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Big Time Miss
Rock Bottom Movement

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World Premiere

Toronto Talent

Performance

Big Time Miss
Rock Bottom Movement

  • Oct 2 - 5
  • In-Person at Betty Oliphant Theatre

A big dance for the moment the joke dries up. In Alyssa Martin’s Big Time Miss, a group of funny people are forced to dissolve their clownish selves in favour of their lush emotional interiors as they navigate the turbulence of their real lives. Set within a shape-shifting cloud of theatrical potential, Big Time is an absurdist dreamscape rooted in Rock Bottom Movement’s signature approach to unbridled, athletic contemporary dance theatre.

A world premiere, Big Time Miss is a surrealist dance epic that invites the real-life biographies of its dancers into a charged arena of reckoning, wherein funny people have to face unfunny feelings. With Rock Bottom’s signature clash of hyper-physicality and theatrical confrontation, Big Time Miss rediscovers what it means to be ambitious, soft, terrified and in love.

Big Time Miss features an original score collaboratively composed by indie superstars, Semiah and Jacob Vanderham. Semiah is a trailblazing Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) pop electro-RnB artist, known for her honeyed vocals that draw inspiration from RnB, Electronic, Hip-Hop, Post-Punk, Dreampop, and Indigenous Vocal Techniques. Jacob is a producer, songwriter, and performance artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal who creates music for film, theatre, and dance, as well as his alt-pop solo project, Telehorn.  

The full-evening work stars the dancers of Rock Bottom Movement, united by their near-decade-long collaborative bond, and is choreographed by company's Artistic Director Alyssa Martin. Bold, funny, and surprisingly touching, Martin makes dance that demands that you not look away, despite feeling unsure of what it is you are looking at. Forget what you think you know. Open your mind to the world of Rock Bottom Movement which Intermission Magazine calls, “as outrageous as it is intelligent".

View the Playbill for this program

FUN FACTS

  • Big Time Miss is creatively inspired by the movie E.T. and the musical, Cabaret.
  • In creating fantasy worlds from the dancers’ memories, Martin says she “seeks to create fantasy worlds for yours to blossom as you watch.”
  • The work is having preview performances in summer 2024 at Festival of Dance Annapolis Royal & Fredericton Playhous before the world premiere at FFDN.
  • Rock Bottom Movement won 3 Dora Mavor Moore Awards in 2023: Outstanding Original Choreography, Outstanding Production, Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble.

Developed with the support of Bulmash-Siegel Foundation; Supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Festival of Dance Annapolis Royal Creative Residency Program, The National Ballet of Canada