A collision of dance and theater

Since 2001, local theatergoers have been agog at the things Sarah Sanford can do.

With Philadelphia's risk-taking Pig Iron Theatre Company, the actress and movement artisan has clowned and cajoled her way through such company classics as the funereal 365 Days/365 Plays (2007) and the tennis-whites' wonk of Obie-winning Hell Meets Henry Halfway (2004).

Sanford crushed as a still-life wife for Brat Productions' 2007 A 24-Hour The Bald Soprano. She displayed a darkly romantic mania in the 2008 Live Arts Festival's The European Lesson, directed by Jo Strømgren, followed by Lantern Theatre Company's The Inspector General and, earlier this year, Mauckingbird Theatre Company's production of Hedda Gabler. And somewhere in there, she was nominated for a 2008 F. Otto Haas Award for Best Emerging Theater Artist at the Barrymores.

"My relationship with Philly began through Pig Iron, and since then I've had the fortune of working in different modes of performance with several Philly companies," says the 34-year-old actress, a Connecticut native who graduated from Swarthmore in 1999. She then attended Paris' École International du Theatre Jacques Lecoq for training in movement, silliness and improvisation and in 2001 returned to the Philadelphia area and began work on Pig Iron's Shut Eye.

Though hooked on the avant-garde, she recently has enjoyed doing Ibsen and Shakespeare, digging into text the way she's used to digging into the more physical aspects of theater. But like many great thespians, what she wanted to do was direct.

So she did - launching her directorial career with Appetite, first in Toronto and now in Philly.

Four years in its co-creation with Sanford's ensemble (agile, funny Claire Calnan, Adam Lazarus and Linnea Swan, and choreographic consultant/associate director Kate Alton), Appetite is a handily absurdist, movement-heavy piece that peels the skin back on our penchant for yearning, hankering, hunger, fulfillment. Swan, Lazarus and Calnan explore food, sex and attention, with laughs, lust and disgust as their goal, the tragicomic starkness of Strømgren as influence, and a dash of wild, Tharp-ian motion as reference.

Appetite even has the feel of an Ernie Kovacs skit, with its buffoonish face-stuffing and chicken-y clucking, set to a mix of cocktail jazz and tango music. One minute they're reading from menus and chipperly chatting about food; the next, they're throwing themselves into walls and angrily sucking face. Then they're hunched over lunch pails, panting like dogs and devouring grapes and porridge.

"When I first started this show, I knew simply that I wanted to explore the vagaries of human appetite and wanted to do it by colliding dance and theater," Sanford said recently by phone, still rehearsing in Toronto. "I had no idea what the product would be. . . . But having trained as a dancer before entering theater, I did know I wanted to pull from both disciplines in generating my first original work."

Of course, Appetite's collision of dance and theater allows Sanford to cull from the arts groups with which she's worked, among them Headlong Dance Theatre, known for its "hybrid" performances. As for why she chose to start her directing career in Toronto, she said she saw it as a blank slate.

"It's a town where no one knew me as an actor and I had no prior reputation to live up to."

In only seven years, Sanford's renown as a highly original actress and avid experimentalist has become golden in theater circles local and national. Her work with Pig Iron alone is a testament to craft, cunning and ridiculousness. Currently, she's readying Pig Iron's contribution to Live Arts Fest 2009, a Wild West mess called Welcome to Yuba City.

While at Swarthmore, Sanford says, "I saw Dig or Fly [in 1996] and Cafeteria [in 1997] and decided I wanted to work with the company. I was focused entirely on that goal." Still, it's in non-Pig pieces that she played two of her favorite roles.

As Eilert Lovborg in Mauckingbird's lesbian version of Hedda Gabler, she played a woman dressed as a man - a brilliant writer who had to clothe herself thusly in order to work. Yet because Eilert's first love wasn't Hedda but rather scholarship and the life of the mind, Sanford was free to play a new kind of character - "a woman who wasn't jockeying for attention or approval or acceptance or love, one that wasn't actively using sex as a means of getting what she wanted. A woman who was never going to settle down, a woman who was driven in the way we think of men being driven."

As Majka in The European Lesson, Sanford crafted a character on the spot, based on the director's improvisational images and plot. "The different puzzle pieces Strømgren sketched out . . . created a bizarre mix of youthful awkwardness and sudden attacks of prophesying that was funny," she says. "Also, it was great to work with a director whom I had admired since 2005 and whose work inspired me to direct Appetite in the first place."

Appetite, however, is a leaner meal, with less pomp, circumstance and costume frippery than Strømgren's blackly comic movement piece. It explores the vagaries of human appetite simply because she found the act of eating to be so revealing, so moving.

"It's rare that we just eat without doing anything else - talking, reading, watching television," says Sanford, who also considered factory farming, eating competitions, and how unself-consciously animals eat.

"I kind of threw all this together and started looking for resonances among these seemingly disparate facets of appetite."

While Appetite defines our distorted cultural stance on food, one aspect of her exploration began in a personal place.

"I realized that in every relationship I had, I went through a phase of being annoyed or disgusted by the way my partner ate," she says. "So I began thinking about the journey of food in a relationship and how it relates to attraction/repulsion - the big romantic date meals, the routine at-home meals, the tense, silent meals between couples you catch glimpses of in restaurants and want to spy on."

That's a big bite to take on with one's directorial debut. Sanford knows that audiences and critics will be especially attentive, that Philly's a small town and that sometimes we're haters - be the venue a stadium or a theater. We could be as hungry to see her fail as we are to watch her succeed again.

"I do hold myself to a pretty high standard, and hitting home runs feels great, but there are so many unknowns in the theater that if you obsess over your success rate, you'll drive yourself mad," she says. "Better to ask yourself how you want to grow next, and go after that.

"Besides, taking a risk always has the possibility of failure - but those who take the best risks are the ones we want to watch onstage."

Yum.