Title: Music Minus One
Premiere: January 25-28, 1979, American Theatre Laboratory, Dance Theater Workshop, NYC, NY
Duration: 4 minutes
Dancer/violinist: Jessica Fogel
Music: Sonata No. 1 in D, 1st movement, Georg Philipp Telemann
Description: This was a work that I placed at the conclusion of my evening-length concerts at the American Theatre Laboratory January 25-28, 1979, and at the Riverside Dance Festival November 7, 9 & 11, 1979. It acted as a coda for the evening, and projected a sense of self-possession after conflict and loss. At the beginning of the work, there was heard a recording of a telephone ringing, which I did not answer. I sat centerstage in a stark pool of light, with a portable record player downstage of me. I then put a Music Minus One record of a Telemann violin sonata on the record player, and returned to my chair to play along with it. There are no videos or photos of this “dance,” in which the act of playing the violin becomes both a dance and a theatrical event. The photo above is from a different dance, Violindance, which opened the evening of dance at the Riverside Dance Festival. Throughout the evening of dances, I framed music as an entity unto itself, with each musical choice imparting an emotional temperature within which each dance lived.
In my journal notes on this dance, I posed several questions. ““What is the Music Minus One? Should I dance as well as play? That is my impulse, and yet there is something more solid about simply playing…If I dance as well as played it would be a little contrived rather than realistic…The ending [of the evening] ought to be very bittersweet. I mean an island of sweet music, but the lights very harsh, everything exposed, some kind of quest for dignity after the anarchy…the acceptance (of self)”
Dance Magazine review, by Linda Small
Jessica Fogel in Violindance
Jessica Fogel in Violindance