Title: Twofold

Premiere: NYU’s Loeb Student Center, March 17 & 18, 1978 on shared concert with Virginia Pier entitled “Crossroads”. Subsequently presented in revised form by Jessica Fogel and Dancers at Earl Hall, Columbia, June 1978; Dance Theater Workshop, NYC, 1979 Also presented at Queensborough Community College as part of a CETA dance festival series.

Dancers: Schellie Archbold, Daniel McCusker, Virginia Pier, John Phillips

Music: Collage of radio station switching between popular top 40 music and a critique of a performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata; Mendelssohn’s wedding march.

Costumes and set design: Jessica Fogel

Duration: approximately 20 minutes

Description: The genesis of this dance was that I was given two bridal gowns. My sister Becky was preparing for her March 1978 wedding, and she and my mother, while shopping for her wedding dress, bought the gowns for $5.00 a piece from a bridal store that was going out of business. They gave them to me, thinking I might use them for a production. I stood the stiff, elaborate dresses up in my apartment in NY and mused upon what I might do with them. The fact that there were two inspired me to double the imagery within the dance. I decided to base the dance largely on images from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I modeled my two brides after the characters of Didi and Gogo. The dance is in three sections. In section 1, the two women gesture through a range of emotions as they sit on cubes in their wedding dresses, waiting for their true love. Popular music (“When Will I see You Again?”) and a radio talk show critiquing a performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata are elements of the radio collage score in the first section. In the second section, set to Mendelssohn’s wedding march, the grooms stand on the cubes center stage. The two brides appear downstage right and upstage left, and approach the grooms on diagonal pathways, shimmying their unseen feet under the gowns so that they appear to glide on the floor, eventually mounting the cubes to marry the grooms, like figures on a wedding cake. In section 3, the two couples repeat all the action from section 1, now as two couples in unison. At the premiere, Shellie Archbold and Virgina Pier were the two female dancers. There was a section in which Schellie spoke while Virginia danced to text from Modern Bride Magazine. Schellie recited a detailed calendar countdown to a wedding, from two years ahead to five minutes before the wedding. Her tempo and hysteria increased as the calendar progressed. The dance was premiered on the night of Becky’s rehearsal dinner. I was not at the premiere since I was attending the wedding festivities in Ithaca. I subsequently revised the dance for a June 1978 performance at Earl Hall, Columbia University, and took the Modern Bride section out. It was performed in several locations in NYC, including Queensborough Community College for a CETA Dance Artists concert; on a 1979 concert at Dance Theater Workshop; and I believe at the Riverside Dance Festival (1980 and/or 1981). Daniel McCusker and John Phillips remained cast members in all versions of the dance.

Without easy access to video as a rehearsal tool, I took copious notes on my dance making:

Fogel journal of creative process

Dance Magazine review, by Linda Small

Dance Magazine review by Barbara Newman

Program March 1978 premiere