Reviews 1976
Burt’s first writing for THE VOICE was as a reviewer of children’s events - theatre, puppet shows, books for children, new exhibits at city museums and the Bronx Zoo, even the occasional street performer.
The photo at left is taken from the dust jacket for Mother, Mother, when he was 25 or 26 years old.
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American Museum of Natural History
The yearly West Side Day at the American Museum of Natural History is a big bash. Any weekend the museum is crowded with families, but this is a takeover. Lots of people wander around the labyrinthine museum looking for a specific event - but wherever they find themselves, something's going on. Like Benney Kalanzi drumming in a corner or children constructing a clay dinosaur. Up in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands and Plains Indians, kids are lined up having their faces painted while nearby there's a talk on Sioux paintings of Custer's Last Stand. In the Hall of Mexico and Central America, people are sprawled all over--looks like they've been camping out.
The bang of two tambourines signals a performance by dancer Sabina Nordoff, musician Jim Milton, and mask-maker Robert Sherman, based on a pre-Columbian myth. It's at the far end, in a deep space between two reproductions of Mayan stelae from Quirigua. Kids are crowded around and many have climbed on the huge, carved zoomorph, also from Quirigua (another reproduction). The deep relief makes it easy to get a foothold.
In the first-floor Education Hall a Javanese puppet play is being performed by Pak Sumarsam with a gamelan orchestra from Weslyan University. The audience comes and goes casually in the dark and spreads on both sides of the screen - in front to see the shadow figures, behind to watch the orchestra and Sumarsam manipulating the delicate, painted figures. In the Education Gallery, there's a new small exhibition called "Is it Real?" which concisely explains what's real and what's fake in the museum's dioramas. A boy and girl stand in front of a case containing three rocks. Two are identical (but only one is real), and the third would be identical also were it not to open to reveal its construction - painted plaster over wire mesh. The boy and girl are laughing and guessing which of the first two rocks is real, pulling out the large tab under each rock to check the answer as if they don't know, again and again and again. Near the rocks is a tiger, mouth agape, one paw extended. You can reach out and touch the fur. Only the skin and claws are real - the teeth are plastic, the eyes glass. A small girl pats the paw, warily presses a finger to a tooth. "You don't scare me!" she whispers softly.
Footlights: Lynda Guddle
In the three dances Lynda Guddle offered in her concerts at Marymount Manhattan Theatre, she seems preoccupied with a kind of passionate gesture that's been "refined" so it's not quite abstract but no longer has any clear intention behind it, and is devising movement phrases that are linked with a competence that's just pleasing and sensible enough to be dull. Beethoven's 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor, for five women, opened with a rather snooty raising of arms, and continued in an oddly precious mode that may have been meant to be amusing. The piece developed in clear patterns that followed (even illustrated) the music and altered with agreeable predictability and coolness. But there was a kind of weakness, a smallness of the onstage world.
A similar delicacy and caution in Introibo ad Altare Dei kept five women, in lushly colored nun's robes and the palest wimples, apparently waiting for outside cues, holding back their movement slightly (with ladylike restraint?). They manage to work themselves up anyway and tremble, stagger, fall, spasm on the floor and freeze neatly in hysterical isolation. Later, they emerge from this state with four of them locking into a cluster, hands joined across the circles, and together blossom out. But nowhere was the drive that might have made these overwrought ladies interesting.
In Wide Southern Country, the four women saunter in wearing pants suits, Western boots, and long curly wigs, and perform similar material to the previous dances, but with pep, smiles, and the addition of some country stomping and square dance figures. The women get to be tarty and writhe on the floor just like the nuns do. But because the women never become individual, their come-ons and distresses are just riskless games. The suite doesn't hold together from dance to dance, except for the moaning style of songs calling to Jesus or detailing family catastrophes and a kind of general swagger in the movement. If they'd really dared to be vulgar it might have been more fun.
Ellis Doesn't Live Here Anymore
From 1892 to 1924 more than half the immigrants entering the United States passed through Ellis Island - an estimated 12 million or more. After mass immigration ended in 1924, when the quota law was passed, it was largely for holding and deporting immigrants whose status was questioned. During World War I it was also used as a detention center for enemy aliens, a way station for personnel, and an Army hospital, and during World War II it served, in part, as a Coast Guard Station. In 1951 it was finally shut down, abandoned and left to decay. No government agency was interested in using it. But this year the National Park Service reopened Ellis Island to the public as part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. The tour takes about an hour, costs $1.25, and the small green ferry leaves from the Statue of Liberty.
