Photo above by Sarah Wells, CETA Artists Project photographer. 1978 performance.
Title: Paperworks
Opening
Mainstream
Pilot
Words Per Minute
Paper Airplanes
Afterword
Closing
Premiere: Work in progress premiere February 12, 1976, Dance Uptown Series, Barnard Gymnasium, NYC, NY.
Full premiere, February 26, 1976, Minor Latham Playhouse, NYC, NY.
Subsequent performances February 27 & 28, 1978, Minor Latham Playhouse; June 7 & 8, 1978, Earl Hall Summer Series, Earl Hall Auditorium, Columbia University, NYC, NY.
Duration: Approximately 20 minutes.
Dancers: Hector Alejandro, Mary Broaddus, Mary Lisa Burns, Catherine Cunningham, Beverly Eisenstadt, Jessica Fogel, Tom Gramila, Hohn Hannay, Nina Hennessey, Yumi Hirai, Laura Kolesar, Marion Kwartler, Daniel McCusker, Carol Koblitt, Yoko Otani, John Smallcomb, Tristan Soares, Nathaniel X (friend of Tristan’s, son of art history professor)
Typist: Elyse Morgan
Note: The 1978 performances included some original cast members and some new cast members, including Nancy Alfaro, Sally Hechinger, Joanne Legano, and John Phillips. The two young boys’ parts were given to a single girl, Patricia Longshore.
Music: Tape collage, including Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and spoken text.
Description:
This work was one of three dances I presented at Minor Latham Playhouse as a capstone project during my senior year at Barnard College in February 1976. Prior to this, Paperworks was shown on a Dance Uptown concert in the Barnard Gymnasium when it was still a work in progress, about three weeks ahead of its premiere. No videos of the work exist that I know of, but I have many notes on the rehearsal process from my journals (see link “Rehearsal notes” below.) The work was in several sections. During the entire dance, Elyse Morgan sat at a typewriter downstage right, typing a paper. While I am not listed on the program as a performer, I was a soloist in the work. There were also two five-year-old boys in the work, one of whom was Janet Soares’s son Tristan Soares, and his friend, Nathaniel. The dance grew out of imagery I had absorbed at that time. I had had a part time job in a law firm near Wall Street in the fall of 1973, and commuted from the Upper West Side downtown on the #1 IRT subway, watching men in suits with briefcases unfurl their newspapers and read them, heads obscured, news of the Vietnam War and Watergate predominating the headlines. The imagery for the first section grew out of this. This section consisted mainly of the large cast of dancers walking downstage in slow and determined motion, while opening their newspapers, which they then set down and stood upon in the shape of the letter “Y.” Certainly, the Vietnam War and warfare in general was another motif. In sharp staccato movements, the dancers spelled out the words of the typing exercise “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party” ending with again with the letter “Y”. Instructed by two whistle blowing sergeants, who shouted out commands and directions(“Right side over. Fold! Left side over. Fold!...”), the dancers constructed paper airplanes out of their newspapers and fought against each other, eventually spinning and falling to the floor in death. I believe this section may have been set to a collage of the ending chords of a Beethoven Symphony repeated many times. After this war section, two young boys played in the debris of the newspaper airplanes, running with sheets against their tummies, and gathering up all the papers into a large pile which they gleefully jumped into like a pile of leaves. In the final section, which was a solo for me to a Bach Violin Sonata, there was a semiotic tension between words and movement—a sense that the dancing spirit prevailed amidst a bombardment of words and politic. While several dancers methodically took on the task of filling the dancing space with sheets of newspaper, gradually encroaching on my dancing space until I had only one foot of space left to dance in, I danced on, even as my space shrank, ending triumphantly in the shape of the letter “Y”, arms upstretched.
Choreographer’s journal notes on rehearsal process 1978
Earl Hall Summer Center 1978 press release & letter to Earl Hall manager
Paperworks. Photo by CETA photographer Sarah Wells. Columbia University Earl Hall performance 1978.