1978 continued
A Body Meets a Body
Ulla Koivisto has flown home to Finland; Russell Dumas to Australia. But before leaving, they squeezed in a brief concert at Trisha Brown’s elegantly spartan studio. Kovisto’s 42nd Street Duet or Any Other Lies is a pleasant but unresonant dance. In the first section, five dancers move to low, whistling sound by Richard Hayman (hard to know where it’s coming from, or that it’s live). They start and stop erratically. What you notice most is their shifting arrangement in the space. The movement is somewhat disconnected, obsessed, or interestingly picky. Arms curve overhead till the tips of pointing index fingers touch, then the head wags. Bodies bob and sway. Stiff hands flap. arms beat.
The gestures are strong, but curtailed, incomplete, unexpansive. Signals that convey no message. Anne Kulper’s hands dig at the air then Koivisto takes hold of her. Dumas leaps and turns, his arms curved like the wings of a seabird. There’s a subtle amusement in all this; the performers are not, as you might expect, isolated, but faintly familial. In a pause, seven more dancers enter the space, close to the others. When the piece resumes, most of the new people seem to be improvising versions of things they saw in the first part. There’s a busyness that stops and starts, rather like a party with the 20 minute hushes coming very frequently. Then, at a word from Koivisto, it’s over.
Dumas’s duet, Counterbalance II, for himself and David Hinckfuss, explores, as the title suggests, balance and support. Hinckfuss’s long arm reaches languorously back and up as he arches slightly back, leaning on Dumas. They move attentively through a series of sweet manipulations, of gentle twists, of one curling under to support the other. Or they brush each other lightly off balance. Hinckfuss breaks into a run, dives under Dumas, who leans sideways, rather stiffly, over his bent body. Softly, Hinckfuss deepens into a lunge, then forms a bridge from his toes to his hands. With a toss, he peels Dumas off his back like a curl of apple skin, and they come down together in a sort of obeisance. Repetitions carry them across the studio. Dumas is intent and clear. Hinckfuss seems easy, happy to be where he is. The quality of his attention stretches him beyond the space he actually fills, well beyond his physical body. Both of them have the ability to appear sprung from one movement to another. They stand for a while flatly side by side, facing in opposite directions. Quiet. They sway slightly. They take hands and tilt away from each other as they set their feet together to make a common fulcrum. They begin to move in a rough line, switching hand or holding both hands, or pivot gravely, seeking balance and a steady progress. Their feet knit more intricately together as they move on. You see the naked concentration in their faces. The tense, intimate balancing gives way to equally precarious separation. Duma trips into backward staggers, leaps, wild near stumbles. Hinckfuss, poised with one leg extended, reaches upward as he delicately winds his body toward the floor, but never touches.
I didn’t mind that the structure of Counterbalance II seemed casual - shifting from one sort of investigation to another without pressing a point, without particular emphasis or stress. Just a kind of unspoken understanding - enough of that, now let’s do this. What really held the piece together, more securely than its subject matter, was its introspective (but not private) mode, the caring and respect of two fine performers.
The gestures are strong, but curtailed, incomplete, unexpansive. Signals that convey no message. Anne Kulper’s hands dig at the air then Koivisto takes hold of her. Dumas leaps and turns, his arms curved like the wings of a seabird. There’s a subtle amusement in all this; the performers are not, as you might expect, isolated, but faintly familial. In a pause, seven more dancers enter the space, close to the others. When the piece resumes, most of the new people seem to be improvising versions of things they saw in the first part. There’s a busyness that stops and starts, rather like a party with the 20 minute hushes coming very frequently. Then, at a word from Koivisto, it’s over.
Dumas’s duet, Counterbalance II, for himself and David Hinckfuss, explores, as the title suggests, balance and support. Hinckfuss’s long arm reaches languorously back and up as he arches slightly back, leaning on Dumas. They move attentively through a series of sweet manipulations, of gentle twists, of one curling under to support the other. Or they brush each other lightly off balance. Hinckfuss breaks into a run, dives under Dumas, who leans sideways, rather stiffly, over his bent body. Softly, Hinckfuss deepens into a lunge, then forms a bridge from his toes to his hands. With a toss, he peels Dumas off his back like a curl of apple skin, and they come down together in a sort of obeisance. Repetitions carry them across the studio. Dumas is intent and clear. Hinckfuss seems easy, happy to be where he is. The quality of his attention stretches him beyond the space he actually fills, well beyond his physical body. Both of them have the ability to appear sprung from one movement to another. They stand for a while flatly side by side, facing in opposite directions. Quiet. They sway slightly. They take hands and tilt away from each other as they set their feet together to make a common fulcrum. They begin to move in a rough line, switching hand or holding both hands, or pivot gravely, seeking balance and a steady progress. Their feet knit more intricately together as they move on. You see the naked concentration in their faces. The tense, intimate balancing gives way to equally precarious separation. Duma trips into backward staggers, leaps, wild near stumbles. Hinckfuss, poised with one leg extended, reaches upward as he delicately winds his body toward the floor, but never touches.
I didn’t mind that the structure of Counterbalance II seemed casual - shifting from one sort of investigation to another without pressing a point, without particular emphasis or stress. Just a kind of unspoken understanding - enough of that, now let’s do this. What really held the piece together, more securely than its subject matter, was its introspective (but not private) mode, the caring and respect of two fine performers.
Animal Exercises
January 2
Eric Bass has found some of the inspiration for his work in Bunraku, the Japanese puppet theatre. In Twilight Crane, as in his earlier Raven’s Dance, black-robed figures carry and manipulate the puppets. But, unlike Bunraku, puppet characters mingle onstage with live actors and masked performers to create a stylized and complex unity.
There is a gravity in Bass’s work, a commitment to deal unsentimentally with mythic or poetic themes, that is too rare in theatre for children. The crane spirit, played by exquisite Muna Tseng, comes to earth. She circles, stands on one leg; blue light shines through her simple cloth wings. Then she is replaced by a hunter’s trap, but is rescued by a Kindhearted Man. The man (played by Tseng also) wears a short, patched coat, carries a load of sticks on his back, and wears a mask. The mask is round cheeked, without much distinction to the features. The face looks rather old, of a low class, maybe a servant. At any rate, he’s humble, harmless, perhaps someone to be ridiculed or pitied. When he releases the crane, they bow to each other. Special obligations have been incurred, a sacred bond formed.
The Kindhearted Man sweeps his house, jumping gaily from foot to foot. Is he happy because he saved the crane from the hunter? Or simply because he is happy in his life? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter. There is a knock, and we see the shadow of a woman (this must be a cutout, since Tseng is onstage as the man.) The narrator says she wants to spend the night and asks, “please, make me your wife.” She promises she will weave him beautiful cloth, but warns that if he ever looks into the room while she weaves, he’ll never see her again. She, also played by Tseng, does weaves beautiful cloth, and an avaricious merchant buys it, tempts the Kindhearted Man time and again with promises of money, and probes about the woman’s way of weaving. The man eventually proves vulnerable to these suggestions, and when he breaks the taboo, his wife vanishes.
Unlike Cupid and Psyche, Bluebeard, or other stories with a similar theme, there is no recourse, no way of modifying the bad effects of doing the forbidden thing. But, before all that, two puppet children come visiting. They are about life-size and are manipulated by the puppeteers like doting parents helping them to take their first steps, except that the puppets are not more refined than toddlers. The woman steps out of the house in a gleaming white kimono. Her sleeves are rounded, suggesting the wings in the costume of the crane spirit. A pattern of muted indigo feathers splash the kimono, which is weighted at the bottom to hug the floor, and is bound by a wide scarlet obi. She plays with the children; her joy with them suggests the happiness of her life with her husband. (With Tseng in both these parts, we can never see them together. If we could, they would seem oddly matched - she, perfectly lovely; he, a self-effacing person in a funny mask.)
At night, in silhouette, the crane woman weaves. She plucks the down from her breast and weaves it on the loom with her beak. The weaving weakens her; it may pain her. The narrator tells us that “last night she move again, but today she will not play with the children.” When she comes out with the cloth she has woven, her dance seems distraught. Perhaps she knows that the merchant’s needling is working on her husband and their relationship is nearly at an end. She unfurls the cloth, which is red on one side, and drops it on the stage instead of leaving it carefully folded as she has before. Here and there, on the cloth and on the floor, lie white feathers, stained with blood on the quills. This is a deliberate, patient production, very spare and lovely, though I became impatient with the interchanges involving the overbearing merchant: he took up too much room for someone who was just a fatal prod. And the introductory dance of the crane spirit was overlong. The later dances, which distill the crane/woman’s emotions, feel just right.
Using Tseng in the roles of the man and the woman seemed wonderfully apt, adding, I suspect, a kind of harmony of being. We sense a sureness in the marriage that we never, in fact, observe. The mixing of puppets and people, the charming stylization of the performances, keeps Twlight Crane on a level of reality removed from our own. In a formal mode, the woman and the puppets are close enough in their vocabulary of gestures and moods to project similar qualities. The silhouette of the woman is just a cutout of Tseng. But it has the same value, the same dramatic force.
Twilight Crane, preceded by Busu, a puppet comedy, is at the Open Eye, 316 East 88th Street, 534-6909, through January 8.
Eric Bass has found some of the inspiration for his work in Bunraku, the Japanese puppet theatre. In Twilight Crane, as in his earlier Raven’s Dance, black-robed figures carry and manipulate the puppets. But, unlike Bunraku, puppet characters mingle onstage with live actors and masked performers to create a stylized and complex unity.
There is a gravity in Bass’s work, a commitment to deal unsentimentally with mythic or poetic themes, that is too rare in theatre for children. The crane spirit, played by exquisite Muna Tseng, comes to earth. She circles, stands on one leg; blue light shines through her simple cloth wings. Then she is replaced by a hunter’s trap, but is rescued by a Kindhearted Man. The man (played by Tseng also) wears a short, patched coat, carries a load of sticks on his back, and wears a mask. The mask is round cheeked, without much distinction to the features. The face looks rather old, of a low class, maybe a servant. At any rate, he’s humble, harmless, perhaps someone to be ridiculed or pitied. When he releases the crane, they bow to each other. Special obligations have been incurred, a sacred bond formed.
The Kindhearted Man sweeps his house, jumping gaily from foot to foot. Is he happy because he saved the crane from the hunter? Or simply because he is happy in his life? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter. There is a knock, and we see the shadow of a woman (this must be a cutout, since Tseng is onstage as the man.) The narrator says she wants to spend the night and asks, “please, make me your wife.” She promises she will weave him beautiful cloth, but warns that if he ever looks into the room while she weaves, he’ll never see her again. She, also played by Tseng, does weaves beautiful cloth, and an avaricious merchant buys it, tempts the Kindhearted Man time and again with promises of money, and probes about the woman’s way of weaving. The man eventually proves vulnerable to these suggestions, and when he breaks the taboo, his wife vanishes.
Unlike Cupid and Psyche, Bluebeard, or other stories with a similar theme, there is no recourse, no way of modifying the bad effects of doing the forbidden thing. But, before all that, two puppet children come visiting. They are about life-size and are manipulated by the puppeteers like doting parents helping them to take their first steps, except that the puppets are not more refined than toddlers. The woman steps out of the house in a gleaming white kimono. Her sleeves are rounded, suggesting the wings in the costume of the crane spirit. A pattern of muted indigo feathers splash the kimono, which is weighted at the bottom to hug the floor, and is bound by a wide scarlet obi. She plays with the children; her joy with them suggests the happiness of her life with her husband. (With Tseng in both these parts, we can never see them together. If we could, they would seem oddly matched - she, perfectly lovely; he, a self-effacing person in a funny mask.)
At night, in silhouette, the crane woman weaves. She plucks the down from her breast and weaves it on the loom with her beak. The weaving weakens her; it may pain her. The narrator tells us that “last night she move again, but today she will not play with the children.” When she comes out with the cloth she has woven, her dance seems distraught. Perhaps she knows that the merchant’s needling is working on her husband and their relationship is nearly at an end. She unfurls the cloth, which is red on one side, and drops it on the stage instead of leaving it carefully folded as she has before. Here and there, on the cloth and on the floor, lie white feathers, stained with blood on the quills. This is a deliberate, patient production, very spare and lovely, though I became impatient with the interchanges involving the overbearing merchant: he took up too much room for someone who was just a fatal prod. And the introductory dance of the crane spirit was overlong. The later dances, which distill the crane/woman’s emotions, feel just right.
