By Raymond Wayne
Attack Theatre | Oct. 16, one night only at the Attack Theatre Studio
Attack Theatre’s Sessions: Happy Birthday Bobby featuring theCAUSE merged dance and live music into the same creative conversation. Presented as a birthday tribute to Bobby Weir, guitarist, vocalist, storyteller, and founding member of the jam-band pioneer Grateful Dead. The performance was less a conventional concert or dance performance than a shared celebration—one in which movement, rhythm, and improvisation, especially the latter, continually reshaped but complemented one another.
The evening’s strongest attribute was the exchange between the musicians and dancers. Rather than treating the band as accompaniment, the production placed Pittsburgh-based theCAUSE in an active dialogue with the dancers. Musical phrases prompted physical responses, while shifts in movement shaped the sound’s energy and direction. That reciprocity gave the program an immediate, in-the-moment character.
Attack Theatre’s performers brought athleticism and theatrical presence, moving between tightly coordinated passages and looser, more spontaneous interactions. The choreography was most compelling when individual personalities remained within the ensemble. Moments of humor, playfulness, and intimacy reinforced the celebratory spirit without diminishing the performers’ technical command.
TheCAUSE put forth grooves that supported the dancing while retaining the personality of a Dead concert, sans the chemical enhancements the band made legendary. Their musicianship benefited from that flexibility: changes in tempo, dynamics, and emphasis created fresh possibilities that kept the collaboration from feeling predetermined. They are a jam band after all, and the dancers fulfilled the improv visions of Michele de la Raza and Peter Kope, Attack Theatre’s founders and creative forces.
The collaborators celebrated Weir’s birthday with two sets of five songs each honoring his musical legacy. Interspersed were talks by Hawk, a producer with the Owsley Stanley Foundation. Stanley was the Dead’s audio engineer, a sixties polymath who crafted the band’s wall-of-sound speaker array while dabbling in psychedelic chemistry.
Notably, Hawk prefaced the band’s rendition of John Cash’s “Big River” and “Days Between,” a Jerry Garcia song Weir sang after Garcia’s passing in 1995. Stanley recorded more than 1,300 reel-to-reel audio tapes of live performances by the Dead and other American musicians. Of note, Hawk is a corporate attorney with a prominent Downtown law firm that represents the foundation in its mission to preserve this audio legacy by transferring the tapes to digital format.
The band’s chops stood out throughout the evening, especially in their renditions of “The Other One” and “Days Between.” Eric “Pappy” Weingrad’s virtuosity on guitar was sublime, accompanied by the dancers’ equally sublime artistry.
An active, engaged audience filled the Attack Theatre’s Studio seating to capacity. Several songs drew dozens from the crowd, many in tie-dyes, to the dance floor to express their individuality.
The dance company and band first discussed collaborating earlier this year, the same day Weir passed away. Both were skeptical that a modern dance troupe could work with a psychedelic hippie rock jam band. They took the creative risk, and it paid off impressively with just a single combined rehearsal the day before.
“I think we all thought we could do it, but I’m not sure any of us imagined it coming off as amazing as it did,” Pappy Weingrad, the CAUSE guitarist, said of the evening. “The full collaboration was churning, and once that wheel starts turning, you can’t slow it down.”
And special mention to the technical crew. The audio and lighting were designed and delivered flawlessly throughout the evening.
Sessions: Happy Birthday Bobby featuring theCAUSE was a heartfelt, energetic collaboration that highlighted Attack Theatre’s ability to make dance communal and immediate. The evening’s blend of live music, physical invention and celebratory spirit offered an engaging reminder that performance can be both carefully crafted and joyfully unpredictable.
The 30-year-old Attack Theatre’s mission is to collaborate artistically through interdisciplinary partnerships. With this performance, they demonstrated successfully that they indeed dance the talk.
-RW
For more information on Attack Theatre, click here.
