CORNERSTONE THEATER COMPANY
Cornerstone is a professional Los Angeles-based ensemble that works alone and in collaboration with diverse communities across America. Affiliated with the company from its inception, Sabrina Peck has choreographed many of Cornerstone's celebrated site-specific, music-theater adaptations of classic plays.
“Possibly the closest entity to a National Theatre that the United States may ever have."
—Theatre Journal
“Sabrina Peck is a frequent Cornerstone collaborator because she is endlessly inventive, creative, and tireless in her work ethic. A brilliant choreographer and director, she also has a rare gift for getting people to move or act who do not consider themselves dancers or performers."
—Bill Rauch, Founding Artistic Director, Cornerstone
A COMMUNITY CAROL
An adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, A Community Carol featured residents of the D.C. neighborhood of Anacostia performing on the MainStage alongside actors from Cornerstone and Arena Stage. 30,000 people saw the show. The cast included two children who were the first deaf performers in Arena's history. I choreographed choruses of firefighters, construction workers, fast food workers and others, who moved the story forward through musical numbers. A highlight was the full-cast, 1940's dance at the Fezziwigs’.
THE VIDEO STORE OWNER’S SIGNIFICANT OTHER
Recipient of a Helen Hayes Award, this gender-bending adaptation of García Lorca's The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife was performed by members of the Cornerstone professional ensemble in D.C. and New York. . Each of the four actors played all four major roles in the play, quick-switching throughout the action so that the audience could experience different versions of the same character. The dances that I choreographed—character studies through movement set to music—brought all four actors together to explore each character in depth. This project is where I crystallized my approach to combining movement and theater. Working with the actors to find the unique gesture or movement that could reveal the essence of the character.
THE WINTER’S TALE: AN INTERSTATE ADVENTURE
50 Americans from 12 towns and cities came together to create a new adaptation of Shakespeare's romance, set in rural and urban America. Performed outdoors and involving Cornerstone's tour bus as scenery, the play went on a 10,000-mile national tour back to each participant's hometown and to major cities. This project was the subject of Insignia Films' 1999 documentary Cornerstone on HBO Signature.
THE MASKE FAMILY MUSICAL
This humorous and disturbing musical adaptation of a Carl Sternheim play traced the particularly American rags to riches story of an immigrant family. Lynn Jeffries' masterful forced-perspective set inspired me as I developed the stylized movement. Both reflected the off-kilter world of this mythic family.
TOO (2) NOBLE BROTHERS
Cornerstone created an hour-long version of Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen with over 200 students at Seward Park High School on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It contained dialogue and song lyrics in Bengali, English, Mandarin and Spanish, and was performed for both student and general audiences. I worked with the students as I would with professionals, organically developing the movement and musical staging from a character's intentions, the conflict of a scene, or the play's themes. After the run, I directed the young cast for the Public Theater's annual exuberant outdoor block party.
THE HOUSE ON WALKER RIVER
This epic adaptation of Aeschylus's trilogy, The Oresteia, was set on the Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation in Nevada. The theater was a converted welding shop that opened onto the desert, lit by torches. Buzz, the tribal Chairman, played Agamemnon.
See also Too (2) Noble Brothers in Residencies; and The Good Person of New Haven in Choreography.
Learn more about Cornerstone Theater Company at www.cornerstonetheater.org