Me You Us Them (2014)

ME YOU US THEM is a theatrical piece utilizing text, dance, sound and projection to create the play’s language, physicalizing as well as describing for an audience the world onstage. This play is particularly complicated – the language is invented, at times broken making Dance and Sound as essential a mode of communication and, at times, a more articulate one than text. Two B-Boys find each other in a vacant lot, while a woman sits alone at her desk searching for answers on the Internet. Another B-boy arrives and an explosive connection is made between the boys and, when she figures out how to get there, the woman’s Avatar. Bound by a search for the Center of Things, the four new friends invent the ultimate battle plan. George Packer’s New Yorker article “The Anthropology of Insurgency,” inspired Andrea to explore friendship and insurgency. The article explained that while boys may find fuel in religious or territorial conflicts, friendship in a vacuum of want is the most powerful motivator. While the degree of desperation varies, there are many locations, here in the USA, other rich nations, and in storied “trouble-spots,” where children must fend for themselves. We approach this work feeling insurgency isn’t something foreign, but rather something familiar and near. The text and dance elements have equal weight as the play’s language. The boys express themselves with moves congruent with and sometimes in place of speaking. They are street dancers, virtuosic spinning on their heads, doing flips and dives, lifting each other and defying gravity. The woman has her own vocabulary of gestures where language fails her. She has trouble leaving her desk and quests to find a way to cross over “Where I could be a part of something bigger than me…” She is motivated by her discovery that “Insurgence begins in a vacuum of need with making a friend.”