Photo above: Bob Capece Dancer: Jessica Fogel in a pose from Departures Date: 1980
Title: Departures
Premiere: 1974, The Cubicolo Theater, NY, NY
Performer: Hannah Kahn
Duration: 7 minutes.
Music: Sound collage of radio station switching, radio static, eventually landing on the song “You Turn Me on, I’m a Radio” by Joni Mitchell.
Description: I created this dance in a composition class taught by Janet Soares at Barnard College. Hannah Kahn was teaching at Barnard at the time, and I was very honored when she asked if I could teach it to her to be performed by her in her concert at the Cubiculo Theater in midtown Manhattan. Thus it was my first professional dance out in the public in NY, and was reviewed in The Village Voice by Robert Pierce, May 2, 1974 (see link below). I also performed the solo frequently in this period. The solo was very much about leaving home, represented spatially by the downstage right corner, where the solo began with a thrashing beginning in a grounded and tense phrase on the floor. Throughout the dance, I kept leaving the corner and returning to it, torn in two directions, while the sound switched between static radio stations. The radio switching was done live in the sound booth, and then changed to a recording of Joni Mitchell, and ended again with live radio static. When the sound landed on the Joni Mitchell song, the dance became spacious and rhythmic and joyful. When the song ended, I paid loving tribute to the home base, moving toward and away from it along the upstage left/downstage right diagonal, long waves goodbye arms overhead, wrists bending, repeated three times moving up the diagonal, then moving down the diagonal in a deep croisé lunge with arms reaching horizontally in two directions, wrists circling as embellishment to the gesture, right ear laid along right arm, lunge phrase repeated twice moving down the diagonal; then before saying a final goodbye, clicking my wrists together back and forth (front wrists/back of wrists alternate touching) as I lowered to lay right cheek and ear to the ground downstage left, arms along sides on ground, then briskly standing and heading up the diagonal with a parallel skip and three slaps on the thigh, arms circling overhead and greeting the space arms opening wide upstage right as the lights faded.
My father wrote a poem about the dance with the same title, and titled his whole collection of poems after it:
Fogel, Ephim. “Departures.” 12/30/1975
Letter to Mark Sovocool, with descriptions of Departures and Sheer
Press:
Pierce, Robert J. "The last polka at the Cubiculo." The Village Voice. May 2, 1974. p. 53