9/25 & 26 – Philly Fringe Festival - SOKOLOW THEATRE/DANCE ENSEMBLE

Photos: Randy Bye (left), Steven Pisano (right)

ROOMS/THRENODY — SOKOLOW/ANTHONY

Friday, 9/25/26 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, 9/26 at 3 pm & 7:30 pm
Performance Garage
1515 Brandywine St, Philadelphia

Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble joins Dancefusion of Philadelphia to present masterpieces by two legendary giants of modern dance, Anna Sokolow and Mary Anthony.

Dancefusion’s revival of Mary Anthony’s Threnody, choreographed in 1956, is based on the play Riders to the Sea by John Milton Synge. Threnody is an episodic dramatic work in three movements about life and loss, set to Sinfonia da Requiem by Benjamin Britten. Threnody depicts the struggles of an Irish mother and her family, and the losses of her three sons to the sea. At its premiere in New York City, Louis Horst wrote in Dance Observer, “Here is the most beautiful and complete dance composition this observer has seen… this is something approaching perfection.” The last movement is a formal lament, a threnody, for all who live and die by the sea.

Photos: Randi Bye, Jeff Somers

On the edge between theater and dance, Anna Sokolow’s Rooms is a dance performed in snapshots to a driving jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins. Choreographed in 1955 during the breakdown of wartime solidarity, when the threat of atomic annihilation, the 1952 polio epidemic, and the Red Scare hung like invisible contagions, Rooms examines the psychic isolation and unfulfilled desires of people living in small, city apartments. Rooms shattered many choreographic conventions; most notably through its focus on everyday people as opposed to archetypal myths, its spare movement vocabulary, and storytelling through nonlinear vignettes. An enduring masterpiece, Rooms reveals the deepest aspects of our human condition.