I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond

Permiering as part of the 2022 Cannonball Festival!

A circus of words, a flight to nowhere, a desperate attempt to make meaning in an unrelentingly confusing world. Award-winning “Fringe Favorite” and Cannonball Festival Producer Almanac’s newest — and largest ever — ensemble acrobatic show explores the lengths we’ll go to change our language rather than change ourselves.

In I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond, artists and audiences alike board a metaphysical flight, traveling together to a visionary place of collective imagining. A Professor and a Facilitator —both on the precipice of revelation — attempt, in their own ways, to explain the world around them, only to realize what they are trying to communicate is nearly impossible for others to comprehend. But as the bodies of the passengers are thrown into acrobatic flight, a certain truth is revealed: either we will put aside our differences and save each other, or we will fall.

Birthed from the detritus of discarded good ideas and progressively queerer impulses in the face of the daily torment of interlocking systems of oppression, I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond features breathtaking ensemble and hand-to-hand acrobatics, captivating movement, earnest contemplations of how to do better, and a relentless soundtrack of words. The cast of devisor/performers features Almanac company members Lauren Johns, Nathan Alford Tate, Mae West and Darren Rabinowitz alongside some of America’s most exciting contemporary circus artists in Kevin Flanagan, Sierra Rhoades Nicholls, and Liam Bradley, and Philly dance luminary Rhonda Moore.