America at 250: Anna Sokolow’s “Rooms”

Rooms, choreographed by Anna Sokolow with a jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins, examines the psychic isolation and unfulfilled desires of characters isolated in their small, city apartments. The controversial and groundbreaking 1955 work breathes with the loneliness and alienation following the breakdown of wartime solidarity, when the threat of atomic annihilation, the 1952 polio epidemic, and the Red Scare hung like invisible contagions and created a mood of pervasive uncertainty and dread throughout the country. An enduring masterpiece, Rooms still conveys the anxiety and isolation of today.

This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival.