Ira Glass, Monica Bill Barnes, Anna Bass: Three Acts, Two Dancers and One Radio Show Host
Sydney Opera House, 18 July
I’m a relative latecomer to Ira Glass’s Chicago-based radio show This American Life, but it has swiftly become a small beacon of joy in my weekly routine. With its tales deftly told by Glass and his team, This American Life is about stories; about examining life closely, about discovering the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. So when I heard that Glass had created a show in collaboration with dancers Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, I was just a little bit excited.
Entitled Three Acts, Two Dancers and One Radio Show Host, the first incarnation of the show was performed at New York's Carnegie Hall in 2013. With his trademark understated wit, Glass remarks that, prior to its debut, there had been “no popular demand” for a show combining radio and dance. From my perspective, as a dance critic and Glass fangirl, however, the concept behind Three Acts, Two Dancers and One Radio Show Host needs no justification.
Three Acts, Two Dancers and One Radio Show is not, in any case, a show that merely blends dance and radio. Instead, dance is both a vehicle for telling stories and a subject of the stories themselves. Drawing on his extensive back-catalogue of radio interviews (This American Life first aired in 1995), Glass probes the art form. He takes us on stage with Anna Bass as she navigates a dance partner who “steals attention”. He invites us to slow dance awkwardly at the American middle school dance. He ponders how dancers in long-running shows perform without seeming “like gum that has been chewed too many times.” He takes us inside the poignant reality of a career that has a limited and unpredictable lifespan. He asks the ultimate question. How do you end a dance show?
The dancers themselves, Barnes and Bass, are a powerhouse pair. Versatile, they move from the comic to the poignant with ease. Sassy numbers see them skip and strut, arms whirling and legs flying. In a tender table-top duo, as one life slips away the other is left in grief.
That thread of loss runs through this show. Hugely and intelligently comical, it’s also peppered with disappointment, disillusion and death… and yet it was euphoria not sadness that I felt as I floated out of the auditorium.
I was high on the joy of seeing Glass, a master of his craft, live on stage, and of watching him apply that craftsmanship to dance.