After months of rehearsal, Dickinson’s Dance Theatre Group (DTG) put on their performance Assembly:Required, an interactive dance experience in Goodyear. This production was designed to transport the audience through a visceral representation of the Goodyear building’s complex history.
Goodyear was built in 1891 by Lindner Shoe Company before being sold in 1922 to the Bedford Shoe Company. At the height of its success, the factory employed 900 workers in three shifts. Dickinson College bought the Goodyear Building in 1979 and renovated it into apartments to house students in 2001.
The choreographers of Assembly:Required described the performance as “a way to reimagine the countless hands and energies that have shaped this space,” from the thousands of factory workers once employed in Goodyear to the hundreds of students who now live in its apartments.
Upon arrival, audience members were given “time cards” that designated them as trainees working either day shift or night shift. Throughout the performance, audience members were instructed to move around according to their assigned shifts.
The show began on the upper floor of Goodyear, where the dancers used rigid and repetitive movements to emulate the strict routines of daytime factory workers. They then switched to nighttime, dancing with slower and more languid motions and releasing large plastic curtains from the ceiling. The audience was directed through several rooms within the building, ending in the downstairs packaging room, where dancers stacked and tossed cardboard boxes between tables. Water vapor from a smoke machine made the room appear dusty.
All of the dancers were dressed as factory workers with colorful patches on their clothes. Many of them also wore labor union pins, which were offered to the audience before the performance. Crew members and ushers wore factory jumpsuits with blue or yellow symbols designating them as day shift or night shift workers. These crew members directed the audience where to stand during the performance and instructed them as they moved from room to room. The stage managers wore neutral-colored period clothing that differentiated them from the dancers and contributed to the time-capsule effect of the production. Costumes for Assembly:Required were designed by Costume Studio Manager Juli Bounds and created by employees of the Costume Shop.
Assembly:Required was directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Erin Crawley-Woods and choreographed by internationally acclaimed artists Matt Reeves and Colette Krogol from Orange Grove Dance, who won the Helen Hayes Award for ‘Outstanding Choreography in a Play’ in 2020. Dickinson’s Associate Professor of Theatre Design Kent Barrett was the scenic and lighting designer. All of the music and audio effects used in the show were composed by Dylan Glatthorn.
In addition to music, the production used ‘factory’ sound effects, such as metallic clanking and the ticking of a clock. The performance was frequently overlaid with audio from a training manual which rhythmically listed instructions such as “be punctual” and ordered audience members to “report to [their] stations.” These sound effects contributed to the factory atmosphere and included the audience in the production.
