Title: A Simple Story

Premiere: July 22-24, 1988, Perry Mansfield Camp, Steamboat Springs, CO

Music:  Pastorale Variations, by Stephen Rush after Igor Stravinsky’s Pastorale

Dancers: Ty Boomershine, Stephen Hogsett, Cathy Kapphahn, Doug Kolp, Amy Malkin, Kevin Predmore, Penny Vercelline

Sheep/Clouds: Cherry Cooks, Stephanie Jentsch, Becky Lind, Laura Mowry, Melanie Powell

Musicians: Stephen Hurley, tenor; Lucinda Lawrence, soprano; April Kuhr, piano

Soprano: Lucinda Lawrence

Duration: 12 minutes

Description: In the summer of 1988, I taught at the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts Camp, located in Steamboat Springs, CO, and affiliated with the Stephens College dance program. Perry Mansfield has a long history of hosting modern dancers for summer residencies. https://www.perry-mansfield.org/additional-info.

I connected with them through pianist April Kuhr, who had become a close friend when we worked together in the Dance Dept. at SUNY Brockport in 1983-4, and who went on to work at Stephens College, among other institutions. At the end-of-session concert, I performed Woman with a Pearl Drop Earring, and also premiered a group work, A Simple Story. This dance served as a first draft for Pastorale (1989), which I worked on upon my return to campus in fall 1988-winter 1989. For our University of Michigan Department of Dance major annual concerts at Power Center, we worked with themes for marketing purposes. The thrust of the 1989 season was to do a program of dances set to Stravinsky music, to be performed live by the University Orchestra, conducted by Gustave Meier. I chose Stravinsky’s Pastorale, drawn to the wordless song for soprano, and I asked the Dance Department’s music director, Stephen Rush, to compose variations on Stravinsky’s work to include a range of moods and a more substantial duration. Equipped with Rush’s initial draft of a score, I made a chamber version of the dance. I worked with literary notions of the pastorale, and of the tension between urban and rural settings, where urban settings are construed as corrupt, and pastoral settings as a freer and simpler setting for shepherds and shepherdesses. It was a story of love found between shepherd and shepherdess, love lost via the lust of a god who descends from the heavens to seduce the shepherdess, and love regained when the shepherd and shepherdess are reunited.

Perry Mansfield/Steamboat Springs review 1988

Program