February 22, 2013 | Theatre,

Daniel Fish: The Next Thing

Daniel Fish is on a mission to combine intimacy with theatricality; to connect the audience with high-brow, intellectual material. Whether it’s Shakespeare, Moliere, or, in this case, the ever-complex and mysterious David Foster Wallace, Fish tackles dense material and translates it to a tangible and moving experience. Daniel represents the next iteration of the artist—driven, independent,  adaptable, and multi-skilled. He is, shall we say, The Next Thing.

As an artist, Daniel Fish has a history of working on the cutting edge in theatre, installation and film. He has  directed shows in spaces that range from the reputable A.R.T. to former factories, proving his flexibility to make any space vital and lively. And as the arts evolve to satisfy our modern need, we (the audience) are learning to seek a new and fresh presentation style.

There is a new model of artist approaching the scene, and Daniel Fish isn’t a one-trick man. He took his degree in performance studies at Northwestern and– rather than jumping into the internship stream– began freelancing in New York City, leading to offers to work all over the globe. If you ask him what his current project is, you will find that he’s in the middle of several, constantly juggling the opportunities and goals that come his way. Over time, the values of this work have reflected the changing landscape of theatre, and his unique interactive performance style makes his David Foster Wallace-inspired show perfect for ArtsEmerson’s TNT Festival.

Tackling the David Foster Wallace text is a bold choice for any stage adaptation– even for an artist with Fish’s history. The profoundness of Wallace’s story relies upon carefully constructed sentences and an acutely melancholy tone. His most well known work, Infinite Jest, is best known for being crafted to perfection and impossible to read. Meanwhile his first novel The Broom of the System raises contentious questions about the lives of college girls. His legacy is twisted, controversial and honest to a fault. So what makes his short stories so relevant to a festival about new devised work? The stories in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again were the inception of Wallace’s career, and are often overlooked. With depth and nuance, they offer a compact look into the loneliness inside all of us that we seldom express.

In a world where the integrity of a story is often traded for higher stakes, explosions or fancy chorus numbers, Daniel Fish uses his commitment to the text and imagination to physicalize the challenges that David Foster Wallace presents. His unrelenting choices to give the audience every word in a fresh and unexpected way conjure new images from the known text with bold decision-making and unconventional theatricality. For Fish, compromise is far from the next thing.

Learn more about the production here and The Next Thing (TNT) Festival here.

If you’d like to see anything else in the Festival, the  festival pass admits you to see all of the groundbreaking companies and works: Vision Disturbance by New York City Players, Blood Play by The Debate Society, Birth Breath Bride Elizabeth by Sleeping Weazel, and Spring Training by UNIVERSES, as well as a concert with The Army of Broken Toys, The Shakespearean Jazz Show, films, workshops and more!

Michelle Roginksy is a senior Emerson theatre major, and the Creative Producer-in-Training.