Using Tseng in the roles of the man and the woman seemed wonderfully apt, adding, I suspect, a kind of harmony of being. We sense a sureness in the marriage that we never, in fact, observe. The mixing of puppets and people, the charming stylization of the performances, keeps Twlight Crane on a level of reality removed from our own. In a formal mode, the woman and the puppets are close enough in their vocabulary of gestures and moods to project similar qualities. The silhouette of the woman is just a cutout of Tseng. But it has the same value, the same dramatic force.
Twilight Crane, preceded by Busu, a puppet comedy, is at the Open Eye, 316 East 88th Street, 534-6909, through January 8.
Combat Like Silk
August 7
This company, started by Loremil Machado and Jelom Vieira who came here in 1975 from Salvador (Bahia) Brazil, is performing some fabulous, singular material. With torsos tipped forward and knees bent, the women dance with flat-footed vigor. They stamp out the rhythms, flip their arms with lightness and finesse, thrust their hips, bounce into deep squats, The men’s torsos flex with power. The movements are like those of African dancing, joyous and brimming with energy.
In a Haitian solo, Yanvalu Zepol, in honor of Maitre Ague, god of the sea, and Damballah, the snake god, Kenel Archer is mesmerizing. His head wobbles delicately, swivels at miraculous speed. With a sudden thrust through his belly, wavelike motions begin to ripple, shudder slowly through his body. The movement is luxuriant, enviable. Archer’s technique and control are impressive, but the sensual sense you get is dumbfounding. Two thrilling fighting dances, Maculele and Capoeira, are the foci of the program. In Maculele, five men in shaggy, rope-fringe costumes click short, thick sticks together. The sticks are meant to be sugar cane stalks. In pairs, they spin in one direction, whack their sticks together as they meet. Taking turns, they leap into the circle to show what they can do and challenge each other. They beat the pairs of sticks across in front of their waists and behind their backs. Joe Sircus and James Cherry keep their drums driving and building. The men switch their sticks for short machetes. They lunge and duck and flip over, their pelvises quiver. The machetes strike sparks as they clash. Machado, tricky and lithe, his hair in dreadlocks, dazzles the audience with a dangerous grin between blows.
The Capoeira was a revelation. Developed in the 16th and 17th centuries among weaponless African slaves in northeastern Brazil, Capoeira continued as a martial art after slavery was abolished, but was later outlawed. In this century, it has been revived as a sort of dance-sport-martial art. Here, one performer enters with a rattle and berimbau (an Angolan instrument made of a gourd attached to a sort of wooden bow, with a single string). There’s a subtle twang and a slow beat. Then, a second man, with a slightly larger berimbau, adds a sort of watery throb. And a third, with a still larger instrument, introduces a sort of wah-wah conversation. The dancing, which begins after the drummers emerge and take over, is like nothing I’ve seen. It’s full of familiar acrobatics, cartwheels, handstands, etc. much of it supported on the hands. But the legs are the weapons; they whip and swirl and kick. Sometimes the moves, the preparations, seem slow and spider-like, full of feints and false leads that swivel in impossible directions, building veering patterns, even in simple two-man challenges, that evolve infinities of twisting circles. There are lots of balances on the hands, on one hand, unbelievable slow overhead flips. What I was least prepared for was the silkiness of the moves, the fluid transitions, the apparently instantaneous decisions. I could almost believe that some strange, spontaneous chemistry permitted these flying slithering bodies to flicker at will from liquid form to solid and back again.
At Clark Center Festival at CUNY Graduate Center Mall (July 18-20).
This company, started by Loremil Machado and Jelom Vieira who came here in 1975 from Salvador (Bahia) Brazil, is performing some fabulous, singular material. With torsos tipped forward and knees bent, the women dance with flat-footed vigor. They stamp out the rhythms, flip their arms with lightness and finesse, thrust their hips, bounce into deep squats, The men’s torsos flex with power. The movements are like those of African dancing, joyous and brimming with energy.
In a Haitian solo, Yanvalu Zepol, in honor of Maitre Ague, god of the sea, and Damballah, the snake god, Kenel Archer is mesmerizing. His head wobbles delicately, swivels at miraculous speed. With a sudden thrust through his belly, wavelike motions begin to ripple, shudder slowly through his body. The movement is luxuriant, enviable. Archer’s technique and control are impressive, but the sensual sense you get is dumbfounding. Two thrilling fighting dances, Maculele and Capoeira, are the foci of the program. In Maculele, five men in shaggy, rope-fringe costumes click short, thick sticks together. The sticks are meant to be sugar cane stalks. In pairs, they spin in one direction, whack their sticks together as they meet. Taking turns, they leap into the circle to show what they can do and challenge each other. They beat the pairs of sticks across in front of their waists and behind their backs. Joe Sircus and James Cherry keep their drums driving and building. The men switch their sticks for short machetes. They lunge and duck and flip over, their pelvises quiver. The machetes strike sparks as they clash. Machado, tricky and lithe, his hair in dreadlocks, dazzles the audience with a dangerous grin between blows.
The Capoeira was a revelation. Developed in the 16th and 17th centuries among weaponless African slaves in northeastern Brazil, Capoeira continued as a martial art after slavery was abolished, but was later outlawed. In this century, it has been revived as a sort of dance-sport-martial art. Here, one performer enters with a rattle and berimbau (an Angolan instrument made of a gourd attached to a sort of wooden bow, with a single string). There’s a subtle twang and a slow beat. Then, a second man, with a slightly larger berimbau, adds a sort of watery throb. And a third, with a still larger instrument, introduces a sort of wah-wah conversation. The dancing, which begins after the drummers emerge and take over, is like nothing I’ve seen. It’s full of familiar acrobatics, cartwheels, handstands, etc. much of it supported on the hands. But the legs are the weapons; they whip and swirl and kick. Sometimes the moves, the preparations, seem slow and spider-like, full of feints and false leads that swivel in impossible directions, building veering patterns, even in simple two-man challenges, that evolve infinities of twisting circles. There are lots of balances on the hands, on one hand, unbelievable slow overhead flips. What I was least prepared for was the silkiness of the moves, the fluid transitions, the apparently instantaneous decisions. I could almost believe that some strange, spontaneous chemistry permitted these flying slithering bodies to flicker at will from liquid form to solid and back again.
At Clark Center Festival at CUNY Graduate Center Mall (July 18-20).
Country Matters
August 14
The National Ballet of Canada, under the artistic direction of Alexander Grant, is looking better and better. In Frederick Ashton’s brillliant, bucolic La Fille Mal Gardee, which must be the gem of their repertory, they were excellent and full of confidence. I saw three good casts in Fille: Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn, Nadia Pots and Tomas Schramek, and Veronica Tennant and Peter Schaufuss dances the lovers, Lise and Colin; Jacques Gorrissen alternated with Constantin Patsalas as Lise’s mother, the Widow Simone, and David Roxander with David Allan as the doltish son of a wealthy vintner who’s the widow’s choice of fiance for her daughter.
I liked Kain’s Lise best: her comic timing and vigorous innocence seemed the most finely honed. Watching her, I thought sometimes of Lillian Gish in her D.W. Griffith days, sometimes of the Katzenjammer Kids. Potts was a little milder in the role, and her face tended to wear the same expression a good deal of the time. Tennant was lovely, especially in the pas de deux, but her slight edge of over refinement in the romantic bits didn’t quite jibe with her pointedness in the comedy. Augustyn and Schramek had a nice feeling for the role of Colin, but Schaufuss is exhilarating in the virtuoso parts and seemed utterly at home in the humor of it all. He played “giddyap, horsey” with Lise in the first scene with the enthusiasm and insight that made their entangling play with the ribbon and expression of passionate devotion and delight as well as a charming diversion. Patsalas and Gorrisson were both spirited and affectionate in the so-British, travesty role of the widow. Patsalas seemed to have more experience in the part, and allowed himself more independence. I’m looking forward to seeing them in the part in two years, and five years, and 20; it should only improve as they mature.
Alain must be the trickiest role in Fille, and both Roxander and Allan were quite good. The many highlights always come off well - Alain’s galumphing introductory dance with its concluding overhead flip into the laps of his astonished father and the Widow Simone; the moment when he shyly hands Lise flowers and then pokes her in the tit; his duet with Lise (infiltrated by Colin who manages to embrace her with Alain none the wiser) where he cuddles her around the waist, tries to match the line of her arabesque with his straight arm in a sort of salute, etc., etc. Both Alains occasionally had difficulty in those jumping up-and-down solos with their cockeyed landings, bringing off those incredibly awkward steps with grace and clarity.
But Allan, most particularly, succeeded in expressing the poignancy inherent in the role by the way he shaped his energy in the final scene. When Simone gives him the key to the bedroom Lise is locked in, his eagerness and embarrassment are sometimes unbearable. He fusses, squirming on top of the stairs, almost bursting, crossing and squeezing his legs together as if he has to pee. And when he gets the door open and sees Lise and Colin at the doorway, he’s utterly crushed, tumbles down the stairs, and lies like a puddle on the floor. He’s really dazed, inconsolable. When his father (Charles Kirby) runs his finger sadly through the baby curl on top of Alain’s head, you could weep.
Company member James Kudelka’s 1976 A Party, which opened the program, is competent, but attenuated and flattened out. Instead of tightening its focus on its four main characters (who are only half-involved with each other anyway), it staggers its main dramatic events through the course of a dull party. Its main problem, evidenced in several ways, is that the characters aren’t interesting. We understand their crude relationships well enough, but we don’t know who they are. They’re colorless. And the set (by Mary Kerr) amplifies this neutrality. It shows us a house (really a living room and a free-standing door frame), defined by broad white bands that simply indicate the joins of the walls and ceiling, frame the back wall in a rectangle, and extend into perspective for the side walls. There’s a plump white couch, big white throw pillows, a white lamp on a white side table, and a hanging plant.
Modern nondescript. As is the inhabitant, the hostess, and her guests. The hostess waits nervously on the couch, takes a sip of her drink. But her very first steps are a disappointment; they tell you nothing about this woman. Anyone might do them, just this way, in any ballet. The first guest to arrive is Her Former Lover: he hesitates en route and she pauses, too, before answering his knock. The next meetings stay low-key. A Boring Couple arrives, and An Old Friend. They wind up on the couch, bored. A Bachelor comes, looking fresh from the gym. Brisk and infectiously energetic, slapping his thighs, snapping his arms up into a wide V, he rouses them into a dance. You expect that, with his galvanic energy, he’s going to be important, but from now on he’s just furniture like most of these people. A Single Girl arrives, and A Chic Couple, whose appetite for each other has them slithering into an amorous pas de deux as soon as they’re through the door. The others seem pretty put off by this. The woman has stuck the bachelor with her jacket, but, while she’s dancing, he hooks it over her lazy, outstretched arm and she manages to take it and hang it up on the door frame without a thought or a break in the rhythm. Then comes A Man. He excites two of the women, the hostess (who imagines she’s got first dibs on him) and the single girl, whom he takes outside and screws. (She challenges him with a look, extending a movement that the other women are doing into a back-arching lunge that offers him the vulnerable curve of her belly and breast. Turns out she doesn’t really want to “go all the way,” but he’s unfazed by her modest resistance. The man is a cad. Afterward, shamed, she huddles in a corner inside, while he lounges disinterestedly on the sofa and then leaves. When everyone else goes, the hostess is consoled by the former lover. He makes love to her, gives her a brotherly kiss on the forehead and leaves. The women set themselves up, then live out their roles as sexual victims.
It’s pretty dreary. You hope that something in this pleasant, bourgeois desolation will become dimensional, but the movements contain few indications that reveal character or make emotions individual. And because the characters and their emotions are not fully expressed through the body or through the interconnectedness of the steps, the ballet doesn’t read well at a distance. As you lose the smaller facial expressions, you lose all that might link you to the drama. A further clumsiness in A Party comes from a sort of division of styles. Sometimes the people act more or less “natural”, sitting around, mouthing words. Then someone, or everyone, will get up and “dance.” Rarely is their a clear motive for the change in mode to make the transition plausible. And most often, when the dance energy is heightened, expressivity is curiously diminished. Veronica Tennant’s most vivid moment as the hostess when, just standing in a corner, she tries to nestle against unyielding Frank Augustyn. The casts were largely identical in the several performances I saw: Augustyn played the macho baddie; Kudelka, the former lover. Tennant shared the role of the hostess with Mary Jago, and Nadia Potts alternated with Vanessa Harwood as the other girl. It was oddly indicative of A Party’s overall flatness, that it didn’t seem to make much difference who was dancing.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 25-30).
