Annie-B Parson is a choreographer and artistic director of the Obie award-winning Big Dance Theater. She co-founded Big Dance in 1991, and with her company has created over twenty large-scale works for such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Japan Society, the Old Vic/London, Saddler’s Wells/London, The Walker, The National Theater in Paris, Japan Society and The Kitchen. Outside of her company, Parson has also made choreography for rock shows, marching bands, movies, museums, objects, television, augmented reality, opera, ballet, theater, symphony orchestras, string quartets, and a chorus of 1,000 amateur singers. Some of the artist she has worked with include David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Laurie Anderson, Nico Muhly, Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, and she has two works in the repertory of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Her work with David Byrne has spanned over ten years and includes dance making for his tours with Brian Eno and St. Vincent. Their most recent work, American Utopia, toured the world and was a smash hit on Broadway. It will reopen on Broadway this fall, and the documentary by Spike Lee premiered in 2020. Parson has published two books on choreography, as well as many articles on dance. Her most recent book was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2019. She teaches and lectures on the body in space, dance making and the virtuosity of structures in art making. Among other awards, Parson has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bessie Awards, The Jacobs Pillow Dance Award, a USA Artist Award, The Doris Duke Award, and an Olivier nomination.

The Mood Room will work specifically from the text of Guy de Cointet’s (1982) text The Five Sisters. The Five Sisters very lightly references Chekhov’s Three Sisters with both a hilarious disrespect – and with a recognition of the internal intention of the regret, despair and relational complexity in the Chekhov text. The departure from the original Cointet production will be the staging, choreography and visual design, as The Mood Room will utilize Cointet’s words without any reference to his original staging or visual design. The Mood Room will be staged using dance and the abstraction of bodies in space. In Cointet’s text, the five sisters often exit to what is referred to as a “mood room”, and my intention is to create a pre-recorded film of the sisters who are not present in any given moment on stage. With 77 entrances and exits, this will create a layer of meaning, plus a complex formal problem to design and navigate. The piece will be one single event, performed by five self-identified women, and run approximately one hour.

For more information on Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theatre please visit the website, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.