Group Activities

Premiere

Date

13 January 1969

Company

Twyla Tharp with Sara Rudner, Theresa Dickinson, Margery Tupling, Sheila Raj, and Rose Marie Wright

Venue

The Theatre of the Living Arts

Location

Philadelphia, PA

Production

Choreographer

Twyla Tharp

Lighting Designer

Jennifer Tipton

Costume and Scenic Designer

Robert Huot

Dancers

Theresa Dickinson, Sheela Raj, Sara Rudner, Margery Tupling, Rose Marie Wright

Number of Dancers

5 (10 in BAM restaging)

Runtime

00:42:00

Description

For Group Activities, white masking tape marks a grid on the floor of the performance space. The dancers perform to the sound of a metronome, a temporal reference point for their rhythmically complex solos, in which segments of stillness and movement incrementally decreased in length while the amount of movement in each segment increased in an inverse ratio with the stillness.

When the dance was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music some months later, Tharp added a caller, seated next to the metronome with a pencil and paper, who shouted out the correct counts when the dancers called out or fell out of sync. The audience sat on bleachers surrounding the stage. The cast was doubled to ten dancers and arranged so that the choreography was seen at two angles from a single vantage point. Like looking through a stereopticon, the double cast created a sense of depth and a feeling of spontaneous reorganization.

Original choreographic notes depicting an aerial view of grid and movement patterns.