Zoë Winters, Marisa Tomei, and Lucas Hedges on Celia Rowlson-Hall’s ‘SISSY’

The creation process is challenging enough for an independent choreographer, vying for grants and rehearsal space and attention in a scattered environment. Add in a young child and an ailing parent, and suddenly the ordeal of daily existence takes on a palpable weight.

That is the premise of SISSY, a luminous new dance-theater work by Celia Rowlson-Hall, premiering this weekend at New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, with a cast that includes Marisa Tomei and Lucas Hedges. Sisyphus, in this imaginative retelling, toils not in the rocky underworld but at a run-down artist’s residency in the Hudson Valley, where an indefatigable director (Zoë Winters) and her six dancers are about to present the final showing of their two-week workshop. The audience—both the fictional one upstate and the real one in Manhattan—soon slips into a world where human-scale beach balls and painter’s buckets become a playground for physical investigation, where the tragicomedy of real life slips in through the cracks.

Celia Rowlson-Hall

Photo: Quinn Wharton

“Somehow I’ve always had a layer of protection between me and my work, even though it’s always been very personal,” says Rowlson-Hall, who has forged a career telling stories through movement. “In this one, that does not exist.” SISSY marks her return to the stage after nearly two decades as a filmmaker and choreographer for the screen. It’s also her first creative project after giving birth to Romeo, the now two-year-old son she shares with her wife, the director (and SISSY dramaturg) Mia Lidofsky.

The work initially took root during a residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center in September 2023. The couple, then staying in a West Village apartment, would walk up the High Line to the studio each day with six-month-old Romeo in tow. At the same time, Rowlson-Hall was dealing with the spiraling health crisis of her “angel-here-on-earth” father: a longtime public school teacher, cross-country coach, and practicing Christian Scientist who had largely lived outside the medical system. As he was shuttled between care facilities and hospitals in Virginia—a “losing uphill battle,” Rowlson-Hall says—plans for an evening-length iteration of SISSY were paused. But the idea of Sisyphus stayed with her. She read Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, about the millennia-old universe beneath our feet; another book described how “grief is like pushing through rock,” she says.

The cast of SISSY

Photo: Quinn Wharton

True to Rowlson-Hall’s own buoyant sensibility, the central boulder in SISSY takes the form of a brightly colored beach ball, which performers slide over top of, struggle against, and toss into the sky, deftly navigating around the studio’s overhead lights during a recent rehearsal. Stones come up in other ways, too, as in a guided improvisation onstage: “Are you a pebble in a shoe?” Winters’s character asks. “Under a naked butt cheek on a nude Italian beach?”

The play-with-a-play structure means the cast is composed of six dancers (led by the transfixing Ida Saki) and three actors, but the beauty rests in the blurred distinctions. Tomei, who plays an archeologist, brings an animated physicality—and a full split—to the role, in keeping with Rowlson-Hall’s direction. “I love her artistic voice, and she’s speaking a language I understand,” says Tomei, explaining that “in my soul, I’m a dancer.” Hedges, who plays a blue-collar quarry worker, sees his hard-hat exterior unexpectedly soften by the play’s end. For the actor, who takes salsa lessons and Gaga movement classes in his regular life, SISSY is a kind of dreamscape you “want to get lost in,” he says. “Celia has brought her subconscious to all of us, and we’re just walking in it.”

Lucas Hedges

Photo: Quinn Wharton

That unlikely duality—mythic imagery alongside resolutely human emotions—is a hallmark of Rowlson-Hall’s body of work. It’s there in 2015’s MA, her feature-length film debut that follows a virgin mother through the desert en route to Las Vegas; her short film for the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series populates a nuclear-age bunker with a band of eccentric performers. Choreographing for other people’s projects, including music videos (MGMT, Bleachers, Alicia Keys) and films (After Yang, Vox Lux), has given her an on-set nimbleness. But it’s motherhood she credits with ushering in a new sense of creative flexibility. “Sometimes when you put something in motion, you have to let it tell you where it’s headed and not try to hold on too tight,” she says.

To that point, Saki brings up the first lunch break of the SISSY residency in 2023, when she told Rowlson-Hall—by then a friend and collaborator—that she was newly pregnant. “The whole story shifted for her,” says Saki, describing how the choreographer folded the news into the central solo, a complicated investigation of weighted anticipation and transferred innocence. In the dance, Saki slips into a pair of pants with an attached belly, but the psychological vulnerability is what proves most important. “If you are not actually going through the storytelling and the emotive qualities in that present moment, you can see right through it,” Saki says.

Ida Saki

Photo: Quinn Wharton

There is one other uncredited performer who, in a way, has been in the room since the very beginning of SISSY. Saki’s one-year-old, Enzo, is periodically trotted out on Winters’s hip, a sometimes babbling manifestation of everything her character is juggling. Winters remembers the first time she heard she’d be holding a baby onstage. (“Like a baby-baby?” the actor asked. “Yeah, like a baby-baby,” Rowlson-Hall responded.)

Bringing in this charming, unpredictable element illustrates Rowlson-Hall’s approach to embracing life in all its beauty and complications. Enzo’s occasional vocalizations have a soft-spoken foil in the piece, via an overheard voicemail from Rowlson-Hall’s late father. And there’s a slipperiness between fact and fiction, which gives the performances a translucent clarity. Winters, who lost her own dad a decade ago while working with Rowlson-Hall on another project, describes their common vocabulary around loss. “Grief is so surprising and comes out sideways in so many ways,” the actor says, yet so often it’s “side-by-side to humor.”

That sums up the terrain of SISSY, where half-assembled folding tables become slides and air-traffic wands light the way. “There’s incredible imagination and magic and suspension of belief and oddness,” Winters says. “Moments that you maybe don’t intellectually understand but can feel so fully.” A duet between two of the dancers comes to mind, where each of Aliza Russell’s footsteps land in Jacob Warren’s hands, in an expression of transferred weight. It recalls what Rowlson-Hall said after rehearsal, seeing Winters take on the role of the director: “I had this feeling, after I watched her do it, that it’s her show now. She holds this.”

SISSY runs through April 26 at Baryshnikov Arts Center.