In the 1950s world of Grand Rounds, a 10-year-old inspired by the adventures of Cherry Ames, nurse and amateur sleuth, turns her perceptive gaze on the rituals of family life. What goes on behind closed doors and on the radio is fodder for her scientific reckonings.  The action takes place in and around six beds, on a hospital floor, in a graveyard, and in the imagination of this curious child.

In Grand Rounds, Tamar Rogoff casts an ensemble of differently-abled performers with disparate bodies to represent “family”  The grandmother is a dancer with Parkinson’s for whom neutral is a “shake” and intense concentration is born of necessity. The grandfather, a 250-pound clown from the Big Apple Circus, has eclectic performance skills which include having studied ballet. The brother is a trans actor, who is discovering a new physical reality now that his body aligns with his trans gender male identity. A renowned palliative care doctor performs with a person who recently played the patient in real life. There are twelve performers, some of whom are well known in the dance world. Each member was cast because of their particular body story.

The Grand Rounds audience has permission to stare, to take in difference, openly without censorship. Seating the audience around three beds, Tamar Rogoff looks for a proximity that will encourage body empathy wordlessly --- body to body. She continues her interest in the medical world and how we allow it to define our deaths. It is the ten-year-old, teetering between childhood and adolescence, who via the last act of Giselle, finds a road map towards life’s end.

Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects produces dance/theater and documentary films. The latest, Enter The Faun, will air on PBS on America Reframed on March 28th. Rogoff is also a movement coach for actors, most notably for Claire Danes in her Emmy award-winning role as Temple Grandin. Rogoff is a six-time recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been  funded by the Sundance Institute, Dancing in the Streets, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Rockefeller MAP Grant, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Harkness Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Grand Rounds lighting design is by Joe Levasseur, sound design by Steven Brush, dramaturgy by Janice Paran, and the set and costume design by Joanne Howard. The cast includes Cynthia Gilbertson, Glen Heroy, Nitzan Mager, Emily Pope, Cadence Rotarius, Peter Selwyn, Aurelia Suchilt, Berenice Suchilt, Morgan Sullivan, and Jake Szczypek.