Title: Kaddish
Premiere: Premiered at the Kyoto International Community Theater, Kyoto, Japan, June 5, 1993. Subsequently performed at Central Michigan University; Alma College; University of Michigan Betty Pease Studio Theater; and at the Performance Network, Ann Arbor, MI. Later integrated into the 2010 work, Dances, Letters, and Rhymes.
Duration: 9 minutes
Choreography and performance: Jessica Fogel
Music: Do You Be, by Meredith Monk (Meredith Monk: Do You Be, ECM Records 1987); Gotham Lullaby, by Meredith Monk (Dolmen Music, ECM Records 1981).
Costumes: John Gutoskey
Description: This solo was created after the death of my father as a vessel for my grief. It is a distillation of materials from the final movement of the large group work Dance for Eighteen (premiered in February 1993).. Instead of using the music materials from Dance for Eighteen, I used the Meredith Monk selections. In creating the solo, I researched Jewish mourning rituals. A cloth is rended toward the beginning of the solo. Towards the end of the dance, I “leave the house” and take a walk, waving to someone, as if emerging from the isolation of the shiva/seven days of mourning. At the conclusion of the solo, I circle a chair that has been laid on its side, doing a low run around it holding an egg, and conclude, arighting the chair, and sitting in it holding the egg at my belly as a sign of life and renewal. It was a harbinger. Within the next two years, I got married and gave birth to Annabel.
Program, September Dances, Ann Arbor 1993
Program, Alma College, November 1993
Review, Ann Arbor News, Susan Nisbett, September 1993
Review, The Almanian, Kristen Miquel, November 1993
Letter, Professor Carol Fike, Alma College
THE PHOTOS BELOW are I believe by Glenn Bering, taken at the Duderstadt Center Studio at University of Michigan. The photos are from a 2010 Ann Arbor Dance Works performance, which included a performance of my work, Dances, Letters, and Rhymes, in which the solo Kaddish is performed more or less in its entirety, layered and overlapped with a compendium of solo dances choreographed by me over the years. These photos provide a good sense of key moments within Kaddish, and are the only visual record I have of the work, unless I can track down a video of Dances, Letters, and Rhymes. At the beginning of the gallery of photos you can see the figure of Jillian Hopper performing Woman with a Pearl Drop Earring in the yellow top and black skirt, and the end of her solo overlaps with the appearance of dancer Tehillah Frederick, performing the opening of the Kaddish section. I am also dimly in these opening gallery photos, delivering a chair to the stage. The solo begins downstage right with a rending of a shawl that is then wrapped around the waist. She moves to the chair and lowers it to the ground, sits/lies in it horizontally on the floor. You can see in the final pictures Tehillah sets the chair upright and circles the chair before sitting in the chair holding an egg against her belly. Meanwhile, another dancer (Susie Thiel, wearing pale green) has entered and is beginning to perform the solo, Upswell, a solo that pays tribute to the birth of Annabel. The only photo I have of me performing Kaddish in the original 1993 solo version is a grainy shot within The Almanian review, linked above.
