Live at Carnegie Hall
Live at Carnegie Hall
Clore Studio Upstairs, Royal Opera House
January 2000
Choreography by Tom Sapsford
Directed by Diana Hillier
Text by Claire Taylor
Dancers: Tom Sapsford, Ricardo Cervera, Bennet Gartside, Sian Murphy, Samantha Raine, Thomas Whitehead
Actors: Tamsin Stanley and Claire Taylor
The inaugural project of the Royal Opera House’s Artists’ Development Initiative, run by Deborah Bull, teamed choreographer and Royal Ballet dancer Tom Sapsford with theatre director Diana Hillier. I joined the project as writer/performer.
Live at Carnegie Hall was based on the sensational concert Judy Garland gave at Carnegie Hall in 1961. The piece began as a dance solo choreographed and performed by Tom Sapsford and set to Judy Garland’s heartbreaking rendition of Stormy Weather. For this production, we expanded the piece and wove Tom’s dance exploration of Judy Garland’s performance together with a story, suggested by the songs in the concert, that revealed the difference between the white-picket-fence dreams of a young American couple and the reality of their lives.
I wrote the text for the parallel story using only words from the concert – song lyrics and Judy’s asides – as if we’d thrown all the concert’s words up in the air and let them fall down to make a new, very different story. The resulting text was a free flowing poem laden with subtle echoes, foreshadowings and twisted, fragmented reflections of the songs and speech used in the dance sections.
Name-dropping moment: Princess Margaret came to see the show and seemed to have fun.
Live at Carnegie Hall cast
Tom Sapsford becoming Judy