Wally Cardona & Molly Lieber
TIMES FOUR / David Gordon: 1975/2025
Seminal choreographer David Gordon’s little-seen duet with his life/art partner Valda Setterfield, Times Four (1975), is reconceived by Wally Cardona, and performed alongside Molly Lieber, in the same SoHo loft space where David and Valda performed it 50 years ago.
The year before he died, David talked to Wally about doing Times Four, last performed in the 70’s and not seen in its entirety since. Of the 1975 version, the only fragments on record include a grainy video of some of it being taught in rehearsal, Valda’s handwritten notes of some of the score and a few still photos. Much of the material has no record at all. Now, three years later, Wally is in the studio with Molly, preserving and building on the 1975 fragments, imagining a Times Four for 2025.
A co-production of Pick Up Performance Co with WCV, Inc.
Original 1975 Choreography: David Gordon
Additional 2025 Choreography: Wally Cardona
Original Performers: David Gordon and Valda Setterfield
Performers: Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber
Stage Manager: Ed Fitzgerald
Producer: Alyce Dissette
David Gordon
From his beginning as a founding artist of the seminal Judson Church performances and the improvisational Grand Union, David Gordon purposefully examined, expanded, and torpedoed conventional lines between theater and dance and pioneered the use of text and textual narrative in movement work. His dual status as movement artist and theater artist was acknowledged when he was awarded a Pew Charitable Trust National Dance Residency grant and a National Theater Residency grant in successive years. He received three NEA American Masterpiece Grant Awards and a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. His online archive is available online at davidgordon.nyc and his work is in the permanent collection at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts. Commissions for directing or choreographing include: The Actors Studio, American Ballet Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, American Repertory Theater, Barbican (London), BBC Channel 4 UK, London Dance Umbrella, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Guthrie Theater, Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, Peak Performances at Montclair State University, PBS series Alive from Off Center, Mark Taper Forum, New York Theatre Workshop, On The Boards (Seattle, WA), PBS Great Performances, Serious Fun @ Lincoln Center, Spoleto USA, Theatre For a New Audience, Walker Art Center, White Oak Dance Project.
Howard Gilman Foundation, NYC Dept. Of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts.
“A formal dance to silence with repeated movements performed in unison, “Times Four” explores space with a meditative calm that highlights shifts of weight and direction as well as the energy between bodies. What seems straightforward at the start becomes almost mystical by the finish.”
