brides,” performed by five barefoot women and accompanied by a complex score for piano, violin and cello based on Stravinsky's Les Noces.
From NYTimes review “...The comic triumph Here is The Gas Heart, by Tristan Tzara, a witty Dadaist take on avant-garde sophisticates working, flirting, effortlessly executing impossible dance steps, looking as classy as Cecil Beaton portraits and exchanging superior sounding banter that is utter nonsense.
Parson cast two dancers (Stacy Dawson and Molly Hickock) as Félicité, who occasionally danced in unison, parallel, and sometimes split entirely while always remaining connected.
[14] The piece employed minimal use of language, instead relying on “spare yet rich vignettes”[15] to tell this simple story with a dry tenderness, intended to match the tonality of the Flaubert.
The Village Voice wrote that Parson and Lazar had created a “cold, compelling world of emotional disintegration.”[14] A Simple Heart premiered at the GIFT Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1997.
The play explores the possibility of constructing alternate realities as three teenage girls, Lissa, Lisa, and Elyssa, perform rituals with the goal of “going away” to a fantasy land.
For Girl Gone, Parson dreamed up dances inspired by Wellman's fanciful stage directions; “They do the Spinal Fusion,” writes Wellman, “They do the Full Cleveland.”[16] In describing the play, Time Out New York gave up on theatrical labels and instead turned to psychological terminology, writing that “the work is schizophrenic, manic, occasionally melancholic and, more often, hysteric.”[17] Watching it was “both an alienating and enchanting experience.”[17] Another Telepathic Thing was inspired by Mark Twain's morality tale “The Mysterious Stranger,” and is described as “a prismatic and complex dance-theater parable.”[18] It was performed by Tymberly Canale, Stacy Dawson, Molly Hickok, Cynthia Hopkins, Paul Lazar, and David Neumann, and featured original music by Cynthia Hopkins.
The medieval setting is echoed by a contemporary Hollywood reality, with a script that braids Twain's sublime writing with ‘found’ text from years of auditions.
"As in a well-cooked dish," wrote the New York Times, “ingredients blend in works by the Big Dance Theater, creating elusive flavors and textures.”[23] Plan B combined elements from Nixon's Watergate tapes and the adult diaries of Kaspar Hauser, the 19th century “wild child” who was found at age 16 at the gates of the city of Nuremberg, after living abandoned in a German forest for 12 years.
“What a perfect foil Kaspar might be,” said Lazar, “because he's so malleable and so innocent.”[24] Add to those elements bits of the Old Testament, Kabuki dance and Taiwanese movie music and you have ‘Plan B,’ “a shimmering strand of evocative storytelling that manages to suggest a great deal about innocence in all its guises.”[25] “Combining all these disparate sources might have been a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands,” writes Susan Reiter for the danceviewtimes, “but Big Dance Theater blends and transforms them with a sureness of vision... creating a work that tells a quirky, ambiguous tale with resonant strangeness and delicate beauty.”[26] Plan B also played at the Bonn Biennale in Germany (2004), Dance Theater Workshop NYC (2004), Under the Radar Festival in NYC (2005), and the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in PA (2005).
[29] The New York Times wrote that in the piece, “meaning accrues from a complex yet spare interplay of actions and objects: a French folk song, video by Jeff Larson, luscious costumes and props evoking French couture, even a razzle-dazzle dance routine that refers to choreography from a Godard film.”[30] The piece premiered in Les Subsistance's Ça Tchatche Festival in April in Lyon, France.
Ella Buff, the festival's executive and artistic director, noted that “by integrating material from far-flung sources, [Parson and Lazar] create their own mythology.”[31] The piece pulled from Yiddish silent films, the physical score from Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis routines, video footage of a horse wrangler and a recording of a monologue by Rosalind Russell.
[35] Parson choreographed and directed the piece, which used her original adaptations of two lesser known Chekhov short stories, “Man in a Case” and “About Love”, in combination with live music, dance, and surveillance-style video footage.
It began when Les Subsistances suggested Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar work with a short excerpt from the 1970 Franco-Italian crime film, Le Cercle Rouge.
The show was “Inspired by disciplines of the concise—novellas, folk tales, diary entries, pencil drawings, thumbnail sketches and the single page of a notebook,” and featured five works, that “embrace the brief, granular, close range, anecdotal and microscopic.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank made its world premiere at the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts’ CounterCurrent Festival 2016.
A startling precursor to our own social media culture, Pepys possessed a similar compulsion to assign an almost constant real-time meaning to his daily existence, to examine himself, and obsessively report it."
In her latest piece, Parson and her team incorporated the copious diaries of Pepys', Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century radical feminist play The Convent of Pleasure, three centuries of marginalia, and the ongoing annotations of the web-based devotees at www.pepysdiary.com.
The piece "dismantles an unchallenged historical figure and embodies the women's voices omitted from Pepys' intimate portrait of his life" 17c was presented as a work in progress excerpt as part of the American Realness Festival at Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in January 2017.
Based loosely on an absurdist play by Ionesco, in this North American premiere, Annie-B Parson stages a birthday party for a company of esteemed dance elders, including Bebe Miller, Meg Harper, Keith Sabado, Sheryl Sutton, Douglas Dunn, Betsy Gregory, Brian Bertscher, and Black-Eyed Susan.
In Carson's theatrical perspective on Antigone's role as a humanist and antagonist, the intellectual excitement of Antigonick lies in how she loses, why her peaceful resistance matters, and the sobering consequences of the Antigone/Kreon face-off.
Outside of Big Dance, Ms. Parson has created choreography for marching bands, operas, pop stars, theater, ballet, docents, movies, objects, television, symphonies, and most recently for a chorus of 1,000 singers under the direction of Simon Halsey.
"[41] Parson studied Marco's movements, riffing on her trademark moves to create choreography so that the audience could see her signature gestures both live and on the TV screens playing historical footage.
The resulting choreography offered diverse phrases that had “everything from boy-band step touches and hard-hitting club moves to gestural sections with lotus-flower hands and swaying luau hip circles.”[41] The resulting mishmash created a striking visual effect, which was at this point known as a “Parson trademark.”[41] Parson said that her way of working came from Merce Cunningham who “offered that sequencing and hierarchy of movement aren't important.
She choreographed for Nico Muhly's opera Dark Sisters, Walt Disney at Soho Rep, Sarah Ruhl's Orlando, Futurity at ART, The Broken Heart at TFNA, David Bowie's Lazarus, full-length work for The Martha Graham Dance Co. and a solo for Wendy Whelan at The Linbury/Royal Opera House Since 1993 Parson has been an instructor of choreography at New York University's Experimental Theater Wing.
She was featured in BOMB magazine, and wrote a piece for Dance USA on the state of dance/theater in the U.S. As an artist-curator, she has curated shows including: the Merce Cunningham memorial, Dancer Crush at NYLA and Sourcing Stravinsky at DTW.