Bored on Earth? There’s another world to visit this weekend — a planet where the arts are not just a pleasure, but biologically essential to life itself.
Your interstellar journey begins in Vineyard Haven, outside the historic Capawock Theatre, where choreographer-performer-producers Abby Bender and Jesse Jason opened their new show Wish You Were Here last Friday night.
Wish You Were Here continues this Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. with an afternoon performance Saturday at 4 p.m.
Another imaginative work in the vein of Rizing, the creative duo’s Halloween production last year, Ms. Bender and Ms. Jason’s new show tells a shaggy-dog space story through a vaudevillian mix of mime, radio drama, stand-up comedy, audio collage, tableaux vivants, karaoke and even a mock TedX talk, complete with whiteboard.
But the heart of their work is always dance, and Wish You Were Here has some exhilarating moments. One of them comes at the very outset of the piece, so it’s important to be on time. However, arriving at the Capawock early isn’t necessary, as everyone is admitted at once. That’s because Wish You Were Here begins by transporting the audience through a wormhole in space — never mind how, that’s a spoiler — to arrive at a planet only Ms. Bender can pronounce.
“Did you really think you were just voluntarily strolling into a theatre?” she asked from the stage.
Ms. Bender and Ms. Jason play a pair of choreographers who meet when they’re both wormholed to the planet by its all-female denizens to help create the next generation via asexual reproduction, which can only take place when these space women are truly delighted by the arts.
The resulting revue, featuring dancers Hannah Burbidge, Nia Dubon-Robinson, Laura Sargent Hall and Claire Page as the shiny green aliens, makes full use of the Capawock’s facilities, with performers popping up — sometimes literally — from the seats, the projection booth and other unexpected spots.
While avant-garde in its conception, Wish You Were Here — like other Bender/Jason works — steers well clear of the highbrow, with more Spice Girls than Mozart in a musical line-up that also included Pink Floyd, Jean-Michel Jarre and Pat Benatar.
Puns, wordplay and rimshot-worthy one-liners are plentiful, sparking frequent laughter at last Saturday’s performance from an audience with an age range that appeared to start around 11.
Unlike their somewhat spooky Rizing and serious-minded ThRough, the duo’s May, 2021 response to the Covid pandemic, Wish You Were Here is light-hearted from start to finish. Saturday’s hour-long show concluded with a return trip through the wormhole, after which audience members were offered nourishment in the form of individual popcorn bags.
Wish You Were Here is a program of the new Built on Stilts Collective, an extension of Ms. Bender’s long-established Built on Stilts fall festival, which returns for its 26th season August 11 though August 13 and August 20 through August 22 at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs.
Ms. Jason’s next project, titled Process: A Collaborative Creation and presented by Pathways Arts, takes place July 16 at Tisbury Waterworks. The event will bring together writers, musicians and movement artists, with Ms. Jason as facilitator, to create a new work in one day.
Tickets for Wish You Were Here are available online at eventcreate.com/e/you.
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