We have it on good authority that “Liaisons” will soon be taking place in living rooms around Park Slope.
Beginning Saturday, Bedford-Stuyvesant-based choreographer Edisa Weeks’s Delirious Dances will be presenting her latest work, “Liaisons,” within the intimate confines of Brooklyn apartments.
“I got tired of hearing complaints that audiences aren’t going to the theater anymore,” said Weeks. “I thought, ‘why not bring dance to people in their homes?’ ”
“Liaisons,” whose themes include relationships, connections and intimacy, puts the performers and audience in close proximity, with the dancers occasionally using audience members as part of the show.
“I love being able to shift and stretch boundaries,” said Weeks.
Inspired equally by her former partner being hospitalized and immobilized with cancer and by attending a screening of the film “Outfoxed” — “I’d gone to a screening of the movie in someone’s home,” she said, “and what was wonderful for me was to gather with a group of strangers I didn’t know. I started to wonder if I could create a similar experience with dance” — Weeks decided to mount “Liaisons,” a 50-minute performance, in apartments.
While Weeks was turned off by the cost of renting a theater, creating a piece to be performed in a living room presented other obstacles for the daring dance-maker.
“Living rooms generally do not have a lot of space,” she said. “I had to radically rethink how I dance, move, create work. Each space has its own quirks. The dancers have to figure out how to orient themselves in the new environment.”
Weeks performed “Liaisons” in living rooms in Berlin and has performed other works in Newark, Staten Island, Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard. If funding permits, she would like to take “Liasons” to living rooms around the world.
“It is a way for modern dance to interact with ordinary people’s lives,” said Weeks, “so it’s not an elitist or incomprehensible art.”
Delirious Dances’s “Liaisons” will be performed at 8 pm on Feb. 8 and Feb. 9 at a private home (14 Prospect Pl. between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Park Slope) and on Feb. 16 at a private home (340 Eighth St., apartment four, at Sixth Avenue in Park Slope). For information, call (917) 714-1293 or visit www. myspace.com/liaisonsdance.
