It wasn’t until Jenn Freeman was thirty-three years old and a well-established dancer and choreographer that her therapist diagnosed her as having Autism Spectrum Disorder. “To arrive at a diagnosis of ASD, we have to see a challenge in three areas; one is communication, one is socialization, and one is repetitive and stereotyped behaviors. You really are hitting all of those three marks.” This is what we hear her therapist say in a recorded voiceover near the start of “Is It Thursday Yet?” an eclectically inventive work created just three years after Jenn Freeman’s autism diagnosis that explains and explores the way she perceives the world, using dance, theater, voiceover therapy, original songs, a dozen video monitors, several unusual props, even innovative graphic design…and more. Nothing feels out of bounds: At one point, Freeman wears a lampshade on her head, which serves as a screen for home movies from her childhood. “Is It Thursday Yet?” is opening tonight at PAC NYC, the new performing arts center at the World Trade Center, just two days after the opening on Broadway of “How To Dance in Ohio,” another show featuring autistic performers portraying autistic characters. The differences are stark, among them: 1. Freeman is telling her own story, in collaboration with Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Moulin Rouge The Musical,” who is also the director. 2. “Is It Thursday Yet?” feels firmly rooted in avant-garde theater and dance tradition, more concerned with sensory impression than an easily accessed replica of linear reality. 3. At the same time, Freeman’s show is explicit – sometimes clinical — in defining and describing the elements of autism. This is thanks in large measure to continual voiceover narrative put together from actual recorded therapy sessions with Freeman’s psychologist and autism diagnostician, identified in the program as Dr. Kimberly Gilbert, PhD, who often delves into episodes from her childhood. One of the nineteen individual dance numbers over the show’s 80 minutes, for example, explains the title. While composer Holland Andrews and percussionist Price McGuffey endlessly repeat the phrase “Is it Thursday yet?” Dr. Gilbert in voiceover explains how Freeman’s parents, noticing how the repetition in dancing seemed to calm her, put her in a dance class every Thursday. Freeman as a child would start repeating the phrase “Is it Thursday yet,” although, as Gilbert points out, she knew that it wasn’t Thursday yet; she simply found the repetition of the phrase soothing. Andrews, besides singing their own songs, and even at one point dancing with Freeman, also occasionally portrays characters (or at least recites lines) to illustrate Freeman’s challenges. At one point, for example, Andrews says “Hey you, you actually made it.” And, as Freeman dances, her therapist says in voiceover as if reading the dancer’s mind “What is it that I’m supposed to say in this moment? What should my tone be?” Gilbert makes one observation that gets to the heart of this show’s appeal. “Dance was your world from the second that you started twirling.” Freeman’s dancing in “Is It Thursday Yet?” is lyrical, masterful; precise, but also playful. I don’t always see the correspondence between the particular moves and the songs/graphics/voiceover analysis that accompanies them. But there is one sequence that’s vivid, and demonstrates the arc of the dancer’s journey towards self-acceptance. Near the beginning of the show, we see her dance in front of a screen where words like failure and loneliness and isolation seem to be attacking her like hail in a storm. By the end, the screen is full of words like love, understand, trust, gift that seem to be buoying her like clouds. Is It Thursday Yet? PAC NYC through December 23 Running time: 80 minutes no intermission Tickets: $48 – $86 Co-Created, Co-Choreographed, and Performed by Jenn Freeman. Co-Created, Co-Choreographed, and Directed by Sonya Tayeh. Composed and Performed by Holland Andrews. Percussionist Price McGuffey Scenic design by Rachel Hauck, scenic design by Marian Tatan de la Rosa, lighting design by Cha See, sound design by Melanie Chen Cole, media and projection design by Joseph DiGiovanna Photographs by Mathew Murphy
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