A Plague on All Our Houses
In the shock of the theater gone missing, A Plague on All Our Houses follows four dancers who take to their window sills, bathrooms, and park benches to show us that they are very much here and will not be postponed.
In March, 2020, in mid-course towards a spring performance season, choreographer Tamar Rogoff’s new work is cancelled. The company is on lockdown, jobless, isolated, and scattered all over New York City. A Plague on All Our Houses is a rescue mission, a film that reconnects the dancers, keeps them dancing, and tells their story, in their words, from their houses. With limited resources, laptops and phones, four veteran performers bring body and soul to the screen. The artifice of theatrical elements recedes to expose closets and bathrooms and the chaos of living and dancing in small spaces. The audience is invited into this intimate world, seeing and hearing what it is in a dancer’s tool kit that keeps them vital and expansive in their dancing despite the crushing realities they face. The choreographer guides her company as if they were in the studio together. Her voice on Zoom, spans Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Body Scripting, a technique she has honed over years, suddenly becomes a way to send choreography through emails. They dance in the shower, on a window sill, in makeshift spaces. In the shock of a world gone missing, A Plague on All Our Houses, is art medicine, an opportunity to mine our creative power to fight what is out of control. A Plague on All Our Houses reveals four lives dedicated to an exacting art form that will not be postponed.
At the virtual gala for A Plague on All Out Houses, Mia Yoo (Artistic Director of La MaMa) spoke about this piece and Tamar’s work.