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All About Eggs on WGBH

Wright in the beginning “Cooking Eggs” section of All About Eggs on WGBH.

Brief excerpts from “Cooking Eggs” and “Four Voice Chroma Key” sections of All About Eggs on WGBH.

Screenshot from “Cooking Eggs” in All About Eggs on WGBH.

Premiere

  • Date

    1 February 1974

  • Company

    Twyla Tharp Dance

Production

  • Choreographer

    Twyla Tharp

  • Composer

    Johann Sebastian Bach (Jesu, Der Du Meine Seele, Cantata, BWV 78, 1724)

  • Costume Designer

    Kermit Love

Dancers

Tom Rawe, Kenneth Rinker, Rose Marie Wright 

  • Number of Dancers

    3

Dance Sections

I. Cooking Eggs:

Wright

II. Bach Duet:

Wright and Rinker

III. Four Voice Chroma Key:

Rawe

  • Runtime

    00:05:20

Description

With All About Eggs, Tharp used the medium of television to project an idea, rather than film a pre-existing dance restaged in a pre-existing set.

 

Inspired by 15th Century Flemish painters, the first section questions the efficacy of communication in a modern world. A single message is delivered simultaneously in three different ways as Rose Marie Wright performs mimetic gestures in front a tryptic of shifting images while a voice over translates her actions into language.

 


The Mérode Altarpiece by Robert Campin seen in the background of the opening image. 

 

Next is a duet to Bach’s Cantata 78 for Wright and Kenneth Rinker, which would later premiere independently under the title The Bach Duet, 1974.

 

Finally a solo for Tom Rawe morphs into a quartet as Rawe’s image was multiplied using early chroma key technology.

 

All About Eggs has never been screened in full.