Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip!

Members of the dance-theater company,  Lucky Plush Productions.
Members of the dance-theater company, Lucky Plush Productions.

Julia Rhoads’ much-loved dance-theater company, Lucky Plush Productions, takes a deceptively lighthearted approach to serious subjects.

Inspired by pulp novels and comic books, artistic director Julia Rhoads, composer Michael Caskey and video designer Liviu Pasare explore the obstacles that do-gooders face, all in a high-octane blend of winning performance, humor and passion.

According to Diana Wortham Theatre Managing Director John Ellis, “SuperStrip is a tremendous pick for Asheville and one of our most anticipated performances this season. It’s a fun and humorous show: a highly-entertaining collision of content and forms.”

Featuring Lucky Plush’s signature blend of nuanced dialogue, complex choreography, and off-the-cuff improvisation, SuperStrip follows a group of washed up superheroes attempting to reinvent themselves by starting a non-profit think tank for do-gooders.

Complex training missions and specialized movement techniques bring structure to their collective, but the unlikely supers are unable to find a shared mission and brand. In the struggle to achieve consensus, they discover that real-world problems are far more complex than singular forces of evil, and that having power is part of the problem.

“Lucky Plush brings the best combination of smart and funny I have ever seen in contemporary dance. Julia Rhoads creates fantastic worlds full of great storytelling and even better dancing,” says Kristen Brogdon, former GM of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and former Director of Dance Programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (currently Director of the Office of the Arts at UNCW). “Seriously, don’t miss this show.”

Though Rhoads has fun weaving in riffs on the exhausting trend of hyper-personal branding and the tropes of meeting culture, the themes of SuperStrip are particularly relevant to her experience leading a nonprofit and the tragicomic circularity of organizational efforts in order to simply “do good.”

“So often organized efforts to effect change – to improve workplace, community, or more broadly to make the world a better place – can be incredibly circular, stunted by non-consensus, or limited by the politics that frame the efforts,” explained Rhoads. “While the characters of SuperStrip are invested in deeply held values, they are challenged to uphold their importance within contemporary platforms that support empty self-promotion and flavor-of-the-day innovation, like so many people today from all walks of life.”

Ultimately, SuperStrip reveals how communication is constructed, breaks down, and evolves within insular communities, and “trips the light fantastic” on everyday do-gooders who strive for high impact with limited resources.

Lucky Plush is the recipient of two National Performance Network Creation Fund awards, two NEFA National Dance Project Production Awards and Production Residency Awards, a NEA Art Works grant, an Illinois Arts Council Artstour Award, and a Metlife New Stages in Dance Award.

Catch Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip at the Diana Wortham Theatre, Friday and Saturday, February 26 and 27, at 8 p.m. To obtain more information or to purchase tickets, call the theatre’s box office at (828) 257-4530 or visit www.dwtheatre.com.

Lucky Plush Productions Artistic Director Julia Rhoads leads pre-performance discussions at 7 p.m. prior to the February 26 and 27 performances, in The Forum off of the main lobby. Pre-show discussions are free to ticket holders. Seating is limited and offered on a first come, first served basis. We regret that patrons may not be admitted to pre-show discussions after 7:10 p.m.

The entrance for the Diana Wortham Theatre is marked by the location of the theatre’s marquee between 12 and 14 Biltmore Avenue. Patrons enter the theatre through the breezeway between Marble Slab Creamery and White Duck Taco, and into a large interior courtyard with multiple glass doors to the theatre’s main lobby and box office.