Title: Night & Day: Henry & Gay

1. Breakfast 2. Desert 3. Rain 4. Lunch 5. Boxes 6. Gardening 7. Aisle 8. Song 9. Dinner

Premiere: November 12-15, 1987, McIntosh Theater, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Ann Arbor Dance Works. Subsequently performed December 4, 1987, Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto, Ontario.  Also performed at Stockton State College, NJ; Betty Pease Studio Theater, Ann Arbor; McIntosh Theater, Ann Arbor.

Performers: Gay Delanghe and Henry VanKuiken, with Jessica Fogel

Duration: approximately 15 minutes

Music:  Excerpts from Five Chromatic Dances, by William Albright

Costumes: Jessica Fogel

Lighting Design: Mary Cole

Description:  This was a character study of Henry VanKuiken and Gay Delanghe, and of their relationship with each other. I played the role of a French maid in the trio, delivering and removing props to Henry and Gay throughout the work. I created the trio after living with the Henry and Gay for two summers at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, where Gay ran the summer modern dance program and hired her UM faculty colleagues and UM Dance alumni to teach there. While not romantically involved, Henry and Gay were in many ways like a married couple, and for many years they spent each summer together teaching at Interlochen. The modern dance faculty lived in a very run down house on the Interlochen property, cooking meals, shopping, playing, teaching and creating dances together. The dance roughly followed a day in the life, and incorporated three meals. (In real life) each morning, Henry would rise early and sharpen his kitchen knife and slice fresh fruit for breakfast for himself and Gay. Gay and I could hear these sounds from our upstairs bedrooms. Then Henry would call Gay down for breakfast. This activity became the first scene of the dance, “Breakfast,” where it took on a sinister tone in stark light as Henry sharpened a large knife in long strokes, and repeatedly called “ Gay….. Gay….. Gay….” finally ending with “Breakfast!” Later in the dance in the “Boxes” section, I employed a theater exercise I had learned in a workshop with Spalding Gray at the American Dance Festival in 1975. The exercise was to stand in a spot and say: “My name is ____________ and I like to…” and then move to another prescribed small space and do whatever you wanted to do within that small rectangle of space. This exercise got integrated into the dance for Henry and Gay. After proclaiming their own preferences, they then parodied each other’s choices, Henry proclaiming: “My name is Gay, and I like to….” and then mimed putting on lipstick and performing aerobics. A nuance was that Henry is a gay man. Gay at one point said ”My name is Gay and I’m not Gay,” (a line she was fond of saying in real life.) She then proceeded to call herself Henry, and parody Henry’s movement choices. The “Gardening” section featured Henry in a solo during which I placed three potted fake tulip stems for him and handed him a watering can to water them. In real life, Henry is a master gardener. In his solo, Henry spoke about his background as a Dutch Reform Calvinist, and the meanings of the TULIP anagram as the five doctrines of that faith. The “Aisle” section featured Gay in a solo. For this section, she donned a long sleeveless pale gold full length ball gown with a wide skirt, and put on a blonde wig. At one point she carried a wedding bouquet down an imaginary aisle, moving as if she was on a precarious tightrope. In the “Desert” section, Henry and Gay traversed the stage leaning sideways against each other at the shoulders and I brought in and held a cardboard sun high above, signaling it was high noon. In the “Rain” section, they continued their leaning traversals as I held an umbrella over their heads. This was followed by the “Lunch” section in which Henry fed Gay spaghetti one strand at a time. During the “Song” section, Henry and Gay sat and faced each other and sang “Night and Day” to each other over the Albright piano music (both Henry and Gay loved to sing and had fine voices). While they sang the song, they played the hand slapping game and eventually did a ballroom dance with each other. To develop the ballroom material, we got lessons from a professional ballroom dance couple, Professor and Murs. Kan Chen, who worked at UM. In the final “Dinner” section, Gay drank a glass of wine seductively while Henry nervously set the dinner table with white tablecloth, which he had earlier brandished as a cape that he laid over an imaginary puddle before gallantly seating Gay at the table. (Or did he brandish his dinner jacket?) He fumbled wildly with the utensils, clattering them noisily and dropping them as he set the table. The Albright music was played live when we performed it in Ann Arbor at the McIntosh Theater by pianist Robert Conway. This work was as much theater as it was dance.

Ann Arbor News review by Marianne Danks Rudnicki

Preview article, Ann Arbor News

McIntosh Theatre program, November 12-15, 1987