Paul Lazar

Paul Lazar is a co-founder, director, actor, and performer with Big Dance Theater, an influential American company that treats dance, music, text, and visual design as equal compositional materials. In 1991, Lazar founded Big Dance Theater alongside Annie-B Parson and Molly Hickok. Over three decades, the company has created hybrid works that draw from literary and documentary sources, often using collage rather than linear adaptation. Early productions including *Another Telepathic Thing*, *Mac Wellman's Antigone*, and *Plan B*—which interwove material associated with Kaspar Hauser and the Nixon Watergate tapes—established the company's distinctive approach to performance.

The company's sustained work earned widespread recognition. Big Dance Theater received an Obie in 2000 and a New York Dance and Performance Award for sustained achievement in 2002. In 2007, Lazar and Parson shared the inaugural Jacob's Pillow Dance Award. Additional recognition followed, including a Bessie in 2010 and the Prelude Festival's Frankie Award in 2014.

Lazar's most widely toured solo work, *Cage Shuffle*, premiered in 2017. In this piece, Lazar speaks one-minute stories from John Cage's *Indeterminacy* in random order while performing a fixed choreographic sequence created by Annie-B Parson. Composer Lea Bertucci provides the score. The work toured extensively, including a 2020 digital duet with Bebe Miller and performances at La MaMa, Japan Society, and other venues through 2024, demonstrating how choreography can remain ordered while language changes by chance, allowing meaning to arise from proximity and coincidence rather than illustration.

Into the mid-2020s, Lazar continued directing, acting, and developing new performance work. In 2025, he received an Obie for directing Jerry Lieblich's *Barbarians* and completed a MacDowell artist residency. His career demonstrates that dance history encompasses the artists who construct theatrical frames, perform choreographic systems, and create durable collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.