Bread and salt …. the traditional greeting gift to the Czar. In Bread & Salt (2004) we explore the interwoven byways of ceremony, custom, tradition, modernity and the role of chance or destiny in life. We bare the sometimes clashing perspectives—beliefs, really—that underlie the chance happenings of everyday life.
The clash of perspectives is made real through a single, universal life passage: marriage. It is explored through a single question of contradictory belief: do we shape our fate, or does fate shape us? In Bread and Salt the clash is imagined as occurring between the demands of customary, long-established, time-honored, accepted norms and the practices of people like us—even one might say, ourselves.
In a world ruled by modernity, gadgets, “stuff,” do-dads, thing-a-ma-jigs, it is often difficult to credit the different knowledge and wisdom of others, much less the potential existence of unseen forces in shaping our lives. Is it foolish to credit the workings of those forces? Do other peoples have wisdoms that we cannot appreciate? The audience, of course, is left to ponder the relative values and outcomes—Bread and Salt has no answers.
Produced and directed by Katie Elliott and Jim LaVita
Choreography by Katie Elliott with Jim LaVita
Performed by Josh Fink, Philip Flickinger, Lara Hayes-Giles, Eliza Kuelthau, Taryn Packheiser, Jennifer Thompson and Lynda White
Lighting design by Craig Bushman
Videoarchiving by Dave Andrews and Craig Hansen