Title: Fern Hill
Premiere: ca 1975 or 1976, Minor Latham Playhouse, New York City
Performer: Carol Hess
Music: likely a recording of Dylan Thomas reading Fern Hill, in its totality, or perhaps just part of if. https://voxpopulisphere.com/2018/08/04/audio-fern-hill-read-by-dylan-thomas/
Description: No video or photos exist of this dance. I was a big fan of Dylan Thomas from my high school years onwards. The solo was directly inspired by the poem, and was an evocation of the passage of time, youth, and aging. I recall a white rocking chair off-center right—I’m not sure if the solo began there or ended there, while the poem was being recited. When the dancer sprang out of the chair, it kept rocking, taking on a motion and life of its own in conversation with the dancer’s motion. The stage space was the boundless space of youth, the chair the space of old age. I used a white rocking chair Spalding Gray gave me from the Wooster Group. Apparently, Meredith Monk had left the chair in their theater after performing Education of a Girlchild there, which is a dance that reverses the aging process, going from old to young. I had not seen Monk’s work when I made my solo. I transported the rocking chair up to Barnard on the #1 IRT subway. It was a long, slow, cheerful ride, and I sat in the rocking chair the whole trip uptown. I recall that subway trip more vividly than the dance itself, in itself a site dance performance; there was much amused banter about the chair with fellow subway riders.
