History

            Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman are composing and performing movement-based theatre artists, working together since 1991, who apply complex composed structures to ordinary daily human behavior. Notated movement scores often accompany their productions. In their collaborative work for theatre ‘natural-looking’ behavior is subjected to contortions, subversions and convolutions, letting ‘naturalism’ show its socially constructed face. They invent systems for organizing movement and speech in theatre, similarly to how new systems for organizing sound have been invented for composing music. Each theatre composition, utilizing a repertory of gestural-choreographic innovations invented by the duo, proposes a specific critical look at social life. These inventions include a technique for the orchestration of instantaneous shifts of time and place in complex patterns.  One of their interests is to lay new ground for composing form in theatre in a way that makes “theatre composition” closely analogous to music composition.
          

  Together and individually, Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman have originated and performed movement-based theatre works for the past 40 years, as a duo for the past 20 years, in tours across the US, in Eastern and Western Europe, Mexico, Cuba and South Korea, in large and small theatres, colleges, cultural centers, and national and international mime and theatre festivals in the US and abroad including the Copenhagen International Theatre Festival, the Third International Festival of Mime in Mexico, the seminal First International Mime Institute and Festival, Viterbo College, WI (1974), and the historic Gathering of Alternative Theatres, St. Peter, MN (1981); formed the internationally touring experimental theatre company United Mime Workers (’71-86’); received Artist Fellowships for original movement-based theatre from the Illinois Arts Council, and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Choreography Fellowship for experimental movement theatre. As working artists they have served the Illinois Arts Council, the Alliance for Cultural Democracy (ACD), and the local Urbana, IL, City Arts Task Force.  They are currently an active member company of the Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET). At times they are visiting faculty or guest artists at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA. They have been featured artists or artists-in-residence at the Columbia College Dance Center, MoMing Dance and Arts Center, Links Hall, and Prop Theatre, all in Chicago; Unit One at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Drake University, Des Moines, IA; Michigan State University Museum, Lansing, MI; the Haja Center, Sungmisan Village Theatre, and the international Seoul Youth Creativity Summit and Festival all in Seoul, South Korea; New College in Sarasota FL; Bravehearts Theatre and with TAPIT/new works at the Overture Center in Madison WI; the Wagon Train Project in Lincoln, NE; Seven Stages Theatre in Atlanta GA; Legion Arts CSPS in Cedar Falls, IA; the Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET) Gathering at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in New Orleans, LA; and since 1999 they have also taught and directed a student theatre ensemble doing original work at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Their history in New York City includes performances at Experimental Intermedia, the Dance Theatre Workshop, BACA Downtown, Roulette, the IRT Theater, and nearby upstate at the North American Cultural Lab (NaCL)

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