Four Underdogs
September 18
Wilson Pico’s four solos from La Cronicas Danzadas, presented at the Cunningham Studio, take their life, in part, from a political context. A young dancer-choreographer from Ecuador, Pico has built his solos on observations of people on the underside of life, the people who get squashed as a matter of course in social/economic/political machines everywhere. Natasha Salguero, who introduced the dances in English and Spanish, explains that the solos are images of daily life, “nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual...”
Pico is a small man, wiry and intense. His movements tend to be sharp and defined. He immerses himself in the characters he draws, starting with the plight, the trap, of their lives. The first, La Beata (The Blessed Hypocrite) is a man crippled by religious fear. Pico walks slightly hunched, with knees bent. He makes hasty but precise signs of the cross before him. Carefully held, his hands seem to have a sot of forced timidity and the habit of the penitential gesture. They don’t look capable of opening, or reaching, or grasping. Pico holds his body tight, constricted. He shifts his focus, to check and re-check, with a paranoid snap of the head. Tension builds into craziness with sequences of rapid shaking alternating with mea culpa breast-beating. But the choreography gets stuck in the literalness of the character and never develops. The dance is as narrow as this pious maniac, and its lack of perspective makes it, finally, trite and unsympathetic: a case study.
Salguero, introducing the second dance, explains its title, Runa Suerte. Suerte means luck, or fate. Runa is a word from Quechua. Originally, it meant person in that language. With centuries of colonization, it came to mean Indian, therefore, “something of very bad quality, something completely worthless.” Salguero described the illiterate peasants who come to the city to find jobs but find none the old people, and children, at the bottom of society, who become cargadores, load carriers. Pico starts with great modest, with small, soft running steps. He holds a cloth band tightly;y across his forehead. His arms pull the band wide and back. He bends, walks n a deep plie, too quickly - to carry his imaginary burden as far as possible before he can’t bear it anymore. You can easily see why: a huge basket on his stooped upper back, with some of the weight distributed forward by the band across the forehead. But though the image is kept clear and emphatic, Pico allows the inner spring and rhythmic shapes of the movement to take over. There’s a lushness in the deep plie with the rapid walk that carries it into a sort of sideways lope. He lifts up, with arms overhead, to disburden himself. His head twitches to the side. He glares- nothing so simple as anger is in his eyes. Wipes sweat from his forehead. Breather over, he resumes moving in a sort of squat; though he remains contained, his easy assurance in these almost ape-like shifts of weight give you a sense of an inner spirit that’s alive, even free. He throws the load off, dreams himself into a faun’s fantasy of luscious, runny fruits, and breaks into a loping run that expresses, in all is resilience and freedom, all the possibilities this serf will never have.
In El Chupamedia (translated as The Bootlicker or the Asskisser), Pico is dressed as a waiter in black pants, vest and tie. He stands a good distance away from and somewhat behind, an empty chair that he watches., “Si, senor. Como no, senor? Paraservirle, senor,” repeats a voice on tape. Pico knots his hands, fawning and distraught, even so far away. Slowly, he makes a slinking, conflicted approach to the chair. He changes his mind, backs off, pauses to paw the ground restlessly. As he approaches, spasms of buried fury seem to twist his head aside. He cannot be direct. Eventually, he reaches the chair, hovers coyly around it, returns to move back and forth again on the diagonal of his original approach. But this dulls the piece because it repeats what was new and makes it ordinary. We’re captives again, as in La Beata, of a rigid character with a simple conflict and no imagination.
Mujer (Woman), Pico’s last piece, had wonderful parts, but essayed too much and didn’t quite hold together. A rope hangs between two ladders. Pico appears in a shapeless dress. His hair is parted oddly; a drawing on one cheek, which suggests a birthmark, disfigures him. In the beginning - and most satisfying - section, which is repeated later, his strong, muscular movements of pulling, and throwing suggest their origins in women’s traditional tasks (like hauling a clothesline, washing clothes in a tub, etc.), but they’re exaggerated and clarified into a pure dance vocabulary. His gestures involve the whole body. He opens sweeping arm gestures, contracts himself sideways, pulls and pushes up and down with feverish insistence. Imagining a basket over his arm, his hand whips out of it again and again as if he’s selling something in the market at hysterical speed. Then, in the deepest of plies, his torso scoops, sweeps low over the floor. Then he’s pregnant, then scrubbing the floor, kneeling, pulling in and stretching out at killing tempo. In a fetal curl, he rolls from side to side. “Sexo, sexo,” screams a man’s heavy, pumping voice on the tape. Pico’s performance is neither feminine nor effeminate, but straightforward and strong, There’s no restrictive comment about what a woman should be; simply Pico taking on things women have to do. At the end, limply erect, his arm dangles over the jiggling clothesline. He seems hanged.
At the Cunningham Studio (August 17 and 18).
Wilson Pico’s four solos from La Cronicas Danzadas, presented at the Cunningham Studio, take their life, in part, from a political context. A young dancer-choreographer from Ecuador, Pico has built his solos on observations of people on the underside of life, the people who get squashed as a matter of course in social/economic/political machines everywhere. Natasha Salguero, who introduced the dances in English and Spanish, explains that the solos are images of daily life, “nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual...”
Pico is a small man, wiry and intense. His movements tend to be sharp and defined. He immerses himself in the characters he draws, starting with the plight, the trap, of their lives. The first, La Beata (The Blessed Hypocrite) is a man crippled by religious fear. Pico walks slightly hunched, with knees bent. He makes hasty but precise signs of the cross before him. Carefully held, his hands seem to have a sot of forced timidity and the habit of the penitential gesture. They don’t look capable of opening, or reaching, or grasping. Pico holds his body tight, constricted. He shifts his focus, to check and re-check, with a paranoid snap of the head. Tension builds into craziness with sequences of rapid shaking alternating with mea culpa breast-beating. But the choreography gets stuck in the literalness of the character and never develops. The dance is as narrow as this pious maniac, and its lack of perspective makes it, finally, trite and unsympathetic: a case study.
Salguero, introducing the second dance, explains its title, Runa Suerte. Suerte means luck, or fate. Runa is a word from Quechua. Originally, it meant person in that language. With centuries of colonization, it came to mean Indian, therefore, “something of very bad quality, something completely worthless.” Salguero described the illiterate peasants who come to the city to find jobs but find none the old people, and children, at the bottom of society, who become cargadores, load carriers. Pico starts with great modest, with small, soft running steps. He holds a cloth band tightly;y across his forehead. His arms pull the band wide and back. He bends, walks n a deep plie, too quickly - to carry his imaginary burden as far as possible before he can’t bear it anymore. You can easily see why: a huge basket on his stooped upper back, with some of the weight distributed forward by the band across the forehead. But though the image is kept clear and emphatic, Pico allows the inner spring and rhythmic shapes of the movement to take over. There’s a lushness in the deep plie with the rapid walk that carries it into a sort of sideways lope. He lifts up, with arms overhead, to disburden himself. His head twitches to the side. He glares- nothing so simple as anger is in his eyes. Wipes sweat from his forehead. Breather over, he resumes moving in a sort of squat; though he remains contained, his easy assurance in these almost ape-like shifts of weight give you a sense of an inner spirit that’s alive, even free. He throws the load off, dreams himself into a faun’s fantasy of luscious, runny fruits, and breaks into a loping run that expresses, in all is resilience and freedom, all the possibilities this serf will never have.
In El Chupamedia (translated as The Bootlicker or the Asskisser), Pico is dressed as a waiter in black pants, vest and tie. He stands a good distance away from and somewhat behind, an empty chair that he watches., “Si, senor. Como no, senor? Paraservirle, senor,” repeats a voice on tape. Pico knots his hands, fawning and distraught, even so far away. Slowly, he makes a slinking, conflicted approach to the chair. He changes his mind, backs off, pauses to paw the ground restlessly. As he approaches, spasms of buried fury seem to twist his head aside. He cannot be direct. Eventually, he reaches the chair, hovers coyly around it, returns to move back and forth again on the diagonal of his original approach. But this dulls the piece because it repeats what was new and makes it ordinary. We’re captives again, as in La Beata, of a rigid character with a simple conflict and no imagination.
Mujer (Woman), Pico’s last piece, had wonderful parts, but essayed too much and didn’t quite hold together. A rope hangs between two ladders. Pico appears in a shapeless dress. His hair is parted oddly; a drawing on one cheek, which suggests a birthmark, disfigures him. In the beginning - and most satisfying - section, which is repeated later, his strong, muscular movements of pulling, and throwing suggest their origins in women’s traditional tasks (like hauling a clothesline, washing clothes in a tub, etc.), but they’re exaggerated and clarified into a pure dance vocabulary. His gestures involve the whole body. He opens sweeping arm gestures, contracts himself sideways, pulls and pushes up and down with feverish insistence. Imagining a basket over his arm, his hand whips out of it again and again as if he’s selling something in the market at hysterical speed. Then, in the deepest of plies, his torso scoops, sweeps low over the floor. Then he’s pregnant, then scrubbing the floor, kneeling, pulling in and stretching out at killing tempo. In a fetal curl, he rolls from side to side. “Sexo, sexo,” screams a man’s heavy, pumping voice on the tape. Pico’s performance is neither feminine nor effeminate, but straightforward and strong, There’s no restrictive comment about what a woman should be; simply Pico taking on things women have to do. At the end, limply erect, his arm dangles over the jiggling clothesline. He seems hanged.
At the Cunningham Studio (August 17 and 18).
Getting Smashed
June 5
Walking from the 103rd Street stop of the Lexington Avenue IRT to the Museum of the City of New York cuts into the impact of the museum’s new exhibit on “Alcoholism: Number Three Killer.” You pass gutters and an empty lot strewn with broken glass, shells of TVs, vandalized and stripped autos, heaps of empty pint bottles. You go through the triple archway of the Park Avenue viaduct littered with more empties, stinking of piss. So when you enter the museum and see on the floor of its airy, elegant rotunda, a smashed car, a crushed tricycle, and one small red sneaker, it’s not quite the shock it’s meant to be. It’s simply a logical next step.
The message and the set-up of the exhibition is uncomplicated - drinking in excess is dangerous and disgusting (an unnecessary, pussyfooting exception is made for moderate social drinking, of course). Stacks of cartons line the hall that leads inside the exhibition. On the sides of some are photos of people drinking - morose, gleeful, dazed. A small display of silver flagons, rock crystal flasks, tankards, mugs and a Greek kylix is the last bit of elegance you see. In the exhibition room, liquor cartons, piled in a slightly ramshackle way, reach nearly to the ceiling. Though installed in a U-shape, it feels like a labyrinth, with displays in unexpected alcoves. The overall lighting is dim, with occasional spotlights - on a model of a shabby, wretched woman in a stupor in a beat-up easy chair, on a pair of jars containing comparative slices of healthy liver and a liver destroyed by excessive alcohol. At the curve of the U, the cartons lean in overhead, seem even more insecurely perched and cavern-like. A huge sculptural aggregate of liquor bottles frames a projection screen like a grotesque garland. Flashing on the nine rectangles of the divided screen are shots of people drinking, smashed cars, newspaper headlines, saloon lineups of fifths, young kids sampling a bottle, staggering drunks, snotnose drunks, argumentative drunks.
Meantime, a tape blurts snatches of songs romanticizing bars and booze. Turn the corner, and there are three scenes of body-case figures; three businessmen getting sloshed, a couple and an older guy at a party urging drinks on each other, four teenagers boozing in a teal car whose headlights blaze. I think there’s a casual line on the accompanying tape like, “I don’t think I’ve killed anybody yet.” The exhibition is a quickie, just takes a few minutes. When you come out, there are photos of “reformed” alcoholics (Dic Van Dke, Don Newcomb, etc.) and volunteers offering information and pamphlets. I wonder who is going to see things in this show that they haven’t seen already (except maybe the liver slices) at home or on the streets. Did anybody learn anything from movies like The Lost Weekend or I’ll Cry Tomorrow? We all know car crashes happen only to other people, and kids know that getting drunk is a lark, that getting smashed is a grown-up thing to do.
