Titled “Avalanche,” the piece explores the performer’s body over a lifetime of stage work, and the idea of an ordinary life. If you keep performing, “Avalanche” proposes, you find something new — something bigger and wilder, and more ordinary. You find your actual body.

“Avalanche” was directed by Headlong co-founder David Brick with invaluable input from Amy Smith and company dramaturg Mark Lord, in collaboration with the five performers — Todd Coulter and Annie Kloppenberg of Colby, and Rachel Boggia, Carol Dilley and Michael Reidy of Bates.

“There’s something about being middle-aged now where I feel my body more, in all ways, including its lumpy, tender messiness,” said Brick. “Somehow it seems important to put that awareness together with the sensation of space itself — the ubiquitous substance that is not our bodies, but that presses against us wherever we are.”

Coulter and Kloppenberg are assistant professors of dance and theater at Colby. Boggia is assistant professor of dance at Bates, Dilley is associate professor and director of the Bates dance program, and Reidy is senior lecturer in and managing director of theater and dance.

The stories in “Avalanche” twist to become at once hilarious and heartbreaking. Ultimately, the piece celebrates and laments the body in ways haunting, visceral and exquisitely formal.

“Bury them in an avalanche of love,” says a dancer in “Avalanche” as she recalls her younger self, “and you won’t ask anything in return.”

“Look across the wings at your friends, say a little prayer to lose 40 pounds instantly and enter.”

Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information, call 207-786-8294.

Headlong Dance Theater

Brick and Smith founded Headlong Dance Theater with Andrew Simonet in 1993. Informed by a deep commitment to collaboration, humor and formal experimentation, Headlong has won many fans and much acclaim including a Bessie Award and a Pew Fellowship.

Hailed as “fiendishly inventive” (The New Yorker) and “bright and brash” (The New York Times), Headlong’s work has been presented at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York’s Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122 and Central Park Summerstage; the Jade Festival and the Kyoto Arts Center in Japan; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Portland (Ore.) Institute for Contemporary Art.

About Bates College

Located in Lewiston, Maine, and engaged worldwide, Bates is broadly valued as a leading national college of the liberal arts and sciences, attracting 2,000 students from across the U.S. and around the world. Since 1855, Bates has been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts and sciences, educating the whole person through creative and rigorous scholarship in a collaborative residential community.

Bates has always admitted students without regard to gender, race, religion or national origin, boldly embracing the transformative power of difference, cultivating intellectual discovery and informed civic action, and preparing leaders sustained by a love of learning and a commitment to responsible stewardship of the wider world.

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