Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
"You all had an impossible task, and you reached for radical solutions, and pulled it off. Your energy and force overwhelmed me."
- Annie Dillard
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Andy adapted and directed this world premiere celebrating the 40th anniversary of Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at the Hollins Theatre Institute. This production set Dillard’s text among layers of movement, music, multi-media imagery and shadow, aiming to honor Dillard's glorious and exacting prose. The production invited the audience into dramatic moments of sumptuous and stark imagery and sensations that reverberated with startling awareness. Scenic designer Randy Ward and lighting designer John Ambrosone were essential in composing a living space to hold Annie Dillard’s clear and electric text that resonates with moments of overwhelming beauty. . .
I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we - so incontrovertibly - are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It’s common sense: when you move in, you try to learn the neighborhood.
- Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“Andy Belser’s adaptation for the stage of Hollins University alumni Annie Dillard’s seminal work, ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ is a fascination of light and sound, of texture and nuance, of language and silence. It is a masterful production of a non-fiction work. . .
- Dan Smith - reviewer
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