Blood on a Cat's Neck at Proscenium Theater

The Communications, Film and Theater Department & Drama Society at Eastern Connecticut State University are proud to present Blood on a Cat's Neck by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, directed by David Pellegrini with choreography by Alycia Bright Holland.

Phoebe Zeitgeist has been sent to the earth from a distant star to write an eyewitness account of human democracy. But, although she has learned the words, she doesn’t understand the human language.

So begins the first lines of Blood on a Cat’s Neck by filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most significant director of postwar German cinema. Before his brief career in which he directed over forty films within the span of fifteen years, Fassbinder was active in theatre, developing experimental techniques which have come to be known as “Anti-Theater. This concept, however, is misleading, because in plays such as this, Fassbinder forged his unique and always entertaining and sometimes uproarious blend of Hollywood melodrama, social criticism, and avant-garde traditions.

In our research we discovered that in his early days, Fassbinder worked with another titan of post-war German performance: the legendary choreographer Pina Baush, pioneer of tanztheater, or dance-theatre. Noting many of the similarities in their approach to performance, Theatre historian David Pellegrini and Acting and Movement Professor Alycia Bright-Holland explore these correspondences with scenic and projections designer Kristen Morgan and costume designer Anya Sokolovskaya and thirteen versatile student performers. Approaching this production as a dance-theatre-media hybrid both of their legacies, and highlights their penetrating insights into the fragility of democracy—an imperative more urgent than ever.

Blood on a Cat's Neck will be presented in the Fine Arts Instructional Center's Proscenium Theater from October 12-15, 2023; October 12 at 5:30pm and October 13, 14 & 15 at 7:30pm.