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You are falling, but you never land.THE LONG FALL imagines a world suspended in contradiction – a space of constant motion where characters shift form, time loops without resolution, and realities collide. Inspired by the existential absurdity of being alive, the failures of assigned roles, and the blurred boundaries between play and performance, the work explores the combustible territory between childhood imagination, adult consequence, and theatrical illusion.
What does it mean when children play at war, or love, or death – enacting dramas they barely understand? And what happens when those same dramas become real, lived, or staged? Is the stage any less real than the battlefield, the bedroom, or the family dinner table? THE LONG FALL lives in this surreal overlap, where innocence and impact are tangled, where performance is both survival and surrender.
Set against an original electronic score by Marshall Chadbourne, the myth of the American mission – of family, of purpose, of safety – fractures. No promise can truly be kept. No victory comes without shadow. And still, we try. We fail. We try again. Our lives tumble forward in the chaotic current of time, and even as we fall through space, we brazenly and optimistically reach for one another. These exquisite moments of connection, caught between descent and delay, are the flashes of meaning against all odds.
My process begins with the body. Behavior that rises into high physicality becomes a portal into the surreal, emotional, and mythic. The pressure between bodies becomes a kind of truth-teller. The audience is present – not just as observers, but as witnesses, co-dreamers, and sometimes accomplices.
Creation is collaborative, volatile, and alive. I bring movement, text, images, themes, and tasks; the ensemble brings their interpretations – wild, grounded, broken, ecstatic. We construct a world from fragments and contradictions. A world that drifts between war-torn realities and absurd dream-states. Where the nuclear family is both icon and ruin. Where love is earnest and unspeakable. Where we fail beautifully, collapsing forward, haunted and held.
THE LONG FALL does not seek to tell a linear story, but to inhabit a state – a falling, looping, breaking, trying. It is a meditation on fragile persistence, on the way human beings continue inside impossible conditions. How even when the promise has been broken, the mission has failed, the family has splintered, we keep playing. Over and over, bending time into childlike loops: Are we there yet?
CAST & COLLABORATORS
Concept and Direction: Shannon Gillen
Choreography: Jason Cianciulli and Shannon Gillen, in collaboration with the performers
Choreographic Assistant: Katherine Kiessling
Performance: Jason Cianciulli, Tzveta Kassabova, Katherine Kiessling, and Samy Navarez
Guest Performance: Ruby Clay, Audrey De Guia, Emerson Forbes, Leah Kropp, Rachel McNaughton, Ava Menzel, Melisa Orduna, Olga Rabetskaya, Jessica Serres, Caitlyn Wade, Angelica White
Sound Score: Marshall Chadbourne with voice over by Sasha Lipinski
Lighting Design: Jess Fialko
Set Design: Jungah Han
Original Text: Shannon Gillen with excerpts from Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’
Backstage Operations Manager: Tiff Crutchfield
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Arthur Miller Theatre Walgreen Drama Center 1226 Murfin Ave Ann Arbor, MI 48109, 1226 Murfin Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1212, United States
