Savage/Love

Joseph Chaikin called the play he created with Sam Shepard “…common poems of real and imagined moments in the spell of love.” This Dance/Theater version of Savage/Love (no relation to Dan Savage) is De Facto Dance’s first “set play”. Previous De Facto work focuses on choreographic structures that generate improvised dance/theater. De Facto brings a spirit of “improvisational remix” to Savage/Love. Music, movement, and movies reframe the collaborative, crystalline poems of Shepard and Chaikin. The result ranges from the poignant to the sublime to the violent to the ridiculous.

Like De Facto’s previous works, Savage/Love is ironic, but it uses irony to get closer to emotional truth, rather than to sidestep it. Simple, raw, intimate, immediate, ironic, incomplete, the play inhabits a world in which savages and innocents struggle to locate themselves and their lovers, and to put together the codes and keywords of trust, communion and desire. De Facto’s remix is a true marriage of movement and theater. The rehearsal process, like love itself, has encouraged artists on both ends of the dance-theater training spectrum to surrender habits and defaults to match the practices of the other. “De Facto charms with its simplicity and ingenuity” -Dance Insider.