Paul Lazar

Rehearsal rooms are full of strange surprises; the game I’ve always played is how to make these surprises manifest, because in rehearsal nothing is happening until something unexpected happens, and then suddenly everything is happening. Often this “everything” emerges from exploring how one image or action can unpredictably spawn a next one, opening a door to yet another unexpected event and on and on until a new system has emerged with a new, inexplicable logic. I am eternally interested in this dance between text and staging that finds its own anarchic sense. 

The texts I have used have ranged from traditional plays, to Dada texts, to found text, to lectures, and in preparation, before I walk into the rehearsal room, I practice a form of conscious dreaming with the text. Then the task becomes to introduce these dream images into the rehearsal room, and then I hope for corruption; I hope that the performers disrupt everything and we find a third thing born of our collective imagining. As I don’t distinguish between genres, ideas can be manifest through any form, and are often danced. And at core, I am eternally an entertainer, so throughout my process that part of me has an eye on the ultimate alchemy between audience and performer.

Paul Lazar is a theater maker and performer whose work incorporates talking, dancing, and sometimes pretending to be someone else. His practice blends humor with a rigorous attention to timing and chance, balancing freedom and structure, legibility and experimentation. Through everyday gestures and carefully composed actions, Lazar creates work that is process-driven while remaining anchored by narrative coherence. His performances are playful, open-ended, and profound, inviting multiple interpretations rather than prescribing a single meaning.

Lazar conceived and performed Cage Shuffle, a 60-minute dance/theater solo that premiered at the American Realness Festival, Abrons Art Center, New York, NY in 2017 and continues to tour the U.S. and Europe. In the piece, Lazar tells a series of one-minute stories by John Cage from his 1963 score Indeterminacy while simultaneously performing a complex choreographed dance by Annie-B Parson. The stories are spoken in a random order with no predetermined relationship to the dancing; yet chance produces an inevitable blend of uncanny connections between text and movement. Cage’s humor, intellect, and iconoclasm find expression in this piece, which adds dance to his original performance instructions: Read stories aloud, paced so that each story takes one minute, using chance procedures or not.

Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for the company since 1991, including commissions from New York City institutions such as The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, and Brooklyn Academy of Music; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and The Old Vic, London, United Kingdom.

Recent and selected works include directing Jerry Lieblich’s Barbarians at La MaMa Theatre, New York, NY (2025); acting in María Irene Fornés’s Mud at Mabou Mines Theater, New York, NY (2022); and acting and co-directing Big Dance Theater’s 17c, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY (2018), as well as The Road Awaits Us, which premiered at Sadler’s Wells, London, UK (2019). Earlier directing work includes Big Dance Theater’s productions of Sybil Kempson’s Ich, Kürbisgeist at The Chocolate Factory Theater, Long Island City, NY (2012), and Mac Wellman’s Antigone at Classic Stage Company, New York, NY (2004).

Lazar has received numerous honors and awards, including an Obie Award for his direction of Barbarians (2025), a MacDowell Artist Residency (2025), recognition as a Performance Space 122 Honoree alongside Annie-B Parson (2016), and the Inaugural Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, also shared with Annie-B Parson (2007).