The Big Family Business returns to the Foundry Theater Saturday and Sunday, May 2 and 3, reopening the venue after a nearly three-month closure. The music and dance collective are pictured performing at the Wheatland Music Festival in 2023. (Submitted photo)
The Big Family Business returns to Yellow Springs
- Published: May 1, 2026
When the Foundry Theater closed in February following extensive winter storm damage, a central venue for village performances went dark for a while. Next weekend, at long last, The Big Family Business — the intergenerational performance collective led by Sharon Leahy and Rick Good — will flip the lights back on, with a flourish.
“We’re opening it back up,” Leahy told the News in a recent interview. “We’re gonna open it back up with a joyous celebration.”
The Big Family Business, or BFB, will take the stage at the Foundry for two performances on Saturday and Sunday, May 2 and 3. In addition to Leahy and Good, performers will include Kevin Anderson, Addie Bakan, Ben Cooper, Tristan Cupp, Franklin and Walker Fannin, Becky Hill, Melissa Proffit, Chris Westhoff, Beth and Violet Wright and Emma and Linzay Young.
Local audiences first got to know the family-knit supergroup from their debut village performance in late summer of 2024, bringing members of the former long-running Dayton dance and music company Rhythm in Shoes together with artists who were collaborators or kin — and sometimes both. The debut performance blended old-time music, percussive dance and audience participation.
This year’s show, Leahy said, carries a similar aesthetic and spirit, but with some novel additions.
“Last time, we kind of reconstituted a lot of [former Rhythm in Shoes] material,” she said. “This time, two of the three pieces are brand new.”
The new works were conjured from meditations and reflections on living and creating — in particular, living and creating in a time, Leahy said, when many feel worn down.
“Just because of the state of our country, we all needed to keep the creative spark alive and get together with people and make things,” she said. “So that’s what we did, and that was the fuel.”
First on the bill is the new piece “What Remains.” Using percussive dance and an original banjo score performed by Good, it aims to wend its way around those initial reflections, Leahy said, and carry them through ruminations on community and connection, and the idea of “staying at the table” together over long stretches of life — even when creating, or simply living, are a struggle.
“Rick and I have been making work for a long time, so we started thinking, ‘What is this thread? What comes and goes, what stays through everything that brings us to where we are now?’” she said. “What is it that brings you together, all the way through all those times that other friends drop off? What is it in common that holds you all there? … So we created [the piece] in the vocabulary and medium of old time music … and we hope people can feel the intent we put into it.”
Standing in complement to “What Remains” is “John J. Plenty & Fiddler Dan,” a retelling of Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” based on a 1963 poetic adaptation of the same name by John Ciardi. The piece will feature puppetry by master puppeteer and mask-maker Tristan Cupp of Zoot Theatre, with an original score by Leahy’s son, Ben Cooper, and live Foley and percussion by Kevin Anderson, with appearances by some of BFB’s youngest collaborators.
The original message of the tale of the industrious ant and idle grasshopper boils down to a simple maxim: work now, play later. But Leahy said the BFB were drawn to Ciardi’s retelling because it upends the age-old story by asking: What is enough, and how can we recognize enough when we see it? What do we lose when work crowds everything else out in pursuit of more-than-enough?
“The ant who works and works and works and works and works, he suffers from that,” she said. “And the grasshopper, who basically just shares his music, is full of life. … So really, do you have to work that hard? Can you take the time to go to the dance?”
At its core, Leahy said, both Ciardi’s tale and the BFB’s adaptation of it deal in exploring joy, making the case that joy is neither a luxury nor an indulgence.
“Joy is a human need,” she said.
And there’s joy for the members of BFB in coming together to dance and make music as part of a collective connected by blood, marriage and/or longstanding creative relationships. Leahy said the bedrock of relational ties infuses the work with joy, but also a deep human memory of a bygone age when cleaving to kinfolk was the standard.
“There’s something between family members on stage that’s compelling,” Leahy said. “This is the way we’ve always worked with our family — and this is how it worked for most of our history as human beings. It’s only recently that families have been separate — you go there, you go there, I’ll go here, all day long — and I don’t think that’s working for [people] all that well.”
Joy exists, too, in remembering BFB’s roots in Rhythm in Shoes, which Leahy and Good founded in 1987 and shepherded for 25 years. For that reason, the upcoming BFB show will feature an “RIS Tap Suite,” incorporating a number of favorites from the Rhythm in Shoes repertoire performed, Leahy said, by “probably the best tap dancers in the area.”
“You’ll be astounded by what they can do — they’ll blow your hair back,” she said.
Those tap shoes will sound especially good on the Foundry Theater’s new slate of stage flooring in the main auditorium; as BFB collaborator and Foundry Theater Director Chris Westhoff told the News, the collective will be hoofing it on newly installed masonite, which he described as “softer, nicer on the feet,” but with a tone that lends itself to percussive dance. Outside of the auditorium, audiences re-entering the Foundry for the first time since February will notice new carpet in the entryway and new tile in the theater’s foyer; coming up soon will be new marley flooring for the dance studio.
Though the BFB will be the first to try out the new auditorium flooring, audience members won’t be far behind: following the closing tap suite, all will be invited to get on their feet and learn the “Shim Sham,” known as the “national anthem” of tap dance — and, hopefully, experience a little joy while they’re at it.
“It’s super easy to learn,” Leahy said. “Come on out and dance with us.”
The Big Family Business will perform Saturday, May 2, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, May 3, at 2 p.m., at the Foundry Theater in Yellow Springs. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $5 for students, and are available online at http://www.bit.ly/BFBFoundry2026
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