2012 – A provocative dance theater work from associated memories, dreams, and nightmares, an off-beat yet delightful spectacle about the fiction and reality of LUV for the digital age.  This evening-length multimedia dance theater work about LUV for the digital age was conceived and directed by Maida Withers.  This real yet surreal evening-length performance by four extraordinary dance artists exposes the fragile and volatile nature of relationships through intricate and striking partnering performed with dramatic and forceful innuendo. The lush white-on-white stage setting provides a palette for the immersive electronic installation of vogue portraits of the dancers and paintings by Anthony Gongora featuring visual poetry and pillow talk by Alex Caldiero, poet, and penetrating and compelling electronic music by Steve Hilmy.

Physical and symbolic meanings are derived from white pristine bed pillows that are incorporated into all scenes and dance episodes. These familiar objects of passion and pleasure provide dancers opportunity to configure/reconfigure the space constructing a sanctuary for intimacy and violence, humor, and even remorse. Pillows are embraced, shared, relayed, and taped to the body like appendages becoming an ever present friend and companion, a shield for protection, a burden, an instrument for violence, a suffocating handicap, a comfort needed for a soft landing.

Collision Course – a.k.a. Pillow Talk is at once bold and delicate, daring, loving and audacious. Pillows thrown, relationships caught! What dreams of love do nightmares bring? “At the end of the day we return to the pillow, the place where thoughts are shared and decisions are made. There’s pillow talk, then life happens!”

What the press is saying

The pillows feel like characters in the story too—there were moments in which they looked like a dancer’s lover, or when they seemed to represent something frightening, like a nightmare or a bad memory Liz Maestri

A beautifully complex and thought provoking piece. Sure to have audiences thinking long after the lights go down. Rick Westerkamp

D.C. choreographer and George Washington University professor Maida Withers' new show features four dances and lots of pillows. "Collision Course—a.k.a. Pillow Talk" is a dance/theater work that tells stories of love for the digital age, with an electronic-music soundtrack. The show runs tonight and tomorrow only, and takes place on a white-on-white stage. According to a press release, pillows will be "embraced, shared, relayed, and taped to the body like appendages becoming an ever-present friend and companion, a shield for protection, a burden, an instrument for violence, a suffocating handicap, a comfort needed for a soft landing." Runs to Dec. 8 at the Marvin Theatre at George Washington University, 800 21st St. NW. $22 general admission, $17 for seniors and artists, $12 students. Katie Fiegenbaum

The movement sequences were most interesting when Withers explored what dancers could do with the pillows…” Could Nate Bond lift Giselle Ruzany while she was curled in a ball clutching three? (He could.) Could a trio of three guys waddle across the stage with pillows between their legs? (Yes; hysterically funny.) And an arabesque while clutching a pillow between two toes? (Awkward, but possible!) Rebecca Ritzel