Drop Dead…Gorgeous – October 17-November 2
By Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects
“… a montage that gradually, obliquely closes in on your heart.” — Deborah Jowitt,Village Voice
Photo by Harvey Wang
ABOUT
Tamar Rogoff’s Drop Dead…Gorgeous ushers audiences into the studio of a TV game show that gives the contestants the chance to win their dream body. As they compete to shed pounds, gain inches, and reverse the aging process, the show’s charismatic yet troubled host offers the audience the opportunity to buy their way to beauty. This multimedia dance performance explores our culture’s obsession with the one “perfect“ youthful body and the intersection of money, media, and madness that keeps us going to greater, more dangerous lengths to find happiness in the mirror. As Rogoff reached puberty, the perfect ballet body alluded her. Out of those early struggles came her lifelong choreographic approach: body scripting. In Drop Dead…Gorgeous, this approach plucks the contestants from the world of the game and returns them to paradise—their birthright, where all bodies can be experienced as sensual and worthy.
CREDITS
CAST
Gina Bonati
Gardiner Comfort
Ninoshka De Leon Gill
Gerlanda Di Stefano
BIO
Tamar Rogoff is a choreographer and filmmaker who explores the outer limits of how people negotiate extreme circumstances. As artistic director of Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects, Rogoff creates inclusive, multidisciplinary, multigenerational, and site-specific performance and film as well as proscenium performance. Rogoff’s subject matter is deeply personal and often autobiographical, but in the vast diversity of her casting, it finds its universality. Rogoff has been presented both nationally and internationally, at the Kennedy Center, the Pompidou Center and the Estonian National Opera, and in venues as accessible as sidewalks and rooftops. The surprising juxtaposition of performers who are new to the stage and seasoned professionals taps into Rogoff’s wish–to use the unexpected to spark curiosity and empathy. Rogoff’s choreography has been seen at P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Church, LaMama ETC, Dance Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and in venues worldwide.
Rogoff’s documentary Summer in Ivye (2001) screened at The Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center and The Hamptons Film Festival. She was a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Fellow where she worked with Daisy Wright on the award-winning feature documentary Enter the Faun (2015), based on an earlier piece of choreography, Diagnosis of a Faun (2009). In the film, Rogoff’s lifelong method, known as Body Scripting, explores release through unorthodox body practices to address protagonist Mozgala’s cerebral palsy. Enter the Faun toured festivals globally–The Sarasota Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, Dance on Camera, ReelAbilities Film Festival and the Extraordinary Film Festival in Belgium. It was broadcast on Belgium TV and on PBS America Reframed in 2018 and 2022. Rogoff’s documentary about her dancers during lockdown, A Plague on All Our Houses (2021), screened at NYC Independent and Manhattan Film Festival (both June 2021). Rogoff’s first short, Wonder About Merri, was at Dance on Camera (2019) and won the Most Daring Short at Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival (2019). During Covid she produced a dance-narrative short, The Circles of Avenue C in her Lower East side neighborhood. She is the founder of the Solar Powered Dance Festival at Solar One.
Rogoff works as a movement coach to actors, including Claire Danes for her Emmy award winning role in Temple Grandin (2010). She was an adjunct teacher at NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing (1995-2010), Her Body Scripting dance lab at LaMama is ongoing.
Rogoff is a recipient of grants from the NEA, NYFA, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the Rockefeller MAP Grant. She is also a Guggenheim fellow.
Rogoff’s choreography will be seen in the soon to be released feature film Thoughts & Prayers.
She is currently working on Drop Dead… Gorgeous, a new piece to premiere at La MaMa in 2025.
Next summer in Sept-Iles, Quebec, Rogoff will collaborate on a film project with Samuel St-Onge, Marie Jomphe-Lemay, and the Enu First Nation community.
