In development, 2027–2028. A new work by Joseph Hernandez / Blue Screen.
Score by August Hernandez, arrangements by Barret Anspach.
In BIG BAND, dancers and musicians enact more than a century of concentrated research into time: how it looks, and how it feels, to experience time as a group. They stop and start, teach and learn, come together and fall apart, because they choose to. They light the path ahead as far as they can see it, and they listen for instructions when the future becomes hard to make out.
In this iteration, BIG BAND works from a hypothesis: jazz and related cultural activities are a manifestation of the complex thinking that has always guided human-centered decision making. We need to be able to let things grow and combust in order to investigate a way forward. Jazz does this thinking out loud, in real time, in what we call performance time: time made to be looked at and felt together. This kind of critical time demands our attention because of the urgency of what it holds, or has the capacity to hold.
We know that our experience of the world feels as though it is spinning out of control, and for most people on the planet, this is not new. The violence we are witnessing now continues a long cycle of solipsism and dysregulation. Complacency, once enjoyed by the many comfortable participants in nationalist projects, is available to fewer and fewer people. There is no going backwards, and no easy solution. What’s left is complexity, leaning forward, and improvising together. BIG BAND invites performers to investigate and demonstrate what a future might look like: how a group can think collectively, trust itself, and work toward something shared when no one knows what happens next.
Phase 1: residency at On the Boards, Seattle, March 2027, with a work-in-progress showing on March 14. Development residencies through 2027. Seattle premiere in the Central District in 2028.
→ Download the BIG BAND booklet (PDF)
→ Support BIG BAND | Fiscally sponsored by Velocity Dance Center, Seattle
→ Presenters and partners: blue.screen.dance@gmail.com
Photos by Stefano Altamura, Erin O’Reilly and Laura Hernandez