CalArts Students Bring Unique Adaptation of The Tempest to East Coast Tonight

Dancing Behind My Eyelids: Scene 4 from Hopelandic Theatre on Vimeo.

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Dancing Behind My Eyelids, the original performance piece created by School of Theater students Samantha Shay and Chelsea Didier based on The Tempest, is receiving its East Coast debut this evening (Jan. 4) in Cambridge, Mass., at Club Oberon, the second stage of the American Repertory Theater (ART).

Additional performances follow tomorrow night, and next week on the 11th and 12th.

Dancing Behind My Eyelids is directed by Shay and choreographed by Didier—both of whom are fourth-year undergraduates in the School of Theater’s Acting Program. The pair’s re-imagining of the fantastical goings-on on Prospero’s island offers an eclectic mix of Shakespeare, Icelandic electronica, acid rock, cirque, and various genres of dance from ballet to contact improv to monkey Kung Fu.

Premiered on campus last May and reprised at the Alumni Reunion in October, Dancing is following its run at Oberon with engagements at Center Stage Theater in Santa Barbara in May and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the summer.

Dancing Behind My Eyelids was developed largely because of Chelsea’s and my exposure to a wide variety of artists through the CalArts School of Theater that we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be exposed to in a more traditional acting program,” Shay told Business Wire recently.

Dancing is produced and presented by Shay and Didier’s Hopelandic Theatre Company, whose name derives from the invented language coined by the band Sigur Rós.


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