INHERITANCE: A LITANY (2018)
Concept, Direction, Text, Choreography, Vocals & Performance: Janis Brenner

Music composed by: Jerome Begin

Lighting: Mitchell Bogard
Time: 42 mins.

Photo Credit: Judith Stuart Boroson and United Solo Theatre Festival

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Winner: "Best Production", "Best Composer", "Best Lighting Design"

United Solo Theatre Festival 2018
 

Janis Brenner has created her first full-length solo in a forty+-year performance and choreographic career. Having a long tenure as a “triple threat”, this solo, based on lists, or litanies Ms. Brenner began making after the passing of both of her parents, is a personal narrative and an honoring of the parent/child relationship, its psychologies and its histories, both comic and deeply intimate.

 

How do we define ourselves in relation to our biology, DNA, history, and our aging? Inheritance: A Litany is a journey into the myriad ways a daughter has "become" her late parents. She inherited "her father's wavy hair, her mother's singing voice, her father's sarcasm, her mother's fragile bones"...but also a lifetime of their objects, belongings, their thoughts and ways of being in the world that all seem to reveal moments of a family's story and a daughter’s path. The work is a poetic narrative, a dance, a non-linear play, an opera, and a comic drama.  

 "There’s truly nothing like it. Personal though it may be, it’s hard not to empathize with 'Inheritance' and think of one’s own parents as Brenner explores her relationship to hers. Funny, clever, tragic and honest, 'Inheritance' is an absolute triumph. Don’t miss it."

James Bartholomew, "All About Solo", October 2018

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Excerpt from Inheritance: A Litany