For more than two decades, the Obie Award-winning Big Dance Theater has been making uncategorizable, galvanizing work that gleefully undermines genre boundaries. The company’s latest effort is a portrait of Samuel Pepys, the outlandish 17th-century politician whose obsessive, tell-all diaries are a startling precursor to our own social media culture. The ensemble weaves music, dance, video, and text in an exploration—part celebration, part inquisition—of the moral murkiness of Pepys’ legacy as statesman and notorious philanderer, juxtaposing his own writings with the radical feminism of his contemporary, the playwright Margaret Cavendish, and the cult of online annotators at pepysdiary.com.

Approximate run time: 1 hour and 15 minutes without intermission

This event is part of the 2018/19 Berkeley RADICAL programming initiative, Women’s Work. Learn more and watch videos >