“They wanted us to look but we had looked already and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman. We had seen the dog, walked. watered, and fed the animal, and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters. Alphabetical ourselves in rows of classroom desks, we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.” -First Reader- Bill Collins, 2001 Beth Corning has always been interested in exploring new territory with her dances, incorporating diverse theatrical forms seamlessly blended into her choreographic vocabulary. At Once There Was a House was created with the company in 2004 and demands of the dancers to develop characters through spoken text, in addition to very specific physicalities. The work references the era of “Dick and Jane” (iconic characters from the teach-children-to-read books popular in the 1950s and 60s) a time when things seemed more simple — the perfect childhood, the perfect parent, perfect happiness. Corning’s At Once There Was a House asks “Whatever happened to Dick and Jane?” now no longer children – but the grown product of those “perfect childhoods,” it asks us to take a look under the surface of our stereotypes, into the deeper narratives we know are there in all our lives. We experience the dark and sometimes humorous interior world Corning reveals in wonderfully varied and unexpected ways.