More or less, I found myself at David Byrne’s American Utopia by accident. I had tagged along with my mother, who had announced she was coming to town for the express purpose of seeing it, and I arrived at the theater knowing nothing other than that it was David Byrne’s musical. Halfway through the second number, I was fumbling for my program. Who had made this choreography? It was unusual for a Broadway show: pedestrian and precise, unshowy, sometimes awkward—but satisfyingly so. This dancing looked more like it belonged in Judson Memorial Church, the seat of the downtown experimental dance scene in New York, than in a Broadway theater. I found my program under my seat: Oh, of course. Annie-B Parson.

Parson has been a luminary of the New York City dance and theater scene since the early ’90s, when she formed Big Dance Theater with director Paul Lazar (also her husband) and performer Molly Hickok. She did indeed come out of the Judson scene, and was influenced by its avant-garde sensibility. After seeing the work of German dancer Pina Bausch at age twenty-five, she also began to incorporate classical theatrical modes of storytelling into her work: character, costume, certain forms of plot. Big Dance Theater productions are ambitious works of formal and intellectual omnivorousness. Her 2021 work, The Mood Room, featured contemporary German house music, a narrative thread about 1980s Los Angeles and Reaganism, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, soap operas, and the Gnostic Gospels. Other recurring inspirations: ancient Greek tragedies, the Old Testament, braided hair, Thoreau, Kabuki, Russian folk dancing, classical ballet, and so on.