CorningWorks – Stand By — an allegory
Carnegie Stage
Carnegie, PA
March 28- April 6, 2025

By Steve Sucato

The marquee work on CorningWorks 15th Anniversary Season, Stand By — an allegory, conceived by company director, choreographer, and performer Beth Corning, continued her string of recent productions that have reflected on the world around us. 

An allegory, defined by the Oxford dictionary as “a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.” Stand By perfectly fit that definition.

Performed at the Carnegie Stage’s intimate 70-plus-seat black box theater in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, the production was the latest in CorningWorks’ The Glue Factory Projects. The series features dance theater works with casts predominantly consisting of performers over the age of forty.

The matinee performance on March 30, 2025, featured veteran performers Alberto Del Saz, the director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance, Kimani Fowlin, the chair of the theatre and dance department at Drew University, and celebrated puppeteer Tom Lee, who joined Corning onstage along with young up and comers Evan Fisk and Chezney Douglas.

Corning, Pittsburgh’s queen of metaphor, began the hourlong dance theater piece walking along the back of the stage on tip-toes as if walking a tightrope. The sequence perhaps hinted at the precarious balancing act artists face in having their art reflect their feelings about the world to audiences without alienating some of them. Or maybe the difficulty most of us face these days when discussing anything that somebody could perceive as political, especially if they might not share our views. 

The work’s most omnipresent metaphor was that of Douglas seated atop a raised platform crocheting something with giant crochet hooks and massive, blood-red yarn (that at times stretched across the stage) throughout the work. Perhaps a representation of the blood that ties us together as humans, or referring to the color associated with the Republican Party. 

Danced to a music mix from Enzio Bosso, Mary Ellen Childs, Ryuchi Sakamoto, and others, Lee, early on in the piece, introduces us to a puppet of a young boy he had carried onto the stage hidden underneath his coat. 

Life-like and believable in its movements, thanks to expert handling by Lee, the puppet spent the first part of the work trying to get the attention of the work’s other performers. During a scene where Del Saz, Fowlin, Corning, and Fisk engaged in back-and-forth runs across the stage slapping hard at their chests, the puppet boy discovered a set of large, red wooden blocks in a cart pulled by Lee and began erecting a wall with them. When done with the wall, he announced to the others, “Ta-da” several times, demanding their attention. 

Was the puppet character merely an innocent boy, curious about the world and craving attention, or a reference to some of the undesirable characteristics and actions attributed to the nation’s 45th and now 47th president? 

With scenes like that and another where the puppet walked over the bodies of the other performers lying on the stage under a sheet, Corning and company presented a series of images that formed a loose narrative of everyday life. This narrative was seemingly definitive in its intent regarding meaning, while also being open to interpretation. 

A predominantly emotionally dark and surreal work, made even more so by the bare, all-black stage on which it was performed, the work’s brighter moments came later, when the performers engaged in playful teasing and giggling, and then sang together the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Its best dancing came when Del Saz taught Lee a folkloric-looking dance sequence that the others joined in on and performed in unison. 

Wonderfully crafted with solid performances by the entire cast, Stand By was a thought-provoking production. And whether one interprets it as a warning of the perils of being a bystander to the downfall of that which one holds dearest, or something else, the work proved a clever allegory for our divisive times, steeped in metaphor, volatile emotion, and a recurring sense of innocence lost.