Event

Jessica Fudim-Sheepish

Sheepish- In Sheepish, winner of the 2006 Best of SF Fringe Little Bo Peep is determined to recover her lambs on the lam as she digs through virtual hillsides, wrangles cotton balls, serenades sheep-shaped clouds and obediently dances to the audience's instructions. In this multi-media, solo dance-theater piece, video backdrops and a dreamy soundscore of live concertina and recorded music set the stage for Bo's travels between a world of "what if's" and the here and now. Hope turns to hallucination as Sheepish wrestles with the question, "Who are we without the ones we love and how can they be gone when we think we see them everywhere?" Bo's delusions also test the definition of "flock"; perhaps our circle is bigger than we think.

Although Jessica Fudim's work has been described as "zany", "thrilling" and "sweetly surreal" the subtext digs deep. Fudim was inspired to create Sheepish when her stepfather passed away two years ago. "We knew logically that he was gone, but my mother and I kept thinking that we heard his footsteps in the house, or that we saw his shadow coming around the corner. There was a blurry line between what we wanted to be true and what we knew to be true." Fudim found an old gingham dress in her closet and decided to tell the story of loss and longing through Little Bo Peep's skewed perspective.

She has performed earlier versions of Sheepish at CounterPULSE's StreamFEST: Emerging Performance Festival and Rock 4 Art, The 418 Project in Santa Cruz, The Dance Palace in Pt. Reyes, Crash Cabaret at the Roxie Theater, the 2007 Women on the Way Festival and the EXIT Theatre. With unpredictable ingredients such as live crank phone calls, audience interviews and remote control lambs, the piece is never the same twice.