Institute History
Description
THE EVA LUNA PROJECT is a bilingual multi-cultural dance/theatre work that will be developed and produced in collaboration with the Salt Lake Acting Company and Artistic Directors Allen Nevins and Nancy Borgenicht. The work is based on five selections from THE STORIES OF EVA LUNA by Chilean author Isabel Allende, and combines dance, live music, and spoken and sung text in both English and Spanish. Like my previous work, TEN P.M. DREAM, which was based on the poetry of Anne Sexton, THE EVA LUNA PROJECT lurks somewhere between theatre, literature, and dance. The stories are both lyrical and mysterious, dark, funny, and erotic. Each is set in the hot, dreamlike, magical space between the tangible and intangible world and explores the inevitable forces at play between men and women. The text provides a narrative structure for the work, but rather than simple dramatization, I seek to illuminate its inner landscape and to reveal the complex emotion at its core through a collage of verbal and danced images. The sensibility of the language, as much as its substance, provides much of the inspiration for the piece. Capturing both the vibrancy of this language and the poetry of its images on stage requires that portions of the stories be told through movement and dance, and portions through sung and dramatized text. The challenge is doing this in such a way that both methods of story telling are integrated and not merely combined. Much of the work will be achieved through structured improvisation, with dancers and actors generating material which I will then shape and mold into the finished work. Substantial work has been completed on one of the Eva Luna stories, WICKED GIRL. At Sundance, I will focus on developing the text of two more of the stories, TOSCA and REVENGE, and will explore new methods of integrating the work of the ensemble of dancers and actors.
—Della Davidson