Upstairs at the museum, the Port of New York exhibit of ship models, dioramas, figureheads, has been nicely spiffed up. The moan of a foghorn (backed by sirens, toots, whistles and other seaport sounds) invited me in, and the lowering, 10-and-a-half-foot goliath Robert Fulton cast in zinc gave me a start. From 1873 to 1924 when the building was razed, it stood in a niche over the entrance to the Fulton Street Ferryhouse. Now it lurks here. In the rooms there are fine, detailed ship models; a streamlined fantasy ocean liner smooth as a sub, tankers, battleships, liners and old sailing vessels like ketches, brigs and a stubby Dutch kaag of 1750 that was used in shoal waters near Manhattan. There are idyllic paintings by James Bard of side wheel steamers, a panoramic photos of New York in 1876 showing a single tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (no span yet). A title diorama shows the city and the East River in the 1850s, and another shows South Street in 1855, with the bowsprits of the ships looming over the cobbled street. Out of perversity, I suppose, what I like best - after the ship models - are two figureheads that graced the Constitution: a funereal, ramrod Andrew Jackson, and a gentle, curly-bearded, fig-leafed Hercules, with a tawny lion skin that caps his head, covers his back, and whose paws tie across his chest.
Walking from the 103rd Street stop of the Lexington Avenue IRT to the Museum of the City of New York cuts into the impact of the museum’s new exhibit on “Alcoholism: Number Three Killer.” You pass gutters and an empty lot strewn with broken glass, shells of TVs, vandalized and stripped autos, heaps of empty pint bottles. You go through the triple archway of the Park Avenue viaduct littered with more empties, stinking of piss. So when you enter the museum and see on the floor of its airy, elegant rotunda, a smashed car, a crushed tricycle, and one small red sneaker, it’s not quite the shock it’s meant to be. It’s simply a logical next step.
The message and the set-up of the exhibition is uncomplicated - drinking in excess is dangerous and disgusting (an unnecessary, pussyfooting exception is made for moderate social drinking, of course). Stacks of cartons line the hall that leads inside the exhibition. On the sides of some are photos of people drinking - morose, gleeful, dazed. A small display of silver flagons, rock crystal flasks, tankards, mugs and a Greek kylix is the last bit of elegance you see. In the exhibition room, liquor cartons, piled in a slightly ramshackle way, reach nearly to the ceiling. Though installed in a U-shape, it feels like a labyrinth, with displays in unexpected alcoves. The overall lighting is dim, with occasional spotlights - on a model of a shabby, wretched woman in a stupor in a beat-up easy chair, on a pair of jars containing comparative slices of healthy liver and a liver destroyed by excessive alcohol. At the curve of the U, the cartons lean in overhead, seem even more insecurely perched and cavern-like. A huge sculptural aggregate of liquor bottles frames a projection screen like a grotesque garland. Flashing on the nine rectangles of the divided screen are shots of people drinking, smashed cars, newspaper headlines, saloon lineups of fifths, young kids sampling a bottle, staggering drunks, snotnose drunks, argumentative drunks.
Meantime, a tape blurts snatches of songs romanticizing bars and booze. Turn the corner, and there are three scenes of body-case figures; three businessmen getting sloshed, a couple and an older guy at a party urging drinks on each other, four teenagers boozing in a teal car whose headlights blaze. I think there’s a casual line on the accompanying tape like, “I don’t think I’ve killed anybody yet.” The exhibition is a quickie, just takes a few minutes. When you come out, there are photos of “reformed” alcoholics (Dic Van Dke, Don Newcomb, etc.) and volunteers offering information and pamphlets. I wonder who is going to see things in this show that they haven’t seen already (except maybe the liver slices) at home or on the streets. Did anybody learn anything from movies like The Lost Weekend or I’ll Cry Tomorrow? We all know car crashes happen only to other people, and kids know that getting drunk is a lark, that getting smashed is a grown-up thing to do.
Upstairs at the museum, the Port of New York exhibit of ship models, dioramas, figureheads, has been nicely spiffed up. The moan of a foghorn (backed by sirens, toots, whistles and other seaport sounds) invited me in, and the lowering, 10-and-a-half-foot goliath Robert Fulton cast in zinc gave me a start. From 1873 to 1924 when the building was razed, it stood in a niche over the entrance to the Fulton Street Ferryhouse. Now it lurks here. In the rooms there are fine, detailed ship models; a streamlined fantasy ocean liner smooth as a sub, tankers, battleships, liners and old sailing vessels like ketches, brigs and a stubby Dutch kaag of 1750 that was used in shoal waters near Manhattan. There are idyllic paintings by James Bard of side wheel steamers, a panoramic photos of New York in 1876 showing a single tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (no span yet). A title diorama shows the city and the East River in the 1850s, and another shows South Street in 1855, with the bowsprits of the ships looming over the cobbled street. Out of perversity, I suppose, what I like best - after the ship models - are two figureheads that graced the Constitution: a funereal, ramrod Andrew Jackson, and a gentle, curly-bearded, fig-leafed Hercules, with a tawny lion skin that caps his head, covers his back, and whose paws tie across his chest.
Hasta La Pirrouete, Siempre
June 26
There is no bomb scare on the opening night of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba as there was when
Alicia Alonso, the founder, artistic director and prima ballerina, danced Giselle at an American Ballet Theater gala last year and the curtain was held for an hour while cops searched the place. Ladies have their handbags inspected at the door and receive blue tags to show they’ve been checked out. Guards clutter the entrance and one stands at either side of the stage throughout the entire performance every night.
The company looks good in Giselle. Some of them are pushing too much: things were crisper and cleaner in a so-called “dress rehearsal” the press was invited to earlier that day. Alonso’s partner, Jorge Esquivel, slipped into what seemed to be a dozen pirouettes and finished neatly; in performance he was a little rocky. His leaps, which had been coolly brilliant in rehearsal, were at least as high but strained and a little jerky. On the other hand, Alonso in rehearsal seemed to present herself to the TV cameras as a drudge, doing a couple of steps, then plopping her hands on her hips, fussing with the ties on her wraparound top, stooping over about 100 or 200 times to fix her shoes or the leg warmers and tights bunched around her ankles. She rasped questions, snapped instructions in Spanish, squinted at the lighting. And she exercised her feet incessantly. Her Giselle, nowadays, is more an idea, a manner, than it is actual dancing. She strikes a few surprisingly solid balances, does some ethereal, nearly invisible bourees in the second act, and some fast footwork that comes out of the blue and drives the audience, lulled by the generally slow tempi, wild. She managed one decent grand jete in Act I, the rest are shapeless, broken. Her bows though are something else - the ultimate in blessed humility. She wilts graciously under the burden of acclaim.
I have a short meeting in the Met’s press office with some of the company’s premier dancers: Loipa Araujo (who was an aristocratic, authoritarian Bathilde, opening night, a wrought-up, affronted wife the next in Blood Wedding), Mara Garcia, Lazaro Carreno and the great Spanish dancer Antonio Gades (choreographer of Blood Wedding and guest artist with the company). Araujo translates for everyone, conscientiously, telling them everything I say and everything she says, even when an interchange is just between the two of us. She doesn’t cut corners, keeps them included in the conversation. I like that.
The other half of the ballet company is still home performing in Havana, the Ballet de Camaguey is “touring in Socialist countries,” Cuba’s folkloric troupe is touring South America, and the modern dance company is going to Europe. Meantime, they’re at the Met. It’s not any theatre,” says Gades. “It has a great history and a great tradition and you feel it. You’re performing in one of the most important theaters in the world. You feel a kind of responsibility.” They know that the importance of being seen by the American public is more than artistic. Whether the ballet company’s arrival heralds an era of cultural exchange or not, they must know that no one can look at such a well-trained company and merely equate Cuba with cigars and sugar, or revolution. Cuba hasn’t sent a folkloric company to charm us, but a ballet company with great authority that challenges us on our own cultural territory. The audience at the Met has been “warm.”
“Temperamental,” Carreno calls it, “like the Cuban public. Reacting to everything that happens in the moment.” My reading of the situation is rather different, though the warmth is certainly there. These audiences go ape. A man behind me on second night bravos anything and states how important it is that Cubans be proud.
My feelings are different. I came away from the opening impressed. Second night made me angry. The corps de ballet was cohesive and lovely in Les Sylphides, but the conducting was torpid and erratic. The ballet looked antiquated, mannered, and dowdy. The orchestration always turns the Chopin pieces to soup, but at this tempo only a genius could dance to it. I’m having visions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning sickrooms, fainting ladies taking milk toast and weak tea to keep up their strength. Then comes Canto Vital, a socko whammo piece by Azari Plietski for four men. The men are fantastic with their flying leaps, mid-air twists and plunges, and muscle-boy poses. It’s got a meaningful plot, too. “Primitive man...fights against his environment and starts to destroy his world. But the vital principle of life asserts itself and brings about new forms of coexistence.” Oh.
This dance makes me furious. The dancers - Carreno, Esquivel, Orlando Salgado, Andres Williams - are wonderful. What they are dancing is garbage. You don’t have to have a capitalist society to have commercial ballet. Araujo tells me that the company auditions boys and girls between nine and 11. “Everybody who wants to study ballet comes” - kids with no training, though many of them have had some experience in gymnastics. “What we look for most are correct proportions, whether they can lift their legs, whether they can move...” I wonder about all these kids coming into the school. They don’t all wind up in the company. Where do they go?
“Selection happens by itself,” says Araujo. “We are not making dancers for nothing. At the fourth year, if they don’t look like they’ll make the company, we try to make them teachers. To be a teacher, you have to know how to dance, so we make them finish the school...We have so many schools in Cuba that we need many teachers.” For boys, lest anybody turn out to be homosexual, there’s also a psychiatrist’s test “when they’re very little,” Araujo continues. “And if we see something that’s really wrong with the boy, and if the psychiatrist feels he shouldn’t go on dancing, we talk to the parents so the parents will know the child has a problem. To solve the problem before it becomes a problem.”
I’m particularly curious about this because years ago, in Paris, I met several young male dancers who’d defected from the Ballet Nacional on a previous tour because they were homosexual. They’d found the restrictions, and the threat of “re-education” unbearable. Nothing awaited them in Paris. They’d loved the company, were homesick for Cuba, revered Alonso. They went to performances, when the company was in town, bravoed and threw flowers. But they didn’t go backstage: no one would speak to them. Carreno says, “You cannot consider this a problem in our country. Little boys don’t have that kind of problem...If it happens, it’s because it’s a medical thing. But it’s not the society that’s going to influence him to be a homosexual.”
I believe that he believes what what he’s telling me is true. But I’m oppressed by the tacit self-righteousness of these charming young women and men. “We’re not artists who work alone, all by ourselves,” says Araujo. “It’s a big company, but it’s very united. It’s a collective. Nobody works alone. You always have somebody that comes and helps you. When somebody accomplishes something good - like doing a role for the first time - we’re all doing it. Because everybody has tried to help. Individualities don’t count. We have never been worried about anything but doing our jobs well. “If Marta has something that’s good, we don’t try to hide it. We try to develop it. We try to develop in each person the best things that they have - and that’s not only valid for artists. Each person has an ability to do something, and the revolution gives the opportunity to develop that ability. He doesn’t become something because of himself; he knows that Cuba has given him the opportunity. That you don’t find anywhere else. The talents that are lost because people don’t have the means to develop them...Here, every talent is saved.” Unless you flunk the psychiatrist’s test.
