Heidi Duckler Dance Presents THE CHANDELIER at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Next Month

Los Angeles-based dance company Heidi Duckler Dance (HDD) presents the world premiere of The Chandelier at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on August 12th through 15th at 8pm. The Chandelier, a site-specific work choreographed and directed by HDD's Founder/Artistic Director Heidi Duckler, will run for four nights on The Wallis' pop-up outdoor stage.

The Chandelier is an epic site-specific journey created specifically for The Wallis. The piece is based on the novel of the same name: The Chandelier by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. Lispector is considered one of the greatest female writers of the 20th century. Her prose is complex and embedded with meaning, and only Heidi Duckler has the nuance and brilliance to bring it to life with movement. HDD's The Chandelier is non-traditional and place-based and provides a new look at this tragic coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a young girl. Duckler animates the book's interior monologues and devises characters from odd fragments of dialogue to create a moving portrait of a family living amid the ruins of a colonial society. Through layers of imagery, acts of repetition, and the architecture of the Wallis itself, Duckler explores the contrasting ideas of impermanence and the irrevocable.

The Chandelier was originally slated to be premiered at the Wallis in Spring of 2020, but was postponed due to the pandemic. Over the past year, HDD explored the possibilities for the work through a Zoom performance titled Illuminating the Chandelier. Reflecting on the text in the virtual space was challenging and rewarding, revealing hidden depths to the text. More about this creative process and exploration of online site-specific work can be viewed in HDD's original behind-the-scenes film The Making of Illuminating the Chandelier, filmed and edited by Nicolas Savignano.

The company is excited to expand on what was created then with new movement and utilization of space in the non-traditional, site-specific way that HDD always does. In this past year, the performance has transformed and in response to the nature of the pandemic has adopted a national feel. Dancers from around the country, including the Pacific Northwest, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Chicago, are joining together in Los Angeles to put up this special piece of theater. The piece is set to an original composition for the cello by Isaac Takeuchi, who will be performing live and accompanying the dancers. HDD and The Wallis, two landmark institutions in Los Angeles, are excited to come together and finally share this unique and wonderful piece, the first live dance performance to grace The Wallis since the pandemic!

Buy tickets at: https://thewallis.org/HDD

General admission -- $50.00