What happens when a bad joke becomes a dance?
In A Deer Walks into a Dance, Victoria Marks takes a familiar joke setup — “So, a horse walks into a bar…” — and turns it into a playful, unexpected exploration of identity, language and human connection.
“There is no deer in the dance,” Marks notes, “only a case of mistaken identity.”
The work asks what happens when the words we use to describe ourselves and one another become labels that can limit us, divide us or even be used against us.
“The joke is built on the absurd idea that description could be more important than every other aspect of sensory experience,” says Marks. “I thought of it as a ‘post-modern’ joke, because it ironically emphasized verbal description over every other way of knowing. I used to think that joke was funny.”
Marks has long been interested in how dance communicates beyond words. Her attention to the work of disabled dance artists experimenting with audio description — the practice of narrating the visual experience of a dance for blind and low-vision audiences — opened another set of questions: How do you put a primarily visual, time-based experience into words without reducing it to words? How might we describe what we see, what we experience and who we are without insisting on a single, authoritative answer?
“I love dancing precisely because it constantly invites multiple registers of attention and possibility,” Marks says.
Created collaboratively by Marks and performers Rian Alcid, Maya Billig, Karen Chuang, and Aaron Mason, and with original music by Simon Chernow, A Deer Walks into a Dance plays in the gap between what we see, what we say, and what we think we know.
The piece resists easy interpretations. Marks hopes the dance offers something more compelling: the fortitude to connect with one another.
Please note:
The October 16 performance will include an option for live audio description for blind and low-vision audience members.
The October 17 performance is currently out of available tickets, however a number of additional tickets will be released soon — join the waitlist to be notified first.