Title: Perennial
Premiere: February 26 & 27, 1988, The Performing Arts Center, Stockton State College, Pomona, NJ. Subsequently performed on Ann Arbor Dance Works’s 1988 tour of 11 cities in Mexico and in solo lecture demonstrations throughout the Midwest. Performed by Holly Hobbs for Peter Sparling Dance Company’s collaboration with the Phoenix Ensemble in 2005, and performed by Holly Hobbs 2005 as part of the award ceremony for Fogel’s Jewish Women in the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, MI.
Performer, costume and set: Jessica Fogel
Duration: 5 minutes
Music: The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives
Lighting Design: at premiere, Joseph R Lazarus.
Description: Emphasizing the right hand, this solo eventually was paired as a companion piece with my performances of Catlin Cobb’s Left-Handed Woman. When performing both works, I began with Left Handed Woman. There was a bridge between the two dances, with music by Stephen Rush, during which I changed costumes and character onstage. For Left Handed Woman I wore a black unitard and an iridescent dark purple tiered ruffle skirt and was barefoot. Transforming to Perennial, I took off the purple skirt, and put on a short black tube dress, black socks, black jazz shoes, a long black glove on my left hand and a neon yellow glove on my right hand. As a student in the school of life, I begin backing up to and then slowly sitting into a school chair with a desk arm. As Ives’s horn poses the existential/perennial the question, I raise my right hand, and then rise to move forward in the space. I follow closely the growing insistence and agitation of the wind instruments in Ives’s score. At one point, I trace a large question mark on the stage, ending with a broad jump to create the dot of the question mark. This work was also reinvented as a group work titled School of Ives for dancers at Interlochen Arts Camp and subsequently set on the University Dance Company for the Department of Dance’s Power Center production Vital Elements: Dances for 1990 February 8-11, 1990. I also performed Perennial a couple of times as a companion piece with another piece of Charles Ives music. When so paired, the overall work was entitled Two-Piece. The first section was entitled “Specter” and was choreographed to Ives’s piece Halloween. Performed in very low lights or blackouts, I cruised across the stage on a skateboard wearing a ghost sheet that hid the skateboard. A basketball also bumped across the stage. This section was then followed by “Perennial.”
Ann Arbor News preview by Joann McNamara
Ann Arbor News review by Joann McNamara
The Press, Atlantic City, NJ review
Snapshot of Holly Hobbs performing Perennial 2005, performed at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, MI, on the occasion of Jessica Fogel receiving the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts award.