Holes in the Belly, Holes in the Head
March 26
I missed Edward Field’s translations of Eskimo Songs and Stories (Delacorte, $6.95) when it was published in 1973, illustrated with stone cuttings and stencils by Pudlo and Kiskshuk, two artists from the community of Cape Dorset on West Baffin Island. The songs and stories, selected by Field, were collected by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmusen in the early 1920’s from Netsilik Eskimos. Translating from literal English versions in the official records, Field has put real voices behind these stories. One way or another, most of them are about hunting or hunger; every other problem ties in - growing old, being orphaned, getting sick, being lazy...but how homey, funny, clear and precise, and practically wise these stories are! How strong their spirit is! No shilly-shallying. Like the old woman who had to be left behind one hard winter (“It was a pitiful sight and we did not laugh/for it probably meant death for her:/the old lady was half-blind and cripppled/and she was not wearing enough warm clothes for the weather/but as long as she could crawl she followed:/life was still sweet to her.”) Or men turning into animals - when the souls of men and animals were not so different - to find out what it was like. Or an orphaned brother and sister, abandoned by the tribe, who turn themselves into thunder and lightning and scare everybody to death. Or the woman who gave her dog her daughter’s name, pretending each time she fed the dog that she was feeding her daughter (in case she was hungry somewhere), and hoping that name would call to name and that calling the dog would bring her daughter home to visit often. These nearly three dozen translations are superb. Alive. I can’t imagine them any other way. Sorry to be nearly five years late in discovering them. Carol Korty’s second volume of simple-to-do plays for children, Silly Soup (Scribners, $7.95), consists of 10 lovely, easy-to-fiddle-with, short scripts rooted in the kind of loopy, tenacious logic that’s full of holes only the audience can see. Perhaps the most exultant, my favorite (with one of its sources in the stories of the Wise Men of Chelm), is that of the building that’s erected without windows. Of course, it’s too dark. The builders scoop cups of sunshine to pour inside, but that’s no help. Then they open up windows to let in some light, knock out the walls, lift off the roof for more light, and dance in the sunshine amid the wreckage of the house. Jane Yolen’s The Seeing Stick is a tender story of a blind Chinese princess. The illustrations, a collaboration between Remy Charlip and Demetra Maraslis, emerge in a sequence out of velvety charcoal darkness (Charlip’s books always start at the endpapers; these endpapers are back) revealing the emperor and the princess in a pavilion, and the figures diminish in size till they become part of a carving on a walking stick in an old blind man’s hand. In each of the next few pictures, we see the scene of the picture cared also on the stick in miniature. As an artist, the blind old man carves the faces of the same guards who peer at him over a gate. When he meets the princess and shows her his carvings, the illustrations bloom into color. The princess, with her closed eyes and forehead, has the innocence and modesty of a Memling virgin. From the text alone, you might get the impression that, with the help of the old man, the princess rediscovers merely the perceptions to be had through touching - but it’s hard to imagine her ever deprived of touch. What seems more significantly awakened is her imagination and a zest for life. This you grasp immediately through the pictures. The greatly oversized hand of the old man guides the princess’s tiny hand over the carvings on his stick, which delineate his journey to Peking and to her. The stick, with its figures, pagodas, pavilions, roads, is a complex surface, almost shimmering with its pale colors. And the final picture, where we are absorbed back into the stick landscape as a whole world, is busy with travelers on horseback, elephants, peacocks, hillsides in the form of monstrous heads, holy men, dragons, children dancing with scarves...a fantastic garden of delights. It’s interesting to me to see how these collaborative illustrations extend Charlip’s fascination with a delicate, glowing palette. His last several books have all, on some level, been concerned with radiance, with a richening color. Harlequin and the Gift of Many Colors, deepens in color and is richest in the final carnival scenes. Arm and Arm and Thirteen (with Jerry Joyner) share the same delicate but infinitely sensitive color range. But The Seeing Stick illustrations are about luminosity, about the lights within color. A few stylistic effects (besides the transition from black-and-white to color, and the wraparound, rounding off close of the book in shadows and darkness) are remarkable here, particularly the fragile complexity of the drawings of the carved stick versus the simplicity of the full-scale characters where a few lines and soft shadows do the trick. But what seems most striking, and most significant throughout the book, are the hands. A close-up of the old man’s fingers lightly clasping the stick. One of the guards placing his hands reassuringly on the old man’s shoulder. The old man half-embracing the princess and holding her hand to his own cheek. All the hands enact their gentle drama among the quieter shapes and placid faces of the characters. Their tenderness sustains the sweetness of the text and makes it true instead of sentimental.
I missed Edward Field’s translations of Eskimo Songs and Stories (Delacorte, $6.95) when it was published in 1973, illustrated with stone cuttings and stencils by Pudlo and Kiskshuk, two artists from the community of Cape Dorset on West Baffin Island. The songs and stories, selected by Field, were collected by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmusen in the early 1920’s from Netsilik Eskimos. Translating from literal English versions in the official records, Field has put real voices behind these stories. One way or another, most of them are about hunting or hunger; every other problem ties in - growing old, being orphaned, getting sick, being lazy...but how homey, funny, clear and precise, and practically wise these stories are! How strong their spirit is! No shilly-shallying. Like the old woman who had to be left behind one hard winter (“It was a pitiful sight and we did not laugh/for it probably meant death for her:/the old lady was half-blind and cripppled/and she was not wearing enough warm clothes for the weather/but as long as she could crawl she followed:/life was still sweet to her.”) Or men turning into animals - when the souls of men and animals were not so different - to find out what it was like. Or an orphaned brother and sister, abandoned by the tribe, who turn themselves into thunder and lightning and scare everybody to death. Or the woman who gave her dog her daughter’s name, pretending each time she fed the dog that she was feeding her daughter (in case she was hungry somewhere), and hoping that name would call to name and that calling the dog would bring her daughter home to visit often. These nearly three dozen translations are superb. Alive. I can’t imagine them any other way. Sorry to be nearly five years late in discovering them. Carol Korty’s second volume of simple-to-do plays for children, Silly Soup (Scribners, $7.95), consists of 10 lovely, easy-to-fiddle-with, short scripts rooted in the kind of loopy, tenacious logic that’s full of holes only the audience can see. Perhaps the most exultant, my favorite (with one of its sources in the stories of the Wise Men of Chelm), is that of the building that’s erected without windows. Of course, it’s too dark. The builders scoop cups of sunshine to pour inside, but that’s no help. Then they open up windows to let in some light, knock out the walls, lift off the roof for more light, and dance in the sunshine amid the wreckage of the house. Jane Yolen’s The Seeing Stick is a tender story of a blind Chinese princess. The illustrations, a collaboration between Remy Charlip and Demetra Maraslis, emerge in a sequence out of velvety charcoal darkness (Charlip’s books always start at the endpapers; these endpapers are back) revealing the emperor and the princess in a pavilion, and the figures diminish in size till they become part of a carving on a walking stick in an old blind man’s hand. In each of the next few pictures, we see the scene of the picture cared also on the stick in miniature. As an artist, the blind old man carves the faces of the same guards who peer at him over a gate. When he meets the princess and shows her his carvings, the illustrations bloom into color. The princess, with her closed eyes and forehead, has the innocence and modesty of a Memling virgin. From the text alone, you might get the impression that, with the help of the old man, the princess rediscovers merely the perceptions to be had through touching - but it’s hard to imagine her ever deprived of touch. What seems more significantly awakened is her imagination and a zest for life. This you grasp immediately through the pictures. The greatly oversized hand of the old man guides the princess’s tiny hand over the carvings on his stick, which delineate his journey to Peking and to her. The stick, with its figures, pagodas, pavilions, roads, is a complex surface, almost shimmering with its pale colors. And the final picture, where we are absorbed back into the stick landscape as a whole world, is busy with travelers on horseback, elephants, peacocks, hillsides in the form of monstrous heads, holy men, dragons, children dancing with scarves...a fantastic garden of delights. It’s interesting to me to see how these collaborative illustrations extend Charlip’s fascination with a delicate, glowing palette. His last several books have all, on some level, been concerned with radiance, with a richening color. Harlequin and the Gift of Many Colors, deepens in color and is richest in the final carnival scenes. Arm and Arm and Thirteen (with Jerry Joyner) share the same delicate but infinitely sensitive color range. But The Seeing Stick illustrations are about luminosity, about the lights within color. A few stylistic effects (besides the transition from black-and-white to color, and the wraparound, rounding off close of the book in shadows and darkness) are remarkable here, particularly the fragile complexity of the drawings of the carved stick versus the simplicity of the full-scale characters where a few lines and soft shadows do the trick. But what seems most striking, and most significant throughout the book, are the hands. A close-up of the old man’s fingers lightly clasping the stick. One of the guards placing his hands reassuringly on the old man’s shoulder. The old man half-embracing the princess and holding her hand to his own cheek. All the hands enact their gentle drama among the quieter shapes and placid faces of the characters. Their tenderness sustains the sweetness of the text and makes it true instead of sentimental.
Impossible Puzzle
February 20
A man and a woman sit facing each other in darkness. As each simultaneously lifts an arm and arcs it smoothly downward, small red lights (flashlights?) appear in their hands. They set the lights on the floor until a dozen of them forma glowing square, like a campfire. The immense, hollow beat of a drum reverberates in the lobby; you hear it come down the hall, getting louder and more threatening, then it moves away somewhere behind the stage where, still loud, it loses resonance, goes dead, and fades. A calm center surrounded by unknown terrors of the night. That’s where Burling McAllester’s perplexing The Barandsphere, shown at ATL, begins. What’s a barandsphere? Not an item of nuclear equipment we’ve never heard of, but a composite of bar and sphere, two obects that are foci of activity in the dance. In McAllester’s previously segmented work, The Pump Parable, ideas and images reflected and echoed back and forth through the piece and held it together even though the whole was confusing. A rough narrative compounded this by making you think you’d be able to make literal or allegorical sense out of it. In The Barandsphere, the lack of text takes the pressure off. But we are left with a series of segments which seem only vaguely related. Pump Parable’s most memorable images had to do with light within darkness - like spinning lanterns or blinking red eyes in bison heads worn by a thumping chorus. Barandsphere also contains vivid images of this sort: a woman in the light of an illuminated sphere had the quality of Georges de la Tour’s child Virgin aglow in candlelight. A couple, immobile, open and close their hands in small beams; while someone offstage speaks an incomprehensible language, their gestures become more elaborate, like shapes that if projected, might make recognizable shadow pictures. Near the end of the piece, in pitch darkness, a dancer flits around the space causing random, split-second flashes in which we can glimpse his iridescent headdress. Os he lighting matches with his thumbnails or lighting his Bic? Almost every section becomes tedious. And the beginning sections stay too dark for too long. When the lights finally brighten and we see the dancers’ faces, they seem too simple, impossibly lighthearted and untroubled. Early on, a procession of figures that crosses the stage (like the skyline dancers in Death’s train in The Seventh Seal), seems to presage a dream or a series of mythic confrontations. A woman carries a large, round object under a cloth, two men cross leaning and clinging to each other, one man slashes and thrusts with slender wands, a girl compulsively wipes her skirt and leads a tame man on all fours...It’s dark; lit from behind the figures have no more volume or directness than shadows. Whatever links there could be in The Barandsphere seem to have been erased. In dreams, you’re carried along on the flood. Later on you can;t tell how you got from where you were, even though it was easy as pie. And it becomes impossible to supply the connections with any conviction. So, The Barandsphere seems to present a selection of developed fragments, a detritus of dreams or myths, sometimes powerful mages loosened from any comprehensible context. In a pool of light, there’s a wildman, no, a woman. Promethean. Bound in what seem to be elastic bandages. Two male, masked figures just outside her circle torment her as she kicks and thrashes. Meanwhile, another woman (Ellen Robbins) stands in another circle of light. Sibylline, she looks outward, but seems to be looking in. Some kind of oracle, or witness, perhaps, but mute. She becomes one of the few threads in the piece, but preserving her role as witness. In the next section, two women ands two men, on the floor, tip back and rock forward. They run forward and back, diagonally, in waves, gradually increasing their sweep. They lie on their bellies, chests arched. faces staring straight front, arms twitching up behind their backs. They make faces, dumbly mouth words. I identified only one, “Why?” They flip onto their backs: their limbs open into wide Vs. The arm and leg on one side tip gently inward, lightly spring open again. Then the other side. Like fastidious anemones dining. Or maybe they’re the helpless ones, expecting to be dinner. McAllester stands onstage alone, chants wordlessly. One serpentine arm twines, and gradually its movement spreads, becoming more articulate and punctuated through the body. The witness reappears in a tropical evening gown, and sits down to watch, changing, through her mere presence, a private, eccentric meditation into a nightclub act. McAllester twists in a sort of trance. John Bernd enters with a long pole and plants himself like a castle guard. The pole might just fit within the loose circles McAllester’s hands are making. But some time goes by before McAllester touches the pole. When he does take it, he begins a lovely, quivery dance with it. A kind of wooing. He starts small and finicky, then gathers momentum and begins to veer and twist. Eventually, he whirls with the pole for a long time. It could go on and on. Or it could be the end. But there's more: two bare-chested guys in purple pants,a rendition of Tonight, another hand dance in flickering light, an escaping wild man... There’s something rich and tantalizing in McAllester’s work. He’s not afraid to use figures who seem somehow archaic, whose powers reside not in what they dance, but in who they might be to us. Unfortunately, he also seems impelled to include too much, and give each image, each activity, equal weight, which makes relationships between the parts incomprehensible. Like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces the same shape.
