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The creation process is challenging enough for an independent choreographer, vying for grants and rehearsal space and attention in a scattered environment. Add in a young child and an ailing parent, and suddenly the ordeal of daily existence takes on a palpable weight.
That is the premise of SISSY, a luminous new dance-theater work by Celia Rowlson-Hall, premiering this weekend at New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, with a cast that includes Marisa Tomei and Lucas Hedges. Sisyphus, in this imaginative retelling, toils not in the rocky underworld but at a run-down artist’s residency in the Hudson Valley, where an indefatigable director (Zoë Winters) and her six dancers are about to present the final showing of their two-week workshop. The audience—both the fictional one upstate and the real one in Manhattan—soon slips into a world where human-scale beach balls and painter’s buckets become a playground for physical investigation, where the tragicomedy of real life slips in through the cracks.
“Somehow I’ve always had a layer of protection between me and my work, even though it’s always been very personal,” says Rowlson-Hall, who has forged a career telling stories through movement. “In this one, that does not exist.” SISSY marks her return to the stage after nearly two decades as a filmmaker and choreographer for the screen. It’s also her first creative project after giving birth to Romeo, the now two-year-old son she shares with her wife, the director (and SISSY dramaturg) Mia Lidofsky.
The work initially took root during a residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center in September 2023. The couple, then staying in a West Village apartment, would walk up the High Line to the studio each day with six-month-old Romeo in tow. At the same time, Rowlson-Hall was dealing with the spiraling health crisis of her “angel-here-on-earth” father: a longtime public school teacher, cross-country coach, and practicing Christian Scientist who had largely lived outside the medical system. As he was shuttled between care facilities and hospitals in Virginia—a “losing uphill battle,” Rowlson-Hall says—plans for an evening-length iteration of SISSY were paused. But the idea of Sisyphus stayed with her. She read Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, about the millennia-old universe beneath our feet; another book described how “grief is like pushing through rock,” she says.
