The Dance Department in collaboration with Sokolow Theatre presents “Rooms”, a virtual presentation.

This fall, CoDa collaborates with the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble (NYC) to reconstruct a suite of dances from Anna Sokolow’s Rooms (1955), conceived specifically for virtual presentation. Lyell B. Clay Artist-in-Residence Kris Allen assembles a special ensemble of student and Artist Associate faculty to collaborate on the Kenyon Hopkins’ original jazz score.

In 2020, Rooms is hauntingly real, and surreal. Created in response to the psychic isolation and unfulfilled desires of characters isolated in their small city apartments, this controversial and groundbreaking work resonates with uncanny power today, at a time when people everywhere are living quarantined in their homes. Rooms breathed with the loneliness and alienation following the breakdown of wartime solidarity, when the threat of atomic annihilation, the 1952 polio epidemic, and the Red Scare hung like invisible contagions and created a mood of pervasive uncertainty and dread over America. Isolated in the grip of a global pandemic, and mired in divisive issues of political and social injustice, we are all living Rooms.