A New Play by  Devanand Janki

DESCRIPTION
Ballet has given me discipline, pleasure, community and a language my body seems to understand before I do. It has also carried histories of hierarchy, racism, sexism, exclusion, silence and pain. I have spent much of my life inside that contradiction: loving the thing enough to question it, and questioning it because I love it.
AGAIN grew out of that tension.

SYNOPSIS
October 2019. In a modest second-floor ballet studio in Englewood, New Jersey, legendary Cuban ballerina Isabel Valdés—“Madame”—has one hundred minutes before a car arrives to take her to Manhattan, where she will receive a long-overdue lifetime-achievement award for her “overlooked role in Cold War ballet.” Documentary filmmaker Anna Reed and cinematographer Eli Morgan have come to record the principal interview for a one-hour public-television portrait of Madame, timed to the award and the renewed interest surrounding her career. But Anna has concealed that she was once Madame’s student—and that she sought this assignment for reasons far more personal than professional. As the interview moves from biography to interrogation, a buried political betrayal involving Madame’s former partner, Rafael Santos, collides with Anna’s own memory of the day, at seventeen, when an injured young dancer asked her teacher whether she should try again. Madame said yes. Over one continuous late afternoon, the camera turns on and off, loyalties fracture, memories contradict one another, and teacher and former student are forced to confront what ambition asks of the body, what authority owes the people who trust it, and whether surviving a tradition is proof that it was worth preserving. Structured, almost invisibly, like a classical ballet class—from plié to révérence—AGAIN is a funny, intimate and increasingly dangerous reckoning with art, power, memory, gratitude and the price of becoming extraordinary.