“Heading into Night” at The Cherry Arts

Cirque du Soleil clown Daniel Passer and Cornell professor of performing and media arts Beth Milles are co-creating a clown play about memory at The Cherry Arts for two weekends.

Opening night is March 17 at 7:30 p.m. The full list of showtimes and ticket information can be found on The Cherry Arts website.

Milles and Passer met in the graduate theater school at Harvard which Milles explained is a very experimental theater. This experimentation with theater and performance is something they have both carried with them throughout their careers and practices.

Passer said the show is inspired by a news article he read about a village designed for people in cognitive decline. The article explained changes this village was implementing for their patients, specifically around how they responded to memory issues.

“They were correcting people saying ‘no this is who you are’ and ‘this is the year and what’s going on,’ and it was making everyone involved anxious and nervous,” Passer said. “But then this one place installed a bus stop, with no bus planned on coming, for patients to be able to sit at and eventually a nurse or staff would come out and sit with them, talk with them, like people might at a bus stop.” 

He continued to say that by doing this, care providers were able to calmly and slowly help patients figure out the situation on their own, or were able to gently guide patients back to the care facility, without anyone feeling upset or anxious about the situation.

“What was crazy about the research I was doing and that article was that I had heard the same story on a radio station shortly after,” Milles said. “It was a morning radio station that I don’t often listen to. My research was on cognitive health in the pandemic and then here comes this article.”

Milles and Passer said that the work they both enjoy doing is about joy and discovery, but that this topic is often about forgetting and is very difficult for many families. They are trying to look at the situation with a different lens.

“We are trying to engage in the discovery of something after one forgets,” Milles said.

Both are writers, performers, and directors of theater and tend to take an experimental path with how they create performances. This is exactly what they are doing by focusing on the discovery that can come with memory loss. 

“Looking through the lens of clown, and bringing a sense of joy and childlike innocence to the theme of memory, has been a rich landscape to explore,” Passer said. “I love collaborating with Beth and dreaming up the impossible and striving to bring it to life.”

For Passer and Milles, experimental theater has included comedy, audience interaction, clowning, and experimental pre performance. Passer is widely known for his clown work in many performances and theaters, including Cirque du Soleil. He is also on the faculty for California Institute of the Arts as well as an associate director of performance there.

“I took a course on clowning my first year [at Harvard] and it was very different from anything I had ever experienced,” Passer said. “It’s not necessarily clowning like we in the United States think it is; it’s very vulnerable, very raw, and very open and just filled with joy.”

Milles added that this project has really been an accumulation of Milles’ research, the work they have done together and individually, and is a passion that they share. 

“One of the things that I really enjoy is getting to work with some of my oldest and dearest friends,” Milles said. “We really understand the initiation of what we care about and have passion for this.” 

Both are excited for this opportunity to play with the performance of joy and to then spark joy in the audience.

“To have Beth and Daniel creating a piece using clown, it is one of the most ancient and beautiful kinds of movement performance. It’s a sophisticated kind of performance,” said The Cherry Arts’ artistic director, Samuel Buggeln. “I think anyone who sees the show will really get a sense of how profound that kind of character work can be and will just really enjoy it.”

Buggeln said he, and The Cherry Arts team, are excited for “Heading into Night.” He is excited to have two very talented people “incubating” this show right in Ithaca. He also described The Cherry Arts as the perfect place for this kind of performance because the cherry is a “multi-arts hub that creates spaces for collaboration and experimentation across artistic and cultural boundaries.”

“Beth is an extraordinary director of this kind of work and she and Daniel are long, long term collaborators. And, uh, of course Daniel’s just a genius and very much at the top of his game,” Buggeln said. “We’re just really lucky to have him here in Ithaca. This play will tour all over the place, and it’s just very, very exciting to have developed it here at the Cherry and to be showing it to Ithaca first.”

Milles and Passer are very excited to share this performance-experience in Tompkins County. They did not give too many details of the show outside of the story it is born from. 

“We’re provocateurs or instigators because we’re instigating an event with the audience and not being afraid of that,” Milles said. “I do not think of experimental theater as something that’s so out there and people can’t access. To me, it is hyper-real. It’s about this moment that we’re sharing right now and ‘how does that feel?’” 

The show will be available live and via livestream on the cherry’s website. Other performances for the 2022-23 season can be found on their website as well. Buggeln, Milles, and Passer all urge the community to come out to the performance for a show and personal connection.