The two years it took to complete Ulysses aged the three Headlong founders. "When Rosenbach approached us," said David Brick, "Amy [Smith] and Andrew [Simonet] and I questioned whether we wanted to take on a project that we weren't all that interested in. Did we really want to work on a piece this long? Were we ready?"
As they delved deeper into the book, the riptide of Joyce's text soon carried them with it. They realized that some material they had included earlier was perhaps gratuitous, there for an easy laugh. Like the text, they needed to draw out deeper levels in their work.
"In works like St*r W*rs, our approach was aphoristic," Brick said. "With Ulysses, you can't be aphoristic or linear. Working through its layers has already taken us to more coherent connections, a different stage of our creative life."
In residence with Ulysses at Lafayette College in January, they cut ruthlessly and crafted with maturity, adding nuance to one sequence and bravely eliminating a popular section that, though Joycean in concept, now seemed an add-on. They restaged the Language of Dance section, in which one person improvises a dance, and another describes it to a dancer offstage, who in turn tries to repeat the dance without having seen it.
"The piece is about those micromoments of miscommunication that come about in our relationships," Brick said, "and how we make sense of that jumble."
The Dance Celebration/NextMove series at the Annenberg Center has the edge on the new, the rough and tumble, and the older, more venerated dance troupes coming to town.
