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Dale Scholl, with whom I have had wonderful collaborations on choreographic versions of my works The Hundredth Monkey and The Idea of North, commissioned me to write this score for a new dance piece sponsored by the Sacramento Metropolitan Art Commission's New Works program. Because of the timing of the first performance - in the one-thousandth April of the second millennium - I chose the title Millennium Spring, and set off to write a piece that would be rhythmically driven by dance impulses, some of them recognizably related to traditional movement - fast waltzes, for example, and tangos. Amidst the catastrophic predictions that were emerging about our millennial passage, I also chose to project a more fatalistic, optimistic attitude: "The new millennium is coming - Let's dance into it!" Just before I began work, I had premiered my California Songs, in which a young woman has a bizarre and intense encounter with the spiritual world. As Millennium Spring began to unfold, I realized that the heroine of "Alice in Holyland" had returned again, this time to be introduced to the physical, sensual world, and added the subtitle "Alice Dances." No specific scenario emerged, but Alice stood before me, experiencing the sensual impulses and static quiescence of this physical life. |