This weekend, Red Nightfall Dance Theatre will present Fractured Dawn, a new work that combines music, dance, film and verse. Artistic director Dorothy O’Shea Overby says it’s part of a larger universe that she’s been working on, in one form or another, for more than ten years.
“The larger project is called Crone, as in maiden/mother/crone, and it is a fantasy narrative universe that descended or downloaded into my mind way back in 2012, actually,” she says. “Honestly, it sat probably for two or three years in my brain before anything really happened with it. The first way that I thought I was going to communicate it – and I still am – is actually as a film, a series of dance films, or really rather a series of films that tell the story through movement and through action.”
Those films are still coming, Overby says, as part of a broader narrative universe that she’s creating. “This is a magical universe, by the way,” she says. “I'm a very geeky person. I love Tolkien and… all these things. And so everyone in this universe has magic.”
The Crone universe will be fantastical and also quite large. After letting it exist only in her brain for a while, Overby decided to start crafting her world in public, by creating stage shows that explore aspects of her vision. “This is the 2nd chapter,” she says. “In July, we launched the performance series [with the show Rituals of Light], and what we're doing with this performance series is we're world building. And so the idea is that since this is a large narrative universe, which will ultimately have lots of stories and hopefully several films and all of that, we need to build the world. And we just thought it would be fun to bring the audience in on that process. It's also a little vulnerable to bring the audience in on that process.”
To make her vision a reality, she’s drawing on some lifelong skills – she's been studying music and dance since childhood – and learning some new ones. “I'm not really studied in film,” she says. “It's been one of those skills I've been trying to build.” And she’s also finding other creatives to collaborate with.
“We're bringing in collaborators of all kinds,” Overby says, “because each of these performance series have dance, have live music, have an aspect of film. My other goal with creating this performance series that kind of world builds in public, is to build relationships with collaborators and truly to get other other voices in the writers' room… to build something bigger than myself.”
Fractured Dawn will feature dance, spoken word, and filmed pieces, and also live music from chamber music group Density 512. “[They’re] so cool, extremely adventurous, very collaborative, thinking outside the box, love to do wild and new things, which is great,” Overby says. “I love working with them.
“You know, [there aren’t] many pleasures in the world more powerful than being in a room full of creative people,” she says, “working like this together, creating something like this together. And to see the story – which, you know, started for me autobiographically – to see how it reaches other people, to see how they identify with it, to see how they deepen it… they come up with aspects of it I hadn't thought of before. I think it's wonderful... and I think it's also a little bit of creating a microcosm of a beautiful world, you know?”
'Fractured Dawn' will be performed November 14 - 16 at East Side Performing Arts Center.