When I went, there were two busloads from New Jersey, mostly older people, but some with children and grandchildren. "We're going because our parents came here," one woman told me spontaneously as we sat on the open upper deck watching the passengers stagger up the short gang-plank onto the tipping deck. It was a windy day and the water was choppy. "Which is the Woolworth Building?" she asked, looking out at lower Manhattan. "I remember when that was the tallest building in the world. " Pleasantly underway, we pass a moored barge full of dozing seagulls. Near Ellis, on the Jersey shore, the piers are rusted out. The Victorian buildings of Ellis Island, brick with white trim, are impressive, but the island is overgrown and dilapidated. Our ferry goes around to the supply dock on the far side. There's a patch of black-eyed Susans and sunflowers among the weeds and ailanthus. The ferry slip on the other side is unusable -the sea walls are collapsing. And an old ferry is sunken there.
The first buildings on Ellis were wood - and were destroyed in 1897 by fire. The present buildings were opened in December 1900 - 35 of them, all connected. We walk down a long, curving brick passageway that goes who-knows-where. An old enameled sign points an arrow to New York. First and second-class passengers, we're told, were landed in New York and could go where they pleased. But steerage passengers had to board smaller boats and were brought here.
In the main building is a vast baggage hall where people could check their trunks - though many dragged their often meager baggage with them through the examinations, mistrustful of the clerks or possibly hoping to hide some deformity. "It's all rusty and dirty," remarked a young girl in the vast, nondescript hall, peeling, flaking, dingy. Hard to imagine it mobbed with people -though it's not unlike an old, grim, oversize, and cruelly anonymous school building.
Upstairs, on the second floor, is the huge Great Hall, or Registry Hall, with tiled, vaulted ceilings and enormous semicircular windows. It was originally divided by iron railings, like a stockyard. On the busiest day on record, April 7, 1907, 12,000 people passed through here. Medical examinations started at the far end. One doctor would look over the immigrant from about 25 feet away for obvious ailments or deformities. Any contagion or anything that might keep him or her from working might be reason for denying admission to the country. Another doctor would examine him close up. Either might chalk a letter on the patient's coat for further examination - H for heart, L for lame, etc. But the terror of the medical was the eye examination (which supposedly didn't hurt) in which a small hook was used to lift and flip back the eyelid to check for trachoma, one of the major medical reasons, along with favus (a chronic fungus infection of the scalp and nails), for refusing entry. In the rapid-fire examinations, these diseases could be readily diagnosed.
In the legal examination, inspectors at high desks shot questions at immigrants. If there were any doubts about the immigrant's eligibility, he or she would have to go before a board of special inquiry. Anarchists, Bolsheviks, anyone who was "likely to become a public charge"; or was guilty of "moral turpitude" might be detained and possibly sent back. Single women without escorts were questioned and frequently held until their fiances came to pick them up (and they were often required to marry at once on the island or at City Hall). After the inquiry, someone could still appeal to Washington. But from the doctors' examination, there was no appeal. Families were broken up (a child under 10 could be sent back with some member of the family as an escort). But 80 percent of the people were never detained. Their stay on Ellis Island was often, surprisingly, only three or four hours long. And, altogether, less than two percent were sent back.
There were no facilities to keep families together if they were detained. But there was a large area where they could seek help from representatives of about 40 immigrant-aid societies (like HIAS, or the Italian Welfare League, even the DAR at one time). Men and women could meet in the dining halls, where three meals a day (kosher and regular) were served to everyone. With the masses of people passing through, some times the kitchens never stopped. Immigrants were amazed at the quantities of food, fresh milk and white bread, and extra quantities thrown away.
About half the people in the country now can trance their ancestry to someone who came through Ellis Island. And the tour is fascinating for anyone old enough to be interested in his or her family history. The tours are conducted by young members of the National Park Service and though they're generally well-informed, hopefully they'll pick up more stories and recollections from older visitors who came through here and remember how it was. More personal stories and details will help make it really come alive. But, even now, anyone can imagine the nervousness and dread of people waiting for their fate to be decided in these anonymous buildings. And respect the courage it took simply to come here.
Stings: Margaret Beals and Lee Nagrin
In Stings, their dance-theatre work based on some of the poems of Sylvia Plath's last month (from "Ariel"), Margaret Beals and Lee Nagrin have developed a fittingly pitiless and moving piece. Clad in salmon-red dresses or pants that bleed into a muted gray, against a gray wall, Nagrin, Beals, and Brooke Myers move with brimming energy and strict economy to create the atmosphere of intense feeling, despair, impotent clarity, and cruel humor in which these poems demand to be uttered. They speak individually or together with precision and unflinching accuracy of feeling and skin the audience by the distance they insist on keeping. No sympathy is asked. Tensions pull the performers upstage, downstage, sideways--in straight lines. Diagonals, curves, are relatively rare. A largely abstract but lucid and restricted movement vocabulary is built: arms that sweep boldly in arcs, and stop; perversely joyous saunters and lopes of two or three together; a wobbling head; feet battering the floor; contractions through a bent back; hard and juiceless, nearly flat-footed jumps; sideways twists, almost dislocations, of head or body away from Plath's cruel facts. There are hard limits on every move, full of power but cut off from sustenance, helpless, imprisoned. The three women are excellent and generous. The end is so simple, Nagrin speaks, Beals calmly aborting run after run from center stage in every pinwheel direction. And a family portrait side stage, all three, Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath.
