Rough and Tumble: Pickled Peaches and Herring

Overview

 Rough and Tumble: Pickled Peaches and Herring is an up close and hyper-personal tongue and cheeky look at life’s hopes and disappointments. Buckle up to be taken on a rough and tumble, show and tell clown-dance-burlesque-theater and somewhere in between ride that acknowledges how pain is so close to pleasure; loss so close to love.

Asked about her work, Lillian cites the writing of David Whyte and bell hooks who propose a love that can carry grief; that the erotic as the space of aliveness and possibility between individuals can contain the celebration and the grief of life together as one. Looking towards live performance as a vehicle for this erotic space of aliveness and the 6th stage of grief– meaning-making, and a space in which humor is a crucial means of survival and celebration, within Rough and Tumble: Pickled Peaches and Herring, Lillian looks to her relationships with relatives dead and living across a watery expanse of love and loss and a the legacy of pickled foods and raw feelings left behind. 

Lead Artist Lililan Ransijn is an overthinking Dutch/American elegiac clown from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania.  Raised by parents from Amsterdam and Atlanta, she followed her mother’s “magnolia-mouthed” footsteps down to the the American South.  Betrothed to become a doctor, yet destined to become and dancer, she earned a BA in Dance and Theater from Emory University in Atlanta, GA (2005).  She is also a 2016 graduate of UArts/Pig Iron’s MFA program for Devised Performance Practice here in Philadelphia, where she is thankful to have her long-standing collaborator Francesca Montanile, as well as the performers who appear both in the flesh and on screen in this original work.

 

Lillian Ransijn/Human Resources

Lillian Ransijn is Philadelphia-based dance theater artist who employs the moving body and theatrically framed personal storytelling to plumb the depths of grief, loss, and missed connection. Driven by what some call the 6th stage of grief—meaning-making— her works for stage and screen find beauty in the grotesque and humor in the ludicrous challenge of moving through and metabolizing every day life and inherited lifetimes. A graduate of Emory University's Dance and Movement Studies and Theater Programs and Pig Iron/UARTS M.F.A. in Devised Performance Practice, she is dedicated the cross-pollination of artistic forms through ensemble-driven work. Lillian has performed with Amanda Byars, Nichole Canuso, Susan Eldridge/DENSE, Greg Catelleir, The Lucky Penny, Claire Porter, David Dorfman, Dance Truck, Ellisorous Rex and the Dance Machine, Fly-By Theater, Helen Hale, 7 Stages, Eva Steinmetz Project, The Peekaboo Revue, Theater Emory, Urban Movement Arts, and Wolfthicket/Lily Kind.

Credits

 Lillian Ransijn-Lead Artist, Francesca Montanile-Director, Mieke Duffly, Iris Seaman, Dylan Smythe-- Creator-Performers, Amalia Colon-Nava, Queen Powell, Caitlin Green, Chelsea Murphy--Contributing Artists