A man and a woman sit facing each other in darkness. As each simultaneously lifts an arm and arcs it smoothly downward, small red lights (flashlights?) appear in their hands. They set the lights on the floor until a dozen of them forma glowing square, like a campfire. The immense, hollow beat of a drum reverberates in the lobby; you hear it come down the hall, getting louder and more threatening, then it moves away somewhere behind the stage where, still loud, it loses resonance, goes dead, and fades. A calm center surrounded by unknown terrors of the night. That’s where Burling McAllester’s perplexing The Barandsphere, shown at ATL, begins. What’s a barandsphere? Not an item of nuclear equipment we’ve never heard of, but a composite of bar and sphere, two obects that are foci of activity in the dance. In McAllester’s previously segmented work, The Pump Parable, ideas and images reflected and echoed back and forth through the piece and held it together even though the whole was confusing. A rough narrative compounded this by making you think you’d be able to make literal or allegorical sense out of it. In The Barandsphere, the lack of text takes the pressure off. But we are left with a series of segments which seem only vaguely related. Pump Parable’s most memorable images had to do with light within darkness - like spinning lanterns or blinking red eyes in bison heads worn by a thumping chorus. Barandsphere also contains vivid images of this sort: a woman in the light of an illuminated sphere had the quality of Georges de la Tour’s child Virgin aglow in candlelight. A couple, immobile, open and close their hands in small beams; while someone offstage speaks an incomprehensible language, their gestures become more elaborate, like shapes that if projected, might make recognizable shadow pictures. Near the end of the piece, in pitch darkness, a dancer flits around the space causing random, split-second flashes in which we can glimpse his iridescent headdress. Os he lighting matches with his thumbnails or lighting his Bic? Almost every section becomes tedious. And the beginning sections stay too dark for too long. When the lights finally brighten and we see the dancers’ faces, they seem too simple, impossibly lighthearted and untroubled. Early on, a procession of figures that crosses the stage (like the skyline dancers in Death’s train in The Seventh Seal), seems to presage a dream or a series of mythic confrontations. A woman carries a large, round object under a cloth, two men cross leaning and clinging to each other, one man slashes and thrusts with slender wands, a girl compulsively wipes her skirt and leads a tame man on all fours...It’s dark; lit from behind the figures have no more volume or directness than shadows. Whatever links there could be in The Barandsphere seem to have been erased. In dreams, you’re carried along on the flood. Later on you can;t tell how you got from where you were, even though it was easy as pie. And it becomes impossible to supply the connections with any conviction. So, The Barandsphere seems to present a selection of developed fragments, a detritus of dreams or myths, sometimes powerful mages loosened from any comprehensible context. In a pool of light, there’s a wildman, no, a woman. Promethean. Bound in what seem to be elastic bandages. Two male, masked figures just outside her circle torment her as she kicks and thrashes. Meanwhile, another woman (Ellen Robbins) stands in another circle of light. Sibylline, she looks outward, but seems to be looking in. Some kind of oracle, or witness, perhaps, but mute. She becomes one of the few threads in the piece, but preserving her role as witness. In the next section, two women ands two men, on the floor, tip back and rock forward. They run forward and back, diagonally, in waves, gradually increasing their sweep. They lie on their bellies, chests arched. faces staring straight front, arms twitching up behind their backs. They make faces, dumbly mouth words. I identified only one, “Why?” They flip onto their backs: their limbs open into wide Vs. The arm and leg on one side tip gently inward, lightly spring open again. Then the other side. Like fastidious anemones dining. Or maybe they’re the helpless ones, expecting to be dinner. McAllester stands onstage alone, chants wordlessly. One serpentine arm twines, and gradually its movement spreads, becoming more articulate and punctuated through the body. The witness reappears in a tropical evening gown, and sits down to watch, changing, through her mere presence, a private, eccentric meditation into a nightclub act. McAllester twists in a sort of trance. John Bernd enters with a long pole and plants himself like a castle guard. The pole might just fit within the loose circles McAllester’s hands are making. But some time goes by before McAllester touches the pole. When he does take it, he begins a lovely, quivery dance with it. A kind of wooing. He starts small and finicky, then gathers momentum and begins to veer and twist. Eventually, he whirls with the pole for a long time. It could go on and on. Or it could be the end. But there's more: two bare-chested guys in purple pants,a rendition of Tonight, another hand dance in flickering light, an escaping wild man... There’s something rich and tantalizing in McAllester’s work. He’s not afraid to use figures who seem somehow archaic, whose powers reside not in what they dance, but in who they might be to us. Unfortunately, he also seems impelled to include too much, and give each image, each activity, equal weight, which makes relationships between the parts incomprehensible. Like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces the same shape.
Kids
February 6
You can never figure what’s coming next in a show by The Mystic Paper Beasts. Melisande and David Potter’s incredibly naive and fearless “masquerades” (presented recently at Theatre for the New City) are like nothing else around; they’re not specifically for kids or for adults, but for anybody whose head isn’t screwed on too tightly. It’s like being at a homemade show: you feel easy and patient. Transitions between segments may be lazy; a pair of bighorn sheep dance around, then there’s a bit of island music. Then nothing happens. Then a skinny 10 or 12-foot rod-puppet lady wafts on. There’s a sketchy set-to between clouds the results in a rain of confetti. Then a chorus f people on roller skates, wearing black, with models of railroad cars over their heads, comes in. I wish I could remember what they did, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. The image, anyway, is indelible. There’s a grandeur of conception in the Mystic Paper Beasts’ costumes. An extravagance, an innocent and dreamlike accuracy. The parade of these visually evocative figures through (usually) static pieces preserves their ambiguity and magic. They are framed but essentially untouched by their context. I loved a punk grandmother-type angel, i black, with quilted black wings. “I don’t want to be superhuman,” she says, “I want to be a rock star.” Like everybody. She knocks her own wig off with the barrel of a revolver and is dragged off kicking by two white-masked figures in black choir gowns and strangely military crescent headdresses. Somewhere, to, there was a superb parody fashion show: a girl with a Greek red-ware vase where her head should have been; a bent, aged person with the Parthenon for ahead; then a “face shuffler” (a cardboard-box head with an oval cutout behind which four different party faces on a scroll can be rolled up or down); and a Cubist inflatable - a silver astronaut with fabulous bazooms. Who would think that this format could work segment after segment in which nothing, or very little, happens. An astonished-looking white lion caresses the audience and jumps through a hoop; a slithery-hipped baboon dances solo to “Happy, Happy, Birthday, Baby,” then is joined by slouchy Ms. Baboon and they do “The Fish” together; white bride-and-groom budgerigars, which remind me of the White Owl Cigar owls, dance together; a woman in a sprawling cardboard costume of a domed-and-towered 17th-century building complains abut nobody remembering her birthday. Meanwhile, Albinoni plays, a child dressed as a monkey somersaults through the buildings gate, and a meringue angel with stuffed wings spins the hands on a pink alarm clock. At a moment when no one’s onstage and nothing is happening, some kid in the audience shouts, “Louder!” There’s no apparent logic to what comes after what. Whether or not the sequence is arbitrary or whimsical, it seems quite satisfactory. Nothing you’d want to quarrel with. And no explanations. No fuss or point is made about the lack of connection between one bit and another. You slip into enjoying r appreciating each thing for itself. How pleasant to be free from causality! The second half of the show is a “play” called Jawbreakers. Here’s the plot: Sweet Loose Tooth goes to the land of the bubblegum jawbreakers so she can fall out and be taken up by the Good Tooth Fairy. A stunning yellow airplane person with a whirling propeller sticking out in front of his face announces the show. The tooth fairy is played by a child carried on someone’s shoulders wearing the pale, sexless mask of an elderly person. Four corseted fairies (my two favorite had a slice of watermelon and a cut of cherry cheesecake on their heads) do a bobbing dance like carousel ponies. The loose tooth itself dangles as part of the character’s headdress in the form of a pair of quilted lips. She suffers an interview with the tooth fairy’s henchmen, but though loose, she’s not yet lost, and she’s rejected. So she goes to live it up with the jawbreakers in hopes of falling out. She’s chased by a giant set of false teeth and meets a mechanical chorus of six women in baggy bloomers with cans or funnels for breasts and plastic babypants for caps. When she finally falls out, the tooth fairy turns up. “I’m here and I want the tooth NOW,” she says. Those skinny kid arms hammer insistently up and down. And that’s what you call ballin’ the jack.
You can never figure what’s coming next in a show by The Mystic Paper Beasts. Melisande and David Potter’s incredibly naive and fearless “masquerades” (presented recently at Theatre for the New City) are like nothing else around; they’re not specifically for kids or for adults, but for anybody whose head isn’t screwed on too tightly. It’s like being at a homemade show: you feel easy and patient. Transitions between segments may be lazy; a pair of bighorn sheep dance around, then there’s a bit of island music. Then nothing happens. Then a skinny 10 or 12-foot rod-puppet lady wafts on. There’s a sketchy set-to between clouds the results in a rain of confetti. Then a chorus f people on roller skates, wearing black, with models of railroad cars over their heads, comes in. I wish I could remember what they did, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. The image, anyway, is indelible. There’s a grandeur of conception in the Mystic Paper Beasts’ costumes. An extravagance, an innocent and dreamlike accuracy. The parade of these visually evocative figures through (usually) static pieces preserves their ambiguity and magic. They are framed but essentially untouched by their context. I loved a punk grandmother-type angel, i black, with quilted black wings. “I don’t want to be superhuman,” she says, “I want to be a rock star.” Like everybody. She knocks her own wig off with the barrel of a revolver and is dragged off kicking by two white-masked figures in black choir gowns and strangely military crescent headdresses. Somewhere, to, there was a superb parody fashion show: a girl with a Greek red-ware vase where her head should have been; a bent, aged person with the Parthenon for ahead; then a “face shuffler” (a cardboard-box head with an oval cutout behind which four different party faces on a scroll can be rolled up or down); and a Cubist inflatable - a silver astronaut with fabulous bazooms. Who would think that this format could work segment after segment in which nothing, or very little, happens. An astonished-looking white lion caresses the audience and jumps through a hoop; a slithery-hipped baboon dances solo to “Happy, Happy, Birthday, Baby,” then is joined by slouchy Ms. Baboon and they do “The Fish” together; white bride-and-groom budgerigars, which remind me of the White Owl Cigar owls, dance together; a woman in a sprawling cardboard costume of a domed-and-towered 17th-century building complains abut nobody remembering her birthday. Meanwhile, Albinoni plays, a child dressed as a monkey somersaults through the buildings gate, and a meringue angel with stuffed wings spins the hands on a pink alarm clock. At a moment when no one’s onstage and nothing is happening, some kid in the audience shouts, “Louder!” There’s no apparent logic to what comes after what. Whether or not the sequence is arbitrary or whimsical, it seems quite satisfactory. Nothing you’d want to quarrel with. And no explanations. No fuss or point is made about the lack of connection between one bit and another. You slip into enjoying r appreciating each thing for itself. How pleasant to be free from causality! The second half of the show is a “play” called Jawbreakers. Here’s the plot: Sweet Loose Tooth goes to the land of the bubblegum jawbreakers so she can fall out and be taken up by the Good Tooth Fairy. A stunning yellow airplane person with a whirling propeller sticking out in front of his face announces the show. The tooth fairy is played by a child carried on someone’s shoulders wearing the pale, sexless mask of an elderly person. Four corseted fairies (my two favorite had a slice of watermelon and a cut of cherry cheesecake on their heads) do a bobbing dance like carousel ponies. The loose tooth itself dangles as part of the character’s headdress in the form of a pair of quilted lips. She suffers an interview with the tooth fairy’s henchmen, but though loose, she’s not yet lost, and she’s rejected. So she goes to live it up with the jawbreakers in hopes of falling out. She’s chased by a giant set of false teeth and meets a mechanical chorus of six women in baggy bloomers with cans or funnels for breasts and plastic babypants for caps. When she finally falls out, the tooth fairy turns up. “I’m here and I want the tooth NOW,” she says. Those skinny kid arms hammer insistently up and down. And that’s what you call ballin’ the jack.
