Interactive journey

Lisa Ross has been thinking about Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in a Day” since she saw a PBS adaptation of it in an eighth-grade-English class. This weekend, Ross and the Red Bucket Dance Theatre, a company she co-founded in 2010, will premiere a full-length dance based on the work.

Bradbury’s story takes place on Venus, where a young Earth girl named Margo and her parents have come to live. In the story, Venus is cloudy, and it’s raining all the time—except for a two-hour period every seven years when the sun shines. Margo, still “new” from Earth, remembers the sun, though her young classmates have never seen it. She tells them of this wondrous thing, and they, in jealousy, decide to deny her the privilege of seeing it again by locking her in a closet. Ross’ dance uses this background to explore the world of technology.

“Are we as a society becoming more connected or painfully isolated?” Ross said in a recent interview with SN&R. “The show was, in a way, a desire for me to discuss the idea of communication, not only within the [dance] company but in society.”

Ross conceded that there can be “issues” in a collaborative outfit such as Red Bucket with “three intelligent and original thinkers” at its core (Ross, dancer-choreographer Tung “Tony” Nguyen; and Nolan T’Sani, a dancer, choreographer and teacher).

“Part of what Red Bucket has been struggling with is how to be on the same page, creating a space where individuals can come in with an idea and together make something out of nothing.”

For All Summer in a Day, Ross said, “I definitely had the idea for the show, but in the process, Tony … had ideas, and some were developed out of my giving the dancers ideas and they came together on the stage.”

The program is “an interactive journey,” Ross said, including a Skype-equipped Lunar Lounge in the theater’s lobby and downward projections created by Teague Fortis in the performance space.