Dancing with Bishop

Conceived and performed by Saskia Hegt, Dancing with Bishop is a theatrical solo in which poems and letters by Elizabeth Bishop are combined with movement and music. The piece addresses the tension between staying and leaving, since most of the time we want both – like the sandpiper running from the ocean, and the next moment standing still, looking. Staying in a foreign country and thinking “should we have stayed at home and thought of here,” we travel, want to stay, but cannot because the plane is leaving. The past and the present melt into each other as Saskia Hegt paints for us who we are and how we cope in this world.

“a gripping and heart-racing portrait of the great poet Elizabeth Bishop […] a thrilling interior monologue for the actress. You can almost see the rhapsodic beating of the heart and the labyrinthine workings of the mind.” — Christopher Correa, Dance View Times

Elizabeth Bishop, an amazing poet, is a keen observer of nature, whose work appeals to all our senses. Bishop described the art of poetry as “the difficulty of combining the real with the un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.”

Saskia Hegt was born in Holland and has an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leiden, Holland and an M.F.A. in theatre from New York University. She was an actress in André Gregory’s Manhattan Theater Project (1969-1979) and appeared in their Obie Award-winning productions of Alice in Wonderland and Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night. Thereafter she worked with directors Anne Bogart, Stephanie Skura, Richard Schechner, Liz Swados and others. Her directing credits have taken her to Belgium, Holland, Germany, Canada and throughout the U.S. She is on the drama faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (Experimental Theatre Wing) and has been a guest teacher at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Saskia believes in inter-cultural exchange and has worked with artists in South Africa, Chile, Ecuador and Indonesia.