Kids’ Books: “Don’t Eat Me!”
December 25
Probably the best books I’ve read all year are Alan Garner’s masterful and inspiring The Stone Book and Granny Reardun (Collins, $6.95 each, age 9 and up), written in a most rich, economical English, informed by Garner’s own childhood Cheshire dialect. The poetic resonance of these sequential books is that of the most penetrating fairy tales, of the truest tales of journeys of the soul. But Garner writes about plain people and focuses on the crucial decisions, or acts, that lead to man- or womanhood. The Stone Book is set in mid-19th century England. Mary, who gathers tone in the field for her father, a master stonemason, brings him his midday ration. He’s finishing work on a new church steeple. Mary climbs the spire even climbs fearlessly atop the weathercock for a spin at the top of the world. Later, at home, she tells him she wants to learn to read, but if he won’t allow it, she still wants a book to carry to chapel like her friends. Instead, her father takes her for a late walk down an old shaft where the stone has been nearly quarried out. She has to go the last bit alone, armed only with a light and his instructions, to find...what? A painting of a huge bull, and the mark of a hand as big as her own, that she thinks is her father’s. But the hand mark is ancient: her father had been taken down there when he was her age, his father before him, and so on. “It puts a quietness on you, does the bull.” Later he carves her a prayer book of stone. That’s the outline. Garner’s eye is keen for mood and gesture, for light and sound, for the intimate, humble details that bespeak other untold stories, for the look of a thing and for its weight in the life of his characters. Garner carries the girl from the brightest eyrie on the steeple, to the blackest pit, and roots her back in her daily life nourished by a gift whose meaning she has grown to understand. By the time of Granny Reardun. The good building stone has petered out: a house in the village is being torn down for the stone it’s made of. And the boy, Joseph, reared by his grandparents, must decide his future. He decides not to follow his grandfather (the stonemason of Stone Book), but to cut himself loose from that dominating presence whose work is everywhere he looks, and claim his independence. Joseph apprentices himself to the blacksmith, to the labor that fires his imagination. What is comforting about Mary and her father and Garner’s other characters, is the solidity and clarity of their relationships, their truthfulness, their contemplativeness that leads unswervingly to concrete acts in an ordinary world. And it’s in this matrix of ordinariness, of familiarity, that they show their fires. The stonemason loves and esteems his craft, his way with stone, cutting and polishing. It nurtures him and honors him. So he gives his daughter a book, not just to please her vanity, but a book out of the body of the world. Tom Fobble’s Day, the third book in Garner’s quartet, is sitting on a shelf in my bedroom. I’m saving it. Shipbuilding is the subject of Jan Adkins’s excellent Wooden Ship (Houghton Mifflin, $6.95),which details the construction of a whaler in New Bedford in 1868, and it seems a more complex business than the various projects outlined in David Macaulay’s series (Cathedral, Pyramid, Underground, etc.) - from the making of a model of a lengthwise half of the hull, to the wintertime cutting and shaping of trees to fit the patterns, to the laying of the keel, to the caulking of the hull, to the sewing of the sails, to the ships’ end in the packed ice of the Bering Straits 15 years later. Wooden Ship is slow going: the drawings demand careful study, but they make the step-by-step process concrete. Adkins explains the structural reasons for each step; any many shipbuilding terms are elucidated in the text, or come clear in the illustrations. “Knowlton’s men pluck a hot plank out with leather gloves and hooks. They rush it, still whippy with the heat and damp, up to the ribs and clamp it down to its curve before it stiffens again. The trunnels [tree nails] almost twenty thousand of them, give the ship a rash of stubbly texture before the dubbers trim them flush.” Adkins large view of the craft takes the book well beyond technicalities. “How does a ship take its look and form? Not all at once...Every line in its forest of rigging is a strength or a weakness, every curve or smooth in its hull has something to say about the ships’ way with the sea.” In jagged language, Jean Craighead George tells the story of The Wounded Wolf (Harper & Row, $4.95, ages 4 to 8), badly hurt by a caribou. Weakened and alone, the wolf nearly becomes the prey of raven, owl, fox, and grizzly. But he’s found by the leader of the pack who brings food until he’s healed. George is especially good at conveying the constant struggle for food and the harshness and peril of Arctic animal life. I particularly admire the occasional savager of John Schoenherr’s dense, detailed line drawings. In one spread, the ominous presence of a snowy owl hovers over the small, trudging wolf. Then ravens pick at the wolf’s wound; the wolf leaps desperately at them in the next picture. There must be more to life than you’d assume from Evelyn Shaw’s Elephant Seal Island (pictures by Cherryl Pape; Harper & Row, $4.95, ages 4 to 8), a dry depiction of the birth and growth of an elephant seal pup. Masses of seals drag themselves upon the beach - first the males, later the females. Each female gives birth to a single pup. Pups may be crushed by the routing males. They’ll be nipped if they latch onto the wrong female’s nipple. Then, when they’re fat enough to survive for a few months with no food, they’re abandoned by the adults t learn to swim and hunt on their own. With its generally gray illustrations, Elephant Seal Island leaves a feeling of desolation. Things come full circle by the final pages, with the pup returning to the island as a mature, belligerent male, probably about to crush some of the new year’s pups in his lumbering rush to mate. Ruth Nivola’s The Messy Rabbit (illustrated by Claire Nivola; Pantheon, $5.95, ages 4 to 7) is the usual tract by some presumably neat person to intimidate those who are “messy.” The assumption is that if you’re messy, you’re disorganized - and perhaps morally lax as well. As expected, the little rabbit in the tale shapes up. Another rabbit book, Bunches and Bunches of Bunnies (by Louise Mathews, pictures by Jeni Bassett:; Dodd, Mead, $6.95, ages 4 to 8) is pretty playful and teaches multiplication from 1 x 1 to 12 x 12. The book is structured so that, for example, for 3 x 3 on the eft-hand page three sets of three bunnies work in the garden (“3 plant seeds, 3 pull weeds, 3 all spray rows with a hose”) while on the facing page nine bunnies picnic on the harvest. BABOB reminds me very much of P.D. Eastman’s Go, Dog, Go!, but more formalized, without the zaniness and energy. The bunnies themselves are enough alike to have been machine-stamped. Ed Emberly’s ABC (Little Brown, $6.95) is rather elaborately designed but static. Each spread consist of four pictures in saturated color in which the letter is built either positively or negatively. For H, a hen and an old horse construct an H on the barn floor out of straw. For G, a family of geese gather at the top of the pictures. Beneath, them a pair of grasshoppers nibble away at the grass to carve a G-shaped swathe, then play golf in the final picture. A yak knits his Y. A turtle builds a Tinkertoy T which a tiger holds between his paws. It’s all very handsomely done, very ornamental, but seems to contrived - more clever than fun. It’s probably impossible not to love James Marshal’’s George and Martha. They are true friends, happily rotund hippos of pencil gray, with tiny pinpoint eyes, doughnut nostrils and two jutting teeth (Martha’s are white, George has one white tooth, one yellow for easy identification). George is impulsive and naive; Martha is cleverer and more patient. In George and Martha One Fine Day (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95, ages 4 to 8), five brief stories are told with wryness, wit and perfect economy equally in simple cartoon like drawings and text. In “The Tightrope,” Martha balances on a slack wire when George begins regaling her with the dangers of falling. But he fast-talks her with encouragement when he sees that he’s undermined her confidence and she really could fall. What mage could be more blissful than the final one? A levitating hippo in polka-dot bloomers, with a rose in her ear. In the fourth story, George frightens Martha, and then noodles around al day expecting her to get back at him. Pouring what appears to be ketchup on his oatmeal, he finds it hard to concentrate on what he’s doing. “Any minute now, Martha is going to scare the pants off me.” He looks for her under the sink in the next spread: through the pipes, brushes, detergent bottles and paint cans, we see part of him through the cabinet doors. George is fretting about what Martha’s up to and where she might be She’s not under the sink, of course (she never could fit there, and she’s never stoop to that anyway), but the picture suggests “hiding” so beautifully, in reverse. From our angle, George seems to be hiding, or, rather, effectively disguising himself as a drainpipe. Martha never does care him; she just lets him sweat it out. Till the fifth story. I enjoyed Nicol Rubel’s manic, flaring illustrations for Worse than Rotten, Ralph (text by Jack Gantos; Houghton Mifflin, $6.95, ages 4 to 8) with their crude energies and toothy, insanely grinning cats. Ralph is a “reformed” red cat, who’s supposed to stay home and be a nice house cat. But that just makes him dull. When he’s taunted by a tiger-striped alley cat, he goes off on a rampage with the alley cat’s gang of squat, beastly looking cats and has a great time. They dump trash cans, steal people’s hats in the park (if these were pictures with dialogue balloons, the lady with the stroller would yell “Eeek!”), terrify some nice cats, have a pie fight. Eventually, Ralph brings the gang home where they wreck his owner’s room. She come home to find a broken bed, walls splashed with paint, and the cats banging away on pots and pans, and chases them out. But, fortunately, being awful doesn’t make one unlovable. Ralph is coddled, like the poor innocent he isn’t. He lies smugly plopped on a sofa, being brushed. There’s no justice. And isn’t that nice? Alexandra the Rock-Eater (Knopf, $6.95, ages 5 to 8), a retelling by Dorothy Van Woerkom of a Romanian folk tale, with illustrations by Rosenkrans Hoffman, is probably familiar in one form or another. Alexandra and her husband, Igor, have got 100 hungry children to feed, so Alexandra goes off to find more food She sees a dragon snatch sheep and cows from a shepherd and makes a deal with him to get rid of the creature. So when next the dragon comes around, she meets and intrigues him, telling him a small round cheese she’s munching is a stone, and showing him how she squeezes milk from it. The dragon is impressed, and offers her three sacks of gold to come home with him and meet his mother. Alexandra manages to keep the dragons bamboozled for her whole three-day visit (she threatens to tear up the whole forest when asked to get some wood, and manages to avoid being bashed on the head during the night after momma dragon decides that she’s really too dangerous to have around). She gets the young dragon to carry her gold home for her, but when they get there and her 100 hungry children run toward him with their knives and forks at the ready, he drops the gold and flees. Van Woerkom tells the story gaily and briskly. Survival - feeding the family, not getting eaten yourself - is primary. But the spirit of the story, besides emphasizing that mind is mightier than muscle, makes an unequivocal heroine of the con artist which some people may find hard to swallow. Alexandra saves the shepherd’s flocks and manages to feed her own kids, but she also gulls the dragons enthusiastically and gets extremely rich by it. She’s clever, knows how to get ahead, and no moral ambiguity muddles her. Hoffman’s pictures are very peculiar and fascinating. Sometimes two pages wide, sometimes one, they’re usually framed in a thin gold border, but a leaf or a tablecloth or a dragon’s claw pokes out. Perhaps a bat floats elsewhere on the page. Or the sheep-gobbling dragon coils his tail around one narrow frame and holds a second in his claws. The colors are unusual: a faded pink, Prussian blue and gold either intense or washy, occasional splotches of strong red or spruce green. Alexandra, rather squat, with a bright red turban-like thing wrapped around her head, looks sometimes like a little girl, sometimes like her own grandmother. The young dragon is pink and adorable, with his wings, little upturned tusks, a single horn that curls out of his forehead, and his pudgy feet with their crooked toenails. The top of his head suggests an airplane, with the straight line of his snout he fuselage and his ears, flat out horizontal, the wings. Momma dragon is more intimidating, sprawled out in their cave among mushrooms, mice, a spider and a semi-squashed toad. Alexandra is about as big as her ear. But even momma’s charming when you see her hunched at the dinner table eating soup, with her feet comfortably fondling each other and dangling out of the picture frame. Alexandra’s horde of smiling, mindless, fork-wielding children are much more frightening.