New Museum Across the Water
In early October the Staten Island Children's Museum Lab opened in the sunny, modest-sized ground floor corner of the triangular building at 15 Beach Street in Stapleton. Starting with some artifacts related to Egyptian writing from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum (along with a model of the hieroglyph-covered hypostyle hall of the Temple of Amun at Karnak), the museum staff put together a cross-cultural exhibit called They Wrote in Pictures, to explore different ways of communicating through symbols. Guided group tours through the exhibit start with a short film on images of the sun and moon - ranging from Indian sign-language images to Apollo driving his chariot, to commonplace English designs based on the sunrise. Then, beginning with the Egyptian materials (including a replica of the Rosetta Stone, a mummy label, an inscribed weight…), the display moves from pictures to letters, from hieroglyphs to simplified hieratic and demotic Egyptian forms, to cuneiform, to a Japanese children's song in calligraphy (with an explanation in English of what two-column stanza is about), to braille (invented by Braille when he was 15).
The focus of the exhibit becomes more strictly pictorial. There are amulets, like an Ashanti fertility doll to be stuffed into a waistband of a skirt, a hand charm from India with crossed fingers to ward off evil, a four-leaf clover; magical symbols of animals (in cave paintings, as door knockers or kits, embroidered on clothes), which may bring good luck in hunting or give protection or imbue the wearer with a particular creature's virtue (like a Batman T-shirt?). There are pictures that tell stories: A Huichol yarn paintings from Mexico telling how maize was brought to the Huichol; a Dahomey applique tapestry; a picture letter, sent by Chippewa chiefs from Wisconsin to the federal government in 1849, asking to be allowed to settle near some small lake where they could harvest wild rice; a large needlepoint hanging made about 40 years ago by a Staten Island woman showing a blissful Adam and Eve before the fall among tigers, giraffes, and ducks next to an Ethiopian painting of Adam and Eve with the snake already between them. The exhibit moves on to modern ways of reproducing images, from tintypes to the instantaneous image duplication of Xerox. Kids can walk into a mirrored "infinity box," which reflects hundreds of images of them in repeating patterns - turns them into instant design. And here is an "activities area," where they can respond to what they've seen: a row of easels with crayons, a setup for face decorating with pictures of faces and masks from all over pasted up close by: a sandbag littered with shards of broken crockery that can be dug out and "restored."
The staff of the museum did a thoughtful job of putting this exhibit together (on a shoestring of course), helped by generous loans of artwork and ethnic crafts from stores like Knobkerry, Craft Caravan, Titicaca Trading, and private people. The museum depends large on volunteers to guide groups through the exhibits, but for parents who take their children through there is an excellent sheaf of 24 mimeographed pages with detailed information on each item on display. The next show planned will deal with light. As part of it, students in a Staten Island high school are working on a solar-energy project. "Light" will begin to creep into the lab in bits and pieces starting in January.
The museum is open weekdays by appointment from 9 to 3. Public hours are: weekdays from 3 to 5 and Sundays from noon to 5. For information, call 273-2060. Admission is free.
The museum is open weekdays by appointment from 9 to 3. Public hours are: weekdays from 3 to 5 and Sundays from noon to 5. For information, call 273-2060. Admission is free.
Back in Lower Manhattan, not too far from the ferry, the loft lobby space at 88 Pine Street has been taken over by sagging, puffing forms of anemones, lobsters, bug-eyed long-finned angelfish, fantastic crabs, creatures with globular bodies and long, pointy "arms." These are Otto Pierie's ANEMONES, floor-to-ceiling inflatable sculptures made of clear polyethylene and red spinnaker cloth. The setup is rough and unrefined, like any work space, with working drawings tacked up on a wall, the variably timed inflating fans littering the floor in clusters. Daylight through huge windows, covered with colored plastic gel on their upper panels, spills iridescent reflections on the tender polyethylene surfaces. Dropping tentacles suddenly thrust out; huge, spiky creatures as suddenly wilt, gradually swell, or give way. The mixed rhythms of inflation and deflation give an oceanic sense of swell and subsidence. But these monsters are tame as goldfish - half dream, half tub toy.