Eleanor Bauer
(Big Girls Do Big Things)
SAT JAN 14 . 8:30 PM
SUN JAN 15 . 4:00 PM
Run time: 60 minutes
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
An empty promise, a preemptive lament, a flirtation with expectations, a wrestling match with potential, whispering what should be shouted and singing what should be whispered, (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS) is a solo on scale, volume, extreme limits and the grey areas between them; on grandeur and vulnerability, hubris and humility, visibility and subtlety; on the fragile braggadocio of living large when less is more but more is also unmistakably more.
Eleanor Bauer invites the audience into the depths of the surface-oriented world of the performer, where the personal and the material are mutually imminent, where style is content, the ‘how’ is inseparable from the ‘what,’ and the difference between fiction and reality is irrelevant. Navigating the folds, surfaces, and transformative possibilities of a too-large bear suit, Bauer performs a series of metamorphoses that challenge, obscure, and exploit her diverse capacities as a performer, to exercise and exorcise questions about the use of self onstage.
Through surrender to the theater and its discontents, in (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS), self-expression drops the self and expression takes over.
“Ms. Bauer is a shape-shifter…lunging for her desperate pleasures as if her life depended on securing them, and earning our hearts in the process.” – Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times