Title

The Eye is the First Circle

Authors

Office of Arts + Cultural Programming
PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

Date(s) of Performance

10/14/2021 - 10/17/2021

Directed by

Simone Dinnerstein, Laurie Olinder, Davison Scandrett, Simon Harding

Created by

Simone Dinnerstein

Performers/Artists

Simone Dinnerstein

Summary

With The Eye is the First Circle, Simone Dinnerstein ventures into bold interdisciplinary artistic territory in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett. Conceived, directed, and performed by Dinnerstein, this dynamic production deconstructs and collages elements from two iconic works of art-her father Simon Dinnerstein’s The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata no.2 (Concord). The Fulbright Triptych places a family portrait (including an infant Simone) within the tradition of medieval altar paintings, against a wall teeming with art historical references, and the Concord Sonata expresses the imaginative and natural world of the Transcendentalists through an ecstatic and fractured musical lens. Olinder pulls visuals including animated elements of the painting and real-time video to all points of the stage, and Scandrett’s lighting gives them breathtaking theatricality. Dinnerstein’s searching performance sits within this disorientingly immersive visual space. The piece asks: How do our origin stories mold us? How can a sense of self come from the musical and visual fragments we remember from childhood? The Eye is the First Circle shows us what it is to draw a new circle around the one we stand in, at the edge of what we can see.

Disciplines

Theatre and Performance Studies

Link to Full Performance Video

Simone Dinnerstein Performance Video

This video is available only to the Montclair State University community. Please log in with your NetID.

Link to Podcast

Talking Cure 19 -Simone Dinnerstein

Files

Additional Information

https://www.simonedinnerstein.com/