Title: An Overture
Dumb Show
Allegro
Premiere: November 7, 1979, Riverside Dance Festival, NYC, NY
Duration: 6 minutes
Dancers: Jessica Fogel and Gary Kotyk
Music: The Riverside Dance Festival program says Handel Violin Sonata #9, but no such sonata exists! I imagine it was the Handel Violin Sonata #3 or #4 or #6, movements 1 and 2.
Description: No photos or videos of this dance exist. It was performed three nights on the Riverside Dance Festival, November 7, 9, and 11. In an earlier evening of dances by Jessica Fogel, entitled “Splintered, a collection of dance works,” this duet seems to have been incorporated as an opening duet. I found scant notes on An Overture in one of my journals, where I described it as follows: “each section a ceremony, compact and pithy. if each element were somehow an essence of the contradiction between tenderness and hostility.” I then went on to describe it in a list of eight actions, beginning and ending with “hand game,” by which I meant the game where partners sit facing each other. One person lays their hands on top of the other person’s palms up hands, and the palms up person pulls their hands out from below to try to slap the partner’s hands before that person pulls their hands away. There is also a game of fake slaying, accomplished with the throw of an apple, then playing dead, and then tickling the dead person awake. Some of these are ideas I reused in subsequent dances, most notably the hand game in Night and Day, Henry and Gay (1987), and the playing dead and tickle scene in The Path Between (1989). A movement I describe as “Spanish hurls” referred to running toward each other at top speed and stopping just shy of hitting each other, pelvises thrust forward and arms flung high aloft with flexed wrists; I also used that movement in subsequent dances. In the flow of this performance, the duet held inklings of tensions played out in the subsequent dances on the program.
Fogel journal notes on “An Overture”
