By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK

Upon entering the George Rowland White Theater for CORNINGWORKS’ Foolish Assumptions, the audience is met by a sparse black-box arrangement: two black wooden chairs positioned symmetrically across the stage, each already inhabited by a faint square of light. The image remains latent as spectators take their seats, accompanied by ambient music and a thin layer of haze suspended above both stage and audience. At precisely seven o’clock, all the lights slowly fade out. An offstage announcement follows. Then: blackout. When the same sharply isolated squares of light return moments later, two figures are finally revealed seated in the chairs—Beth Corning to the left, Evan Fisk to the right—both turned away from the audience. A dual structure immediately emerges: woman and man, older and younger, left and right, the stage divided into two hemispheres. Everything is black: the chairs, the costumes, the floor, the surrounding theatrical space. Nothing moves. The tableau remains motionless for a few long minutes as the audience’s eyes continuously search for movement that doesn’t arrive. Before the performance has even properly begun, Foolish Assumptions is already quietly frustrating expectations—our own foolish assumptions about theatricality, frontality, movement, and visual access itself.

The first major movement belongs to Corning. Performed to Meredith Monk’s “Happy Woman,” the solo unfolds through small variations of gesture, rhythm, and affect while Monk’s voice cycles through an accumulating litany of identities—“I’m a happy woman,” “I’m a grieving woman,” “I’m a hungry woman,” “I’m a lucky woman,” “I’m a sassy woman,” so on and so forth. Rather than stabilizing womanhood into a singular image, the sequence produces a shifting constellation of emotional and behavioral possibilities. Fisk’s subsequent solo, more grounded in falls, repetition, and string-based musical textures, does not oppose Corning’s presence so much as echo it through difference. In these opening sections, Foolish Assumptions repeatedly organizes perception through mirrored structures that never fully align. Throughout the work, one begins to perceive difference less through direct opposition than through subtle variations in rhythm, gesture, age, gender, and spatial relation—a compositional logic that recalls Mary Overlie’s notion of “News of a Difference,” in which perception itself becomes the generative source of theatrical experience.

As the work gradually shifts from isolated solos into shared structures, Foolish Assumptions begins constructing a quiet dramaturgy of ordinary actions: dressing, eating, resting, sitting, repositioning chairs. Yet these actions rarely unfold according to habitual social logic. One particularly compelling sequence involves the performers exchanging pieces of clothing. Corning struggles humorously with Fisk’s oversized pants, while Fisk manipulates Corning’s dress largely above his head, unable to comfortably inhabit its form. The scene never slips into caricature or exaggerated gender performance; instead, it subtly exposes how clothing reorganizes corporeality itself. Elsewhere, assumptions surrounding civility and behavior are gently destabilized through eating rituals: Corning consumes yogurt directly with her hands—initially improvising a spoon from the container’s lid—with an increasingly rapid and voracious rhythm, while Fisk carefully assembles a small table setting complete with napkin and chopsticks, moving with deliberate slowness and restraint. Throughout these shared episodes, everyday gestures are rendered slightly strange—not through theatrical excess, but through shifts in duration, repetition, tempo, and spatial relation. In this sense, many of the work’s most compelling moments resonate with Overlie’s notion of “Doing the Unnecessary,” in which ordinary actions become perceptually reawakened through subtle displacements.

As Foolish Assumptions progresses, its initially rigid dual structure slowly begins to soften. In one of the work’s most visually striking passages, a moving rectangular spotlight alternately illuminates the performers in a rhythmic, pendulum-like pattern. Within these sharply framed spaces, both Corning and Fisk engage in minimal compositional negotiations between body and chair: leaning, pushing, balancing, waiting… The sequence unfolds with remarkable patience, allowing tiny shifts in proximity, rhythm, and orientation to acquire unusual perceptual weight. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the performers begin moving closer toward the center of the stage. What initially appeared as separation or opposition slowly transforms into relation. Throughout the work, the lighting design (Iain Court) reinforces this compositional logic through an almost excessive symmetry, frequently dividing the stage into two sharply differentiated hemispheres. Predominantly top-lit rather than sculpted through the side lighting more traditionally associated with dance, the bodies often appear less volumetric than diagrammatic, as though arranged within a perceptual field of relations rather than presented as virtuosic objects for visual display. The piece never abandons its commitment to restraint and minimalism, yet the slow convergence of the bodies produces a quiet emotional accumulation, one rooted less in dramatic revelation than in duration itself.

By the work’s final section, the chairs that once occupied opposite hemispheres of the stage have gradually migrated toward one another, allowing the performers to finally share space more directly. Physical contact, previously sparse and carefully restrained, begins to emerge through gestures of support, leaning, carrying, and subtle weight-sharing. At one point, Fisk lifts Corning onto his shoulders while she gently covers his face with her dress, briefly transforming her figure into something at once playful, monumental, and strangely tender. Yet even here, Foolish Assumptions resists a theatrical climax. The movements remain calm, minimal, and free of affective excess. Foolish Assumptions finds quiet power in restraint, sustaining attention not through spectacle, but through precision, duration, and subtle variation. Rather than spectacularizing difference or dismantling assumptions through confrontation, Corning constructs a choreographic world in which assumptions quietly reveal themselves through duration, repetition, relation, and some humor. Reading the work through Mary Overlie’s conceptual language proves particularly illuminating, not because Foolish Assumptions illustrates theory, but because Overlie herself sought to articulate perceptual and compositional questions long embedded within postmodern dance practices more broadly. Her concepts function here less as explanatory tools imposed onto the work than as a vocabulary for recognizing how Corning organizes attention through difference, duration, repetition, and the subtle destabilization of ordinary behavior. 

TICKETS AND DETAILS

Corning Works’s Foolish Assumptions has remaining performances May 15 – 17 and 20- 23, 2026 at te George Roland White Theatre on the campus of Point Park University, 313 Blvd. of the Allies. Tickets at the door or at https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/corningworks-presents-the-glue-factory-projects-foolish-assumptions

Guilherme is a Brazilian theater practitioner and scholar, currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com

Categories: Arts and Ideas