Probably the best books I’ve read all year are Alan Garner’s masterful and inspiring The Stone Book and Granny Reardun (Collins, $6.95 each, age 9 and up), written in a most rich, economical English, informed by Garner’s own childhood Cheshire dialect. The poetic resonance of these sequential books is that of the most penetrating fairy tales, of the truest tales of journeys of the soul. But Garner writes about plain people and focuses on the crucial decisions, or acts, that lead to man- or womanhood. The Stone Book is set in mid-19th century England. Mary, who gathers tone in the field for her father, a master stonemason, brings him his midday ration. He’s finishing work on a new church steeple. Mary climbs the spire even climbs fearlessly atop the weathercock for a spin at the top of the world. Later, at home, she tells him she wants to learn to read, but if he won’t allow it, she still wants a book to carry to chapel like her friends. Instead, her father takes her for a late walk down an old shaft where the stone has been nearly quarried out. She has to go the last bit alone, armed only with a light and his instructions, to find...what? A painting of a huge bull, and the mark of a hand as big as her own, that she thinks is her father’s. But the hand mark is ancient: her father had been taken down there when he was her age, his father before him, and so on. “It puts a quietness on you, does the bull.” Later he carves her a prayer book of stone. That’s the outline. Garner’s eye is keen for mood and gesture, for light and sound, for the intimate, humble details that bespeak other untold stories, for the look of a thing and for its weight in the life of his characters. Garner carries the girl from the brightest eyrie on the steeple, to the blackest pit, and roots her back in her daily life nourished by a gift whose meaning she has grown to understand. By the time of Granny Reardun. The good building stone has petered out: a house in the village is being torn down for the stone it’s made of. And the boy, Joseph, reared by his grandparents, must decide his future. He decides not to follow his grandfather (the stonemason of Stone Book), but to cut himself loose from that dominating presence whose work is everywhere he looks, and claim his independence. Joseph apprentices himself to the blacksmith, to the labor that fires his imagination. What is comforting about Mary and her father and Garner’s other characters, is the solidity and clarity of their relationships, their truthfulness, their contemplativeness that leads unswervingly to concrete acts in an ordinary world. And it’s in this matrix of ordinariness, of familiarity, that they show their fires. The stonemason loves and esteems his craft, his way with stone, cutting and polishing. It nurtures him and honors him. So he gives his daughter a book, not just to please her vanity, but a book out of the body of the world. Tom Fobble’s Day, the third book in Garner’s quartet, is sitting on a shelf in my bedroom. I’m saving it. Shipbuilding is the subject of Jan Adkins’s excellent Wooden Ship (Houghton Mifflin, $6.95),which details the construction of a whaler in New Bedford in 1868, and it seems a more complex business than the various projects outlined in David Macaulay’s series (Cathedral, Pyramid, Underground, etc.) - from the making of a model of a lengthwise half of the hull, to the wintertime cutting and shaping of trees to fit the patterns, to the laying of the keel, to the caulking of the hull, to the sewing of the sails, to the ships’ end in the packed ice of the Bering Straits 15 years later. Wooden Ship is slow going: the drawings demand careful study, but they make the step-by-step process concrete. Adkins explains the structural reasons for each step; any many shipbuilding terms are elucidated in the text, or come clear in the illustrations. “Knowlton’s men pluck a hot plank out with leather gloves and hooks. They rush it, still whippy with the heat and damp, up to the ribs and clamp it down to its curve before it stiffens again. The trunnels [tree nails] almost twenty thousand of them, give the ship a rash of stubbly texture before the dubbers trim them flush.” Adkins large view of the craft takes the book well beyond technicalities. “How does a ship take its look and form? Not all at once...Every line in its forest of rigging is a strength or a weakness, every curve or smooth in its hull has something to say about the ships’ way with the sea.” In jagged language, Jean Craighead George tells the story of The Wounded Wolf (Harper & Row, $4.95, ages 4 to 8), badly hurt by a caribou. Weakened and alone, the wolf nearly becomes the prey of raven, owl, fox, and grizzly. But he’s found by the leader of the pack who brings food until he’s healed. George is especially good at conveying the constant struggle for food and the harshness and peril of Arctic animal life. I particularly admire the occasional savager of John Schoenherr’s dense, detailed line drawings. In one spread, the ominous presence of a snowy owl hovers over the small, trudging wolf. Then ravens pick at the wolf’s wound; the wolf leaps desperately at them in the next picture. There must be more to life than you’d assume from Evelyn Shaw’s Elephant Seal Island (pictures by Cherryl Pape; Harper & Row, $4.95, ages 4 to 8), a dry depiction of the birth and growth of an elephant seal pup. Masses of seals drag themselves upon the beach - first the males, later the females. Each female gives birth to a single pup. Pups may be crushed by the routing males. They’ll be nipped if they latch onto the wrong female’s nipple. Then, when they’re fat enough to survive for a few months with no food, they’re abandoned by the adults t learn to swim and hunt on their own. With its generally gray illustrations, Elephant Seal Island leaves a feeling of desolation. Things come full circle by the final pages, with the pup returning to the island as a mature, belligerent male, probably about to crush some of the new year’s pups in his lumbering rush to mate. Ruth Nivola’s The Messy Rabbit (illustrated by Claire Nivola; Pantheon, $5.95, ages 4 to 7) is the usual tract by some presumably neat person to intimidate those who are “messy.” The assumption is that if you’re messy, you’re disorganized - and perhaps morally lax as well. As expected, the little rabbit in the tale shapes up. Another rabbit book, Bunches and Bunches of Bunnies (by Louise Mathews, pictures by Jeni Bassett:; Dodd, Mead, $6.95, ages 4 to 8) is pretty playful and teaches multiplication from 1 x 1 to 12 x 12. The book is structured so that, for example, for 3 x 3 on the eft-hand page three sets of three bunnies work in the garden (“3 plant seeds, 3 pull weeds, 3 all spray rows with a hose”) while on the facing page nine bunnies picnic on the harvest. BABOB reminds me very much of P.D. Eastman’s Go, Dog, Go!, but more formalized, without the zaniness and energy. The bunnies themselves are enough alike to have been machine-stamped. Ed Emberly’s ABC (Little Brown, $6.95) is rather elaborately designed but static. Each spread consist of four pictures in saturated color in which the letter is built either positively or negatively. For H, a hen and an old horse construct an H on the barn floor out of straw. For G, a family of geese gather at the top of the pictures. Beneath, them a pair of grasshoppers nibble away at the grass to carve a G-shaped swathe, then play golf in the final picture. A yak knits his Y. A turtle builds a Tinkertoy T which a tiger holds between his paws. It’s all very handsomely done, very ornamental, but seems to contrived - more clever than fun. It’s probably impossible not to love James Marshal’’s George and Martha. They are true friends, happily rotund hippos of pencil gray, with tiny pinpoint eyes, doughnut nostrils and two jutting teeth (Martha’s are white, George has one white tooth, one yellow for easy identification). George is impulsive and naive; Martha is cleverer and more patient. In George and Martha One Fine Day (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95, ages 4 to 8), five brief stories are told with wryness, wit and perfect economy equally in simple cartoon like drawings and text. In “The Tightrope,” Martha balances on a slack wire when George begins regaling her with the dangers of falling. But he fast-talks her with encouragement when he sees that he’s undermined her confidence and she really could fall. What mage could be more blissful than the final one? A levitating hippo in polka-dot bloomers, with a rose in her ear. In the fourth story, George frightens Martha, and then noodles around al day expecting her to get back at him. Pouring what appears to be ketchup on his oatmeal, he finds it hard to concentrate on what he’s doing. “Any minute now, Martha is going to scare the pants off me.” He looks for her under the sink in the next spread: through the pipes, brushes, detergent bottles and paint cans, we see part of him through the cabinet doors. George is fretting about what Martha’s up to and where she might be She’s not under the sink, of course (she never could fit there, and she’s never stoop to that anyway), but the picture suggests “hiding” so beautifully, in reverse. From our angle, George seems to be hiding, or, rather, effectively disguising himself as a drainpipe. Martha never does care him; she just lets him sweat it out. Till the fifth story. I enjoyed Nicol Rubel’s manic, flaring illustrations for Worse than Rotten, Ralph (text by Jack Gantos; Houghton Mifflin, $6.95, ages 4 to 8) with their crude energies and toothy, insanely grinning cats. Ralph is a “reformed” red cat, who’s supposed to stay home and be a nice house cat. But that just makes him dull. When he’s taunted by a tiger-striped alley cat, he goes off on a rampage with the alley cat’s gang of squat, beastly looking cats and has a great time. They dump trash cans, steal people’s hats in the park (if these were pictures with dialogue balloons, the lady with the stroller would yell “Eeek!”), terrify some nice cats, have a pie fight. Eventually, Ralph brings the gang home where they wreck his owner’s room. She come home to find a broken bed, walls splashed with paint, and the cats banging away on pots and pans, and chases them out. But, fortunately, being awful doesn’t make one unlovable. Ralph is coddled, like the poor innocent he isn’t. He lies smugly plopped on a sofa, being brushed. There’s no justice. And isn’t that nice? Alexandra the Rock-Eater (Knopf, $6.95, ages 5 to 8), a retelling by Dorothy Van Woerkom of a Romanian folk tale, with illustrations by Rosenkrans Hoffman, is probably familiar in one form or another. Alexandra and her husband, Igor, have got 100 hungry children to feed, so Alexandra goes off to find more food She sees a dragon snatch sheep and cows from a shepherd and makes a deal with him to get rid of the creature. So when next the dragon comes around, she meets and intrigues him, telling him a small round cheese she’s munching is a stone, and showing him how she squeezes milk from it. The dragon is impressed, and offers her three sacks of gold to come home with him and meet his mother. Alexandra manages to keep the dragons bamboozled for her whole three-day visit (she threatens to tear up the whole forest when asked to get some wood, and manages to avoid being bashed on the head during the night after momma dragon decides that she’s really too dangerous to have around). She gets the young dragon to carry her gold home for her, but when they get there and her 100 hungry children run toward him with their knives and forks at the ready, he drops the gold and flees. Van Woerkom tells the story gaily and briskly. Survival - feeding the family, not getting eaten yourself - is primary. But the spirit of the story, besides emphasizing that mind is mightier than muscle, makes an unequivocal heroine of the con artist which some people may find hard to swallow. Alexandra saves the shepherd’s flocks and manages to feed her own kids, but she also gulls the dragons enthusiastically and gets extremely rich by it. She’s clever, knows how to get ahead, and no moral ambiguity muddles her. Hoffman’s pictures are very peculiar and fascinating. Sometimes two pages wide, sometimes one, they’re usually framed in a thin gold border, but a leaf or a tablecloth or a dragon’s claw pokes out. Perhaps a bat floats elsewhere on the page. Or the sheep-gobbling dragon coils his tail around one narrow frame and holds a second in his claws. The colors are unusual: a faded pink, Prussian blue and gold either intense or washy, occasional splotches of strong red or spruce green. Alexandra, rather squat, with a bright red turban-like thing wrapped around her head, looks sometimes like a little girl, sometimes like her own grandmother. The young dragon is pink and adorable, with his wings, little upturned tusks, a single horn that curls out of his forehead, and his pudgy feet with their crooked toenails. The top of his head suggests an airplane, with the straight line of his snout he fuselage and his ears, flat out horizontal, the wings. Momma dragon is more intimidating, sprawled out in their cave among mushrooms, mice, a spider and a semi-squashed toad. Alexandra is about as big as her ear. But even momma’s charming when you see her hunched at the dinner table eating soup, with her feet comfortably fondling each other and dangling out of the picture frame. Alexandra’s horde of smiling, mindless, fork-wielding children are much more frightening.
Nearly Dinner for Three
May 29
“Because of extensive reconstruction” (already?) the children’s theatre of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. moves from one space to another within the complex. In the curtain-enshrouded Musical Theater Lab, where I saw a performance of Somersault by Metro Theater Circus of St. Louis, the acoustics are wonderful and the space is a perfect size, spacious but intimate - but the roof leaks. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining. Most Saturdays, mobs of people line up early outside for the free performances. First come, first served. So the people who don’t get in can get pretty riled, especially if they’ve already paid to park their cars in the center’s garage. It must be especially infuriating, of course, if Amy C. should decide to pop in late with her secret servicemen after you’ve been turned away. MTC’s show, with script and direction by Phyllis Weil, consists of three fairy tales - The Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk - all, curiously, about eating, or, more exactly, about the main’s character(s) becoming somebody’s dinner. Steven Radecke’s music is excellent. The all-purpose et - conceived by June Ekman (who supervised and choreographed the production) and worked out in detail by member