LED—GRACE (2026)

Photo: © Michelle Bliss

After an exciting and electrifying inaugural season, LED returns to the Dixon with a provocative program to kick off their 2026-2027 run. Grace (2026)—created, written and directed by Lauren Edson and Andrew Stensaas (Boise’s dance and music powerhouse couple)—leans into a polarized midterm election cycle coming to a head mere days away to frame an exploration of the nature of internal and interactional conflict. 

“This particular moment in our world is marked by so much conflict and unrest,” Edson and Stensaas write. “It can feel almost impossible to turn on the radio, the television, or read the news without encountering something catastrophic. We started wondering: what would happen if we distilled all of that conflict down to just two people? What if it starts with just two people? Two bodies. Two opposing ideas. Two people trying to figure out where they stand.” 

And, thus, the pas de deux becomes intriguingly politicized and harnessed to a bifurcated narrative structure: the wrestling mat and a 1940s dinner party. 

Grace begins with the wrestling mat. Bobby Lawrence and Jen Wieber, grapplers from The Garage, square off in gendered conflict. Of importance is to note that the conflict is embedded within the affirmative principle of competition. Even in the Biblical narrative of Cain and Abel where the two brothers compete to gain God’s favor, God does not punish Cain for killing his brother Abel but instead marks him. That mark is, surprisingly, one of protection so that anyone seeking to harm Cain will have damage come back at them sevenfold. I interpret that to mean that the intrinsic nature of conflict requires some system of confinement so that it doesn’t cascade unchecked, and competition grants conflict that instructive and restrictive structure. In order to engage athleticism there has to be respect for “the combination of rules, power, trust, control, and the very human desire to win” that Edson and Stensaas further note. “There is a structure everyone agrees to, and then there is everything happening underneath it. What is spoken. What is unspoken. What we show each other. What we hide.” 

Shift to the concealments and revelations (i.e., decorum) of the LED ensemble stylishly costumed by Chante Hamann to simulate a 1940s cocktail party, scored to music of the WWII period. Grace, embodied by the ever-elegant Cassidy Fulmer, has her own internal dialogue going on about how she presents herself as a woman, how she has been taught, and what is expected of her by others but, more importantly, by herself. Enter Joan (Colleen Loverde)—another strong and beautiful woman in her own right—who resists Grace’s feminine sovereignty and the sapphic tension of a conflictive pas de deux is on! Girl fight!! 

  

In past performances, LED has experimented with choreographing to the spoken word rather than music, but it veers on gestural and comic brilliance in Grace where the syncopation between speech and movement is thrillingly melded, achieved through an equally innovative use of voiceover shifting between male and female voices and levels of volume engineered by Daniel Congdon Focal Audio. 

After the intermission, the LED ensemble returns to the stage in wrestling singlets (not Piglets!) and so the theme of channeled conflict is readdressed. But the themes deepen. The conflict of individuality with uniformity is staged by each stating to the other wearing similar singlets that they “wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that”. Michael Baltzell’s scenic design of two huge squares on coasters moreorless becomes another member of the ensemble, creatively weaving in and out of the choreography and providing chalkboard surfaces for the ensemble to scribble commentary such as “More is None!” 

Photo: © Michelle Bliss

Standouts in Grace’s second act include Nick LaMaina’s tapdance sequence in frustrated competition with persistent and interruptive door knocking. Also, Annika Barlow’s hostile takeover of a microphone to instruct the audience on the parasite commonly found in crickets known as the horsehair worm (or hairworm) that famously has the ability to "mind-control" their hosts, turning ordinary crickets into submissive "zombies" to complete their bizarre lifecycle. The horsehair worm cannot complete its life cycle on land, it must return to water, but its final host—the cricket—is a terrestrial insect that normally avoids bodies of water at all costs. The worm hijacks the cricket's central nervous altering its response to light and gravity and ultimately forces the cricket to wander mindlessly until it finds open water and commits a “kamikaze dive.” It’s only then that the repeated chirping of crickets throughout the program gains an eerie poignance. 

So what is Grace saying about the conflict between informed choice and programmed behavior? How much say do we really have as individuals when it comes to our human propensity for conflict? How much are we steered by media and our political moments? In her studies of the chimpanzees of Tanzania, East Africa, Jane Goodall identified the in-group out-group tensions recognizable in the human species. Can we really resist the impulse to define ourselves as against the other? Of making fun of the singlet that we ourselves are wearing? Are we predisposed to being taken over at times by conflict such that we can barely recognize ourselves or our choices? 

Which brings me back to the zombie cricket who, after throwing himself into the water, experiences the hairworm bursting out of its abdomen or rear. The hairworm uncoils into the water, looking like an animated strand of dark spaghetti or a long horse hair. Multiple worms will often emerge from a single host and immediately twist together into a tight cluster—known as a "Gordian knot"—to mate and lay eggs, restarting the entire cycle. Surprisingly, if the cricket doesn't drown or get eaten by a fish immediately after impact, it will often survive the ordeal, crawl out of the water, and go back to its normal life on land. 

I guess you could call that conflict resolution. 

One final but essential praise for Grace. There are so many layers to this production. Edson’s signature imaginative choreography, the impressive talent and strength of the ensemble, the period costuming of Chante Hamann, the evocative spotlighting of lighting designer Chaz Gentry, the flexibility of Michael Baltzell’s scenic design, but Andrew Stensaas’s dexterity and mastery as a musician—piano, ukelele, drums—and the beauty of his soulful voice renders his original compositions and stylish covers exquisitely nuanced to the choreography at hand. The teamwork between Edson and Stensaas is seamless and impeccable.