Reporting from CHICAGO — If writing about music is, as the saying goes, like dancing about architecture, then what is dancing about radio?
Discover the answer when Ira Glass brings an unlikely dance-radio storytelling hybrid show to the Theatre at Ace Hotel on Saturday.
Have you ever been listening to Glass’ “This American Life,” perhaps in your driveway as you waited for the end of a story, and thought, “What if people were dancing to this in front of my car right now?”
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That you almost certainly have not is one of the things that inspired Glass and the Monica Bill Barnes & Company dance troupe to team for a show they’ve been touring for two years.
“What makes it work is that the mash-up is fun to watch,” said Glass. “It’s fun to see us figure it out.”
Typically as the show begins, “I definitely feel like there are question marks above the heads of the audience,” Glass said. “But there’s a point around 22 minutes in, where in every performance, the audience is like, ‘Oh, I get it. This is actually kind of a cool experiment.’ And then they trust us. Literally, there’s one moment in one of the dances where we can feel the audience relax.”
Without giving too much away, that moment, he said, involves a story about a middle school dance.
Titled “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host,” the show “has a slightly vaudevillian feel,” said Barnes, one of the dancers along with Anna Bass from her company. “And a kind of just homespun feel: This is us showing you what we do and who we are, like in ‘This American Life’ when you’re getting to know the reporter.”
Glass said “Three Acts” is one of the favorite things he has done: “The thing that makes it work, I think, is that Monica is super out to entertain, and we are too. The radio show is too.”
What makes it work is that the mash-up is fun to watch. It’s fun to see us figure it out.
— Ira Glass
“The project, I think, really surprised all three of us in how much we really love doing it,” said Barnes.
“What the show really advocates for is, for people who don’t consider themselves a typical dance audience, how accessible the art form can be. There’s a way in which Ira is framing, giving an unusual context to, an art form that a lot of people find alienating or hard to understand.”
The three acts are about being a performer, falling in love and nothing lasting forever, and the storytelling includes both Glass talking and his playing of recorded audio, some of it interviews with the dancers.
One piece he said he finds especially effective has Bass and Barnes talking about their relationship onstage as the audience watches them do a duet.
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(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) “They seem like the best of friends, but it turns out they’re really competitive,” Glass said. “So that’s the game. You feel like you have X-ray vision.”
The performance developed out of Barnes and Glass crossing paths, first at a local New York celebrity dance competition (“200 people in a bar,” Glass said). Barnes was a judge and Glass was a dancer, and “honestly it was pretty great,” Barnes said.
Glass a few months later went to see her company perform in New York, “and he just wrote the most generous email after the show,” said Barnes. “He said, ‘I feel like what you’re doing with dance is similar to what I’m doing with radio.’ He offered if he could help in any way.”
The similarities, Bass explained, include structural ones: the use of humor and tragedy, a cumulative power to the pieces, and a willingness to take an audience on a surprising detour.
At Glass’ invitation, Barnes choreographed dances for a couple of “TAL” live shows.
Then “Ira said, ‘We should just tour a few cities together,’” Barnes recalled. “I said, ‘Instead of just touring the dance show, why don’t we make up a new show and have you in it?’”
One of her main goals with the show that became “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host,” Glass recalled, was to bring new people to dance: “She said, ‘We feel like we’re always performing for dance people. No regular people go to dance.’”
But with the crowds coming much more from the public radio side of the partnership, “I definitely feel like I’m bringing new people to dance,” Glass said. “A lot of people have the experience at the show I had: ‘Oh, I like dance.’”
The plan as of now, he said, is to retire “Three Acts” after a performance next summer at the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
“One of the things that’s nice is I feel like no one’s ever going to try this again,” said Glass. “I don’t think the ‘RadioLab’ team are prepping their own dance show.”
Johnson writes for the Chicago Tribune.
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‘Three Acts,
Two Dancers,
One Radio Host’
Where: The Theatre at Ace Hotel, 929 S. Broadway, L.A.
When: 7 p.m. (sold out) and 10 p.m. Saturday
Tickets: $30 to $68.50
Info: www.acehotel.com/calendar/losangeles/threeacts7pm or (213) 623-3233
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