Q&A with Annie-B Parsons – Long Day’s Journey
Annie-B Parson is a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Parson is notable for her work in dance/theatre, post-modern dance, and art pop music and has worked with musician and co-founder of the American rock band Talking Heads, David Byrne. Parson and Byrne have a 15-year creative partnership that reinvented the modern concert and theatrical experience. She co-founded Brooklyn’s Big Dance Theater with her husband, Obie Award-winning American actor and theatre director, Paul Lazar (also in this production). Big Dance Theatre and Pan Pan team up to stage an exciting new interpretation of legendary American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s original play, “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” – with their new production “Long Day’s Journey” that runs at Project Arts Centre this month:
Long Day’s Journey – Pan Pan in association with Big Dance Theater
Dates: 13 – 21 November 2026
First, thank you for your involvement in one of the best gigs I’ve been to in recent years: David Byrne’s American Utopia. Can you tell me a little about your time working on this project?
I had choreographed two of David Byrne’s shows before I did American Utopia, so by the time we started working on American Utopia, I had spent many years developing a choreographic approach, an aesthetic door, into his music. And choreographing for Byrne is the freest I ever feel; it comes very naturally for me. It is the tone of his music that is my starting point, plus I feel very in sync with his visual imagination and its relationship to composition. We don’t really even need to talk too much to figure out what we are going to do. For the American Utopia show, he laid out a few basic elements–empty white box, gray suits, no cords, everyone free to dance–and then we went to work.
This production of Long Day’s Journey is a collaboration between Pan Pan Theatre and your own company, Big Dance Theater. How did it come about?
Gavin Quinn and Emma Coen approached us last summer with an idea to spend some time in a studio without a goal, just conjuring ideas and seeing how we could collaborate, what it would be like to mix things up in the studio; it was almost like a blind date. So, we did this for three weeks in NYC. After that, the idea for Long Day’s Journey emerged.
The production takes the original Tyrone family and transports them 100,000 years into the future, while retaining many of the emotional conflicts at the heart of O’Neill’s play. What possibilities did this radical shift in time and setting open up for you as a performer and theatre-maker?
In this production, I am very much on the other side of the curtain, so I speak from my performer perspective here– Gavin’s ideas about the show existing in the future liberate it from the typical living room drama—that the play already happened, and it happened to other people, and so the audience can separate themselves from it. He brings this play into a suspended state of living, one that floats beyond the earth, and the clock, and history, suggesting that all of our relationships within our family occur outside of time and space, that they are both age-old and eternal; they exceed the limitations of gravity and linearity.
How much of the original text survives this transition, or is it a complete reworking of the original theme and plotline?
Gavin has edited the script without changing any words; he has limned it down to release it from the logic of argument, and from the distraction of storytelling—even the notion of cause and effect are unimprisoned here. Instead, the play lives entirely in the realm of relationality and the body.
You’ve been living in Dublin during rehearsal for this project. How have you found the city? Do you have any favourite bars or restaurants?
I love it here. So far, my favorite restaurant is The Winding Stair.
Pan Pan and Big Dance Theatre’s Long Day’s Journey runs at Project Arts Centre until 21st November: https://projectartscentre.ie/events/long-days-journey/
