“17c” is the newest Big Dance Theater ensemble work, built around the problematic seventeenth century diaries of Samuel Pepys. Pepys danced, sang, strummed, shopped, strove, bullied, and groped—and he recorded all of it in his diary, completely unfiltered. From his bunions, to his infidelities, to his perversions, to his meetings with the King, he needed to get his daily life down on paper or he felt lost. A startling precursor to our own social media culture, Pepys possessed a similar compulsion to assign an almost constant real-time meaning to his daily existence, to examine himself, and obsessively report it.

Using all the data we can find—the copiously prolific diaries themselves, Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth century radical feminist play “The Convent of Pleasure,” three centuries of marginalia, and the ongoing annotations of the web-based devotees at www.pepysdiary.com—”17c” dismantles an unchallenged historical figure and embodies the women’s voices omitted from Pepys’ intimate portrait of his life. Big Dance Theater continues its formal fascination with building systems of dance that challenge theater, while allowing the structure of the work itself to bring contemporary meaning to the making and un-making of our subjective past.