Related to both the audience-participation element of Dancing In the
Streets... and the rigors of The Fugue, The One Hundreds presents an
opportunity to put the dance audience on stage. (It is also an exercise in
aesthetic and physical deterioration.) The movements, based on activities
anyone, including non-trained dancers, could do, such as skip, hop, shiver,
shake, didn't require virtuosos. The One Hundreds progresses as follows:
first, two well-versed and skilled dancers execute, in unison, 100
eleven-second phrases separated by four-second pauses; next, five dancers
each do 20 different phrases simultaneously; finally, 100 audiences members
appear and all together execute the entire set of variations, thus taking
eleven seconds to show what the two dancers did in approximately 25 minutes,
and what the five dancers showed in approximately five minutes. In effect,
as the time lessens, so does the rigor and definition of the dancing, which
at the climactic display of 100 individual soloists shows the dance phrases
as "mere shadows of themselves."