Radio Vision, a solo choreographed and performed by Helen Wicks, synthesizes a decade of ancestral research on Helen’s great-grandfather, Hollywood music supervisor Joe Gershenson, and a conversation she had with music composer/producer Quincy Jones in 2018. The piece includes a live rendition of a 1914 composition for cello and piano by Nadia Boulanger performed by Ami Nashimoto and Keisuke Nakagoshi and a recorded sound collage by Simon Linsteadt that samples Boulanger and some of her students like Quincy Jones, Igor Stranvisnky, and Phillip Glass. Radio Vision weaves ancestral and cultural roots in Yiddish theater with the origins of talkies and broadcast television. It moves from the first orchestras on the radio to early Hollywood soundtracks. The dance is a movement mosaic that illuminates ancestral and popular culture’s origins while exploring technological advances that have led to music and entertainment on a mass scale.
