ORIGAMI NIGHT, A New Choreopoem, To Premiere at Boston Center For The Arts in July

Origami Night is a new multi-disciplinary choreopoem utilizing spoken word, dance, and sensory design to trace a woman's life from working-class navy brat to radical feminist to mother, and explore aging, love, loneliness, and the queer act of self-examination. The third collaboration between multimedia artist Christopher Annas-Lee and choreographer Graham Cole, the piece will premiere on July 25 at the Plaza Blackbox Theatre within the Boston Center for the Arts.

The driving force behind the piece is the poetry of Pamela Annas, a Boston-based poet and Professor Emerita of UMASS Boston known for her roles in radical pedagogy, feminist writing, and working-class literature. If Christopher is known in Boston, it is as the co-founder of The Circuit Theatre Company, which produced twenty-one works in the city from 2010 to 2014 including the seven-hour rock opera The Valentine Trilogy! and John Kuntz's world premiere Annotated History of the North American Muskrat at the BCA. Since 2019, he has also been a Resident Designer with Boston Dance Theatre.

The workshop performance of Origami Night premiered in December 2023 in Portland, OR. Noting the tight integration between movement and design, which Cole and Annas-Lee hope is a signature of their work, The Portland Tribune wrote: "The dancer performs in the round, constantly dividing her attention between the single ring of spectators. Her face is expressive, at times connecting with the audience one-on-one, but her body barely stops moving. If the octagon has become a place of violence in popular culture, [the production has] detoxified that shape and rendered it a sacred space. The dancer never seems trapped, because she is always moving, and with such grace and elegance that her form matches the poetry which is spoken over the sound system."

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