Founding Company Member and Master Choreographer Susan Dibble brings her newest production Dibbledance: Shoes On, Shoes Off to the Tina Packer Playhouse for a special ONE NIGHT ONLY performance Sunday, August 31st at 7:30pm. Dibble has choreographed countless productions for Shakespeare & Company over the past three decades, including this year's Henry IV Parts I & II, Shakespeare's Will and a special piece for Shakespeare & Company's return to The Mount, Edith Wharton's Home, last summer.
Tickets are $30 with General Admission seating. For more information on season productions, schedules, to receive a brochure, or inquire about discounts on regular performances, please call the Box Office at (413) 637-3353 or visit www.shakespeare.org. For customized group visits -- which may include artist talkbacks, tours, and catered events -- contact the Group Sales office at (413) 637-1199, ext. 132. The Tina Packer Playhouse is air-conditioned, hearing aid assisted and wheelchair accessible.
The crowd pleasing and popular annual event, DibbleDance, is a celebratory and soulful dance performance that tells unique stories through movement. Created by Dibble, her special DibbleDance performances started in 1986 at The Mount,
Edith Wharton's Home and have been a staple at the Company ever since. With a different concept every year, audiences flock to see Dibble's extraordinary and powerful performances. DibbleDance: Shoes On, Shoes Off features a cast of 17 including many long-time Dibbledance dancers and performers who are joined on-stage by a delightful gathering of Company artists and special guests. "I frequently use objects, accessories, costume pieces, and furniture in order to highlight story lines, suggest a mood, feeling, activity, or encourage a type of relationship for the performers," says Dibble.
This year's Dibbledance is titled Dibbledance: Shoes On, Shoes Off and includes 12 dances set to a wide range of music where actors and dancers put on and take off different shoes, reflecting the changing movement derived from the kind of shoes the performers are wearing (or not wearing). "My experience from early years as a dancer when I would sneak into a studio and take off my ballet shoes and dance barefoot is at the core of this piece. The shoe as an object and the bare foot as an object are in this work." Dibble hopes these elements will motivate the audience to reflect on the daily life experiences they have wearing shoes, and not wearing shoes and how do they differ.
"The spirit of the place and my attraction to making dances for all kinds of people are behind the annual event," continues Dibble. "Over the years I've continued to devote my work to a basic need...to give people a place to feel free and safe while performing dances that tell stories. I am always grateful to
Shakespeare & Company for giving me the opportunity to make these dances that are truly in the spirit of the company from the very beginning of its conception. Freedom and joy, with touches of truth about the human condition, the tragedy and the comedy combined in dances.
Samuel Beckett said it best, 'Dance first, think after. It's the natural order.'"
Susan Dibble thirty-third season (Movement Director for Henry IV, Shakespeare's Will; Choreographer/Sound Designer for DibbleDance: Shoes On, Shoes Off; Summer Training Institute Faculty.) Choreographer, teacher, dancer, painter and Professor, Susan Dibble is the Barbara Sherman '54 and Malcolm L. Sherman Professor in the Theater Arts Department at
Brandeis University. Her areas of expertise, among many, include movement for the actor, historical dance, movement styles, modern dance, composition and choreography, clown, mask, Rudolf Laban Movement Theory, and history of dance and movement training. Susan was a participant in the first S&Co. January Intensive in 1979. She is the director of Susan Dibble Dance Theater and has performed in her work for over 35 years in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont as well as numerous times at S&Co. in the program DibbleDance. Susan has choreographed for the Actors Shakespeare Project, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Nora Theater, Súgán Theater, Madison Repertory Company and numerous theaters in NYC. Before Brandeis, she taught at New York University's Tisch School for the Arts, the Denver Center Performing Arts Center, University of Ohio, University of Utah and Webster College. "Shakespeare Honors the Three Centers of the Body" is an article written by Susan Dibble in "Movement for Actors" published by Allworth Press. Susan received the 2006
Leonard Bernstein Festival of Creative Arts Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts at Brandeis.
DibbleDance: Shoes On, Shoes, Off
THEATRE:
Tina Packer Playhouse
DIRECTOR: Susan Dibble
SOUND DESIGNER: Dave Wilson
STAGE MANAGER: Maegan Passafume
CAST: Marianna Basham,
Patrick Brennan, Susan Dibble,
Kelly Galvin, Charls Hall,
Dana Harrison,
David Joseph,
Arthur Oliver, Josh Aaron McCabe, Carmen-Maria Mandley,
Susannah Millonzi, Jim Nutter, Tori Rhodes, Nikki Weaver, Kristin Wold
SET DESIGNER / DECORATOR:
Patrick Brennan, Susan Dibbble
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Keith Chapman
SOUND ENGINEER: Iain Fisher
COSTUMER DESIGNER: Stella Giuletta Schwartz
Photo Credit: Kevin Sprague
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