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If you ever thought your family could put on a great show, here’s your chance. Headlong Dance Theater, 1170 S. Broad St., is recruiting households to participate in their upcoming Live Arts 2012 piece, “This Town is a Mystery.”
“The idea is that we would find households — and it can be a household, it doesn’t mean you have to be related. Our definition of household is that you sleep and eat in the same house together. There could be a lot of different kinds of households,” David Brick, co-founder of Headlong, said.
Brick and the other two co-founders, Andrew Simonet and Amy Smith, are actively seeking the household members that will become the performers while the performances will take place in their residences during the September Live Arts Festival.
“We will work with a household to create a performance by them for a small audience that comes to their home and everyone who comes in the audience will be required to bring food, so it will be a potluck in somebody’s home and performance by the members of the household,” Brick, who lives at 10th and Wharton streets, said. “That’s the thumbnail sketch.”
With a rough guideline to create four separate performances, the group is in the recruiting stages for interested performers. Once applications are reviewed, the Headlong team will come to hopeful participants’ homes and make sure they are a good fit.
“That’s the journey of the piece: There will likely be media or mutlimedia. What do these people like to do? What are they interested in doing? That’s the game for working on it,” the 44-year-old said. “Headlong has kind of made a career of making work that defies categorization — dance or theater. We work with performers to create a vocabulary for each piece that we make.
“We’ve done that with highly trained performers all these years. There are lots of possibilities for skills and to perform if you are willing to work and willing to perform. People will talk, people will move, there might be pictures.”
Those not selected will still have the chance to participate if they are disciplined enough to follow the company’s do-it-yourself instructions for creating a performance in your home. The suggestions will be posted on the project’s website in the coming months.
“It’s not necessarily tricks but a way to think about making a performance in your own home — principles to create a performance,” Brick said. “If people are serious and they get through enough of the rehearsal process, Headlong will come spend a day working with the household and put it into performance shape.”
Brick grew up in rural Illinois before making stops in Florida and Missouri on route to attending college at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Meanwhile, his parents and brother — all of whom are deaf — relocated to Germantown to teach at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.
“I was a dance and English major. I discovered dance in college, came to dance very late,” he said. “I saw performance there for the first time. Being from a deaf family, we really didn’t do a lot of cultural [events]. Deaf culture doesn’t go to a lot of theater shows. We didn’t watch TV or movies, either.”
At Wesleyan, Brick saw his first performance, which was by New York’s Richard Bull Dance Theatre, and he was immediately enamored.
“When I saw a dance performance in college it was unusual. It was improvisation and it had talking and moving in their pieces. I looked and I knew right away that’s what I should do,” Brick said. “I had grown up with body language, you know sign language being my first language. I didn’t realize there was an art form about the body speaking. When I saw dance I was like: I really get that, that makes perfect sense to me.”
Brick met Simonet and Smith in college and they began talk of starting a company. While completing his thesis, Brick had the opportunity to perform for Bull and upon graduation he was invited to attend the dance troupe’s rehearsals, which eventually led to a position in the company.
“I danced with them for three years, ’90 to ’93. I was dancing with other people in New York, too,” he said. “I was starting to make my own work and then in ’93 we started Headlong.”
The three co-founders were in search of where to set up shop and while Brick was entertaining in New York, he found the scene there very expensive for a fledgling venture. A friend suggested Philadelphia, and the three of them gave it an interview.
“We went to a couple performances here and we thought they were really great. The people making work here were great. People were really serious about the work and the ideas at play in their work,” he said. “Philadelphia is very affordable and we wanted a place to make work that was more preprocessed and complete.”
Brick finished up his commitments in New York while Simonet and Smith moved to Philly to begin setting up the 50-by-50-foot warehouse space at 20th Street and Snyder Avenue that would house the company. Throughout its almost two-decade lifetime, the company briefly moved to Old City and then 10 years ago it moved back to its South Philly roots.
“We were still unsure, but once we moved here and started making work we pretty quickly knew we were in the right place,” he said.
In the current home at Broad and Federal — which is a renovated funeral parlor — Headlong has thrived and grown with the evolving art community.
“We kind of feel like we grew up with the current scene. We helped each other grow up,” Brick said. “Today there’s like performance training schools — Headlong has a performing institute and people from all over the country come here and attend and they end up staying in South Philly and making work.”
Now, Headlong has accepted the role of creating innovating and genre-bending pieces. For “This Town is a Mystery” the special melding of cultures and neighborhoods unique to the city inspired the artists to explore — and they are hoping citizens will be interested in coming along for the ride.
“Whatever community is yours, you might be living a block over from a whole other community. We love that about our urban lives and Philadelphia,” Brick said. “The art we’ve typically made, we’ve been interested in the citizen body for a long time. We’ve made different kinds of work where we put the ordinary person and they become part of the place in some way.” SPR
For more information or to apply call 215-767-6881, e-mail andrew@headlong.org or visit thistownisamystery.com.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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