The Accursed Items

Through the wide-angle lens of the physical detritus of human life, The Accursed Items presents a moving portrait of humans and the myriad ways our lives can go astray: Poor communication, selfishness and vanity; the abuse of alcohol and other drugs; the deterioration of the mind and body through accidents and aging; and our general failure to get our shit together.

The Accursed Items uses, as narration, a text of the same name by acclaimed author J. Robert Lennon which illuminates the history and lingering psychic life of broken, misused and discarded objects – trash. To create the content of the show – the dances and dialogue – Andrew Dinwiddie turned to a particular kind of Accursed Item: deleted scenes and rehearsal videos from never-used and drastically reworked dances. He asked other dance and theater makers to donate rehearsal videos of material they had created but never used in a show, or from so early in a process that the taped material would be unrecognizable from the final product. Additionally, Andrew plundered the Deleted Scenes of DVDs for material that was left on the cutting room floor. With his outstanding cast, Andrew disemboweled and reanimated these lost dances and scenes into a new work of dance theater.

Alternately austere and rambunctious, The Accursed Items draws from material that wasn’t quite good enough for The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Big Dance Theater, Metallica, Stacy Dawson, Faye Driscoll, Levi Gonzalez and others.

The Accursed Items is a sympathy card for everything that was never good enough.