“As a stagehand you sit in the dark for many, many long hours. You wear black all the time, like you are perpetually at a funeral. You are not supposed to be seen. You are not supposed to be heard. Your skill set can sometimes resemble your suffering, your isolation.” — Karen Sherman*

Sherman—a dancer, choreographer, artist, writer, and stagehand—understands the tensions between backstage workers and the performers they support, and the dark space proximate to but excluded from the spotlight.

This sense of erasure informs Sherman’s dance/theater piece SOFT GOODS—presented this weekend by CAP UCLA—”an examination of the lives lived backstage, the lonesomeness of theaters, the spectral beauty of a lighting focus, the choreography of labor, and the labor of dance.”**

 

KAREN SHERMAN—SOFT GOODS, Saturday, October 7, at 8 pm.

FREUD PLAYHOUSE, MACGOWAN HALL, UCLA, Los Angeles.

*  mprnews.org/story/2016/12/06/soft-goods-turns-dance-spotlight-backstage-karen-sherman

**  cp.ucla.edu/calendar/details/karen_sherman

Karen Sherman (light gray shirt, facing camera), Soft Goods. Photographs by Euan Kerr. Image credit: MPR.