Richard Peck (Music) and David Woodberry with Danny Lepkoff (Dance) Performance

The evening’s program was structured in five parts:
I. David Woodberry, solo dance: “a. Give it up, b. How to stand up”; II. Richard Peck, solo alto sax: “Prince (Hot Summer Time) Street Blues, or the ‘Food’ is Hot” (dedicated to Ornette Coleman); III. David Woodberry and Danny Lepkoff: Contact Improvisation; IV. Richard Peck, Fender Rhodes Piano: “Vehicle #1”; and V. David Woodberry and Richard Peck (various instruments): “Improvisation to Recognition of Four Vignettes.”

In “How to Stand Up”, Marcia Siegel wrote that David Woodberry, “pushed himself up from the floor, tiled, lunged, rolled over in various ways, then did a series of gestures borrowed from sports umpires and movie tough guys.” Regarding the contact improvisation sequences she wrote, “Once the men established a mutual flow of energy, they moved through a very active and changeable sequence in which not only their roles were always reversing—from carrier to carried, from thrower to catcher—but their relationship kept turning into its opposite. They would drag or pull each other sometimes quite roughly, male motions of attack and defense, then suddenly they’d be embracing.” In discussion the vignettes she remarked, “They really were vignettes, none lasting more than a few minutes. First Peck played the clarinet while Woodbery held two six-foot long fluorescent light bulbs, changing their angle and position very carefully so they wouldn’t hit anything and break. While Peck beat a rhythm, on what look like a circular blade. Woodberry and Lepkoff went outside and held up two sparklers against the window of the gallery.”

Excerpted from Brentano, R., & Savitt, M. (1981). 112 Workshop, 112 Greene Street: History, artists & artworks. New York: New York University Press.