Working Title Dance Theater
Third Person Scenario
3AM Theater
September 26, 2026
Artistic Director: Isaac Martin Lerner
Choreography: Isaac Martin Lerner in collaboration with the dancers
Dancers: Emily Aslin, Kaitlyn Hawkins, Elinor Kleber Diggs, Isaac Martin Lerner, Matthew Spangler
Lighting Design: Kyle Driggs
Third Person Scenario begins with death. Yet even as we witness blood oozing from a wound on the chest of Isaac Martin Lerner, dancer and Artistic Director of Working Title Dance Theater, the scene is not macabre. Lerner’s movements echo this ooze as he melts bonelessly into the floor, suddenly finds verticality, and then melts again, the blood creating abstract splotches and trails across the white stage floor. What unfolds from his magically weightless yet deeply earthbound solo is a portrait of a community coping with loss, both individually and together. As more dancers enter, they collect his blood on their clothing and hands, depositing it on each other and the floor beneath them- a reminder of the new reality they are navigating.
Effectively sparse in structure, Third Person Scenario gives audiences the visual space to experience the many facets of loss: inertia; the feeling of time stretching endlessly and then rushing back when reality hits; sudden bursts of hyperactivity followed by eerie slowness. At times, a pair of dancers moves slowly and sculpturally; at others, one carries another across the stage, providing visceral imagery of the heaviness of grief and the slow fog of emergence. Dancers often watch one another, bearing witness to each other’s experience without filling the space with a response. Lerner uses counterpoint often and to great effect throughout the evening, embodying the dissonance between individual experience and collective reality. In one section, two dancers roll repeatedly over each other’s backs, replacing one another to lie prone on the floor. In another, one couple moves sculpturally in a repeated phrase while another pair entwines at a quickening pace. Lerner is part of the action. Although his character is dead, he remains physically engaged with those left behind, continually taking new shape through their memories and experiences.
Those experiences range in texture from tender to combative, angry to exhausted. Themes of pulling each other up and falling back down recur, while liquid vignettes appear and reappear with different performers assuming the same poses, shifting how we perceive them each time. Dancers walk slowly backwards toward the audience, stop to watch other dancers, or simply stare into space or at the floor, seemingly lost in their own internal landscapes. When they move together, their movements are related but rarely identical, giving us a sense of individual perspective within a shared experience and mirroring the strange collectivity of something as isolating as loss. Lerner and Matthew Spangler perform an intensely emotional duet, at times moving smoothly together, at others pushing, pulling, and attempting to replace each other in space. Eventually, their struggle is spent, and they collapse on the floor. Performer Kaitlyn Hawkins repeatedly tries to drag them away, but each, in turn, crawls back to the site of their collapse. She drags, pulls, and lifts the two men, the strain increasingly visible on her face and audible in her labored breathing. Still, she persists. The repetition becomes wrenching: no amount of effort can force them forward, just as grief itself refuses to be hurried along.
Compositionally, Third Person Scenario is reminiscent of an abstract painting- a large canvas awash with complementary lines and forms. Clusters of moving relationships are offset by still shapes, drawing attention to each without allowing either to overwhelm the other. The shifting blood spatters and streaks across the floor and dancers’ bodies add to that effect. The work takes on the quality of liquid architecture, continually building and dissolving itself and allowing us to move through its shifting landscape alongside the dancers.
In the end, Hawkins folds Lerner’s discarded shirt, cradling it in her arms like a precious child before walking offstage, her head and shoulders bowed. It is a poignant ending to a work that does not attempt to offer answers to the questions left by loss. Rather, Third Person Scenario invites us to witness people processing a life that has ended and, in doing so, contemplate our own responses to an experience we all must encounter.
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