Photo: Michael Sharkey
I Want You To Want Me
Choreography and Text: Jack Ferver
Performers: Reid Bartelme, Barton Cowperthwaite, Jack Ferver, Carling Talcott-Steenstra
Costumes: Reid & Harriet Design
I thought I would try to make something for everyone. You know, like ballet or a good subscription audience kind of play. I consider myself a populist, but some people really hate my work. They even hate me they hate my work so much. So I thought: ‘Well, why don’t I make a really pretty ballet or a play about a straight couple and their issues?’ So that’s what I’m going to do. Oh, I also just wanted to say, that not everyone is going to make it. I don’t mean make it to the show. I mean make it out of the show alive.
“Ferver, as writer, choreographer, and director of I Want You To Want Me—this world of dancers real and reflected—is handling several elements: a tragic plot, a send-up of ballets with tragic plots, and dancing that is skillfully made and interesting to watch, but on-and-off parodies ballet steps and conventions. It’s also performed extremely well. So you laugh and admire and are puzzled all at the same time.”
“Mr. Ferver’s dance-theater works are campy, clever and refreshingly unhinged; here he mixes in some rigorous ballet choreography — he calls it ‘post-Balanchine witch’.”
“I Want You To Want Me is another triumphant piece of thoroughly engaging dance theater as only Ferver can create.”
PERFORMANCE HISTORY
2016 *The Kitchen: ADI/NYC. New York, New York
*Premiere
I Want You To Want Me was commissioned by American Dance Institute for ADI/NYC and received an AIRSpace residency from Abrons Art Center.