Choreographer: Derek Deane

Music: Bruce Springsteen

Costumes and Set Design: Henry Heymann

Lighting: Michael Korsch

World Premiere: Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, April 29, 2004

PBT Performance Dates: March 2004, March 2011

Program Notes (from PBT playbill, 2004)
By Carol Meeder, former Director of Arts Education

Derek Deane enjoys watching people and wondering about their lives. He also enjoys the earthiness of Springsteen’s music, portraits of real and ordinary people. In Hungry Heart…‘we all have one’!!, he choreographs emotions that exist in all of us. A diner seemed the perfect setting because of its transience. 

“People float through diners, revealing fragments of their souls; but then they’re gone.” In these vignettes Deane creates emotional comparisons – the tenderness of young love with the resentment of a disillusioned couple; the innocence of young girls beginning a friendship with GI buddies whose bond is based on a lifetime of experiences including military service where their lives were at stake; the biker, whose only security comes from provoking fear in others with the actress whose disappointments have created a profound alienation.

Figures like these have drifted in and out of our experience as they drift in and out of the Hungry Heart Cafe. The Barman and Waitress, ever-present at the diner, never changing, interacting with others as they pass through, then getting back to business, because “at the end of the day, nothing changes, and life goes on.” In a sense, isn’t that what we all do?