Title: Broadloom

Premiere:  1979, Jessica Fogel and Dancers at the Marymount Manhattan Theater, NYC. Subsequently performed in theaters throughout NYC: Dance Theater Workshop/American Theatre Laboratory; Riverside Dance Festival; Queens Community College; Earl Hall, Columbia University.

Duration:  10 minutes

Dancers in premiere:  Jessica Fogel, Sally Hechinger, Gary Kotyk, Joanne Legano, Keith Marshall, Martha Wiseman.  Subsequent performances may have substituted Catlin Cobb as one of the dancers, and Fogel and Wiseman, speakers in the premiere, shifted out of the dance when the prologue was discarded.

Music:  Prokofiev Violin Concerto #2 in G Minor, Op. 63, 2nd movement, Andante Assai 

Description: An earlier, abbreviated version of this dance was performed in January 1979 as a duet with Daniel McCusker at the American Theatre Laboratory (Dance Theater Workshop) in NYC, and was entitled Idyll. The subsequent premiere of Broadloom included two sections:  a brief prologue entitled “Martha and Sally” that consisted of spoken dialogue between two women (Fogel and Wiseman), performed downstage right while chopping apples on a cutting board, and a second section entitled “The music,” which was basically a movement visualization of the lush violin concerto. The second section stood as a symbol of idealized romance. My concept for including the “Martha and Sally” section was to indicate that not all was right in paradise. See journal notes below for a draft of this prologue dialogue.   In discussing the music in this first section, I wanted to make it clear that music was a deliberate theatrical choice that represented an ideal, in contrast to more complex realities. In subsequent performances, the first section was deleted and the second section stood on its own, without any narrative/textual introduction or contrast.  The dance for two male/female couples was set very closely to the violin concerto, a piece that had been a favorite of mine since adolescence.  The dance materials took place almost entirely on the floor, except for one brief climactic section, in which the dancers donned socks, skied on the floor and performed lifts. This was followed by returning to the ground and repeating the opening movements, which included shifting in seated positions and spins on the floor, rocking back onto the spine with legs lifted and pressed together in an asymmetrical twist from the waist, locomoting in a seated position by thrusting forward with one long leg, one bent leg. 

 NY Times review Jack Anderson

The Villager review Doris Diether

Dance Magazine review, by Linda Small

NY Times review Jennifer Dunning

Program Marymount Manhattan premiere

Fogel journal draft of original text for premiere version,  later discarded