Spider Rabbit

Director Dan Safer got kicked out of high school for a year, used to be a go-go dancer and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday Party. He is a choreographer, director, performer, teacher and frequent collaborator with Tony Torn, notably on the notorious Ubu Sings Ubu. Safer’s dance and theater company Witness Relocation is a resident company at La MaMa and performs all over, from the back of bars in NYC to Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris to a giant leaky warehouse in Poland where a light fell off the grid during a show and almost killed him. Recent work includes Particles, Fields, and The Void, a duet with Thomas F. DeFrantz (in development); choreography for Hoi Polloi’s Family by Celine Song; Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival; and Aristotle Thinks Again with Great Jones Rep. His work has been seen at DTW, BAM, Danspace Project, Les Subsistances (Lyon, France), Patravadi Theater (Bangkok), an opera house in Transylvania and elsewhere. He has collaborated with Chuck Mee, Robert M. Johanson, Christian Frederickson, Ridge Theater, Alec Duffy, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Stefanie Batten Bland, Heather Christian, Mary Overlie, Julia Kent and many more. In the 90s, as Hellena Handbasket, he was part of Anohni’s Blacklips Performance Cult. Dan is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Dance at MIT.

Tony Torn, the titular Spider Rabbit, has been seen most recently onstage as Lear/Oswald in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Directed and Adapted by Karin Coonrod at La Mama ETC; Mr. Slocum/Mr. Rooney in Beckett’s All That Fall and Henry in Maria Irene Fornes’ Mud, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis at Mabou Mines; Doktor/Grandmother in Büchner’s Woyzeck, adapted by Lukas Papenfusscline and directed by Jesse Rasmussen at Torn Page; The Client in Bernard-Marie Koltès’ In The Solitude of Cotton Fields, directed and translated by Amin Erfani on Pier 45 for the Down To Earth Festival; Ensemble in Michael Gordon’s The Forest of Metal Objects, directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson at The Cloisters for Met Live Arts; JG Conwell Senior in Life and Trust by Emersive Productions at Conwell Tower in the Financial District; and Poor Man/Mr. Sunday in Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ash K.Tata for Bard Summerscape. He has an impressive list of movie and television credits that includes The Blacklist, Teenage Bounty Hunters, Law and Order SVU, Exhibiting Forgiveness, The Dutchman and Invention. Most recently, he can be seen in Little Brother with Eric Andre and John Cena and Late Fame with Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee. Torn recently directed the acclaimed English language premiere of Romina Paula’s The Whole of Time at Torn Page and The Brick. Tony is also known for his extensive work with experimental theater makers Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, as one of the founding directors of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, for playing Rusty Trawler in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway, and creating and starring in Ubu Sings Ubu with Dan Safer. He manages Torn Page, a private event space named in honor of his parents Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.