Red Rovers from Headlong Dance

Headlong Dance was formed in 1993 by Co-Directors David Brick, Andrew Simonet and Amy Smith. Their movement backgrounds include modern, ballet, jazz, tap, contact improvisation, theater, sports, sign language, Bharata Natyam, and Ghanaian dance. Over the past twenty years, Headlong has created over forty dances and they have performed nationally and internationally to a range of audiences.

Rather than relying on a single dance style or technique, Headlong Dance Theater develops a unique movement vocabulary for each new piece. Audience members should get ready to participate themselves in the performance because recently Headlong has been doing more and more with audience engagement and site-specificity when it comes to performances. In an interview, Amy Smith, co-director of Headlong credited these recent obsessions with engagement and site-specificity to the belief that, “if you make a piece for everyone, it’s really for no one.”

The 2013 Festival will feature a performance entitled Red Rovers, choreographed by Headlong Dance Theater. It positions the spectator as a Jet Propulsion Laboratories employee attending a professional conference on the rover mission to Mars. The beautifully disjunctive narrative of Red Rovers concerns a romance gone south between the conference session leaders. The impotency of communication attempts is articulated through robotic rovers aimlessly trekking across the stage, a Ziggy Stardust soundtrack, Gary Cooper mutely romancing a silent film starlet, and the haunting sight of a lone astronaut dancing en pointe in a space suit.

Read more about Headlong and Red Rovers here: http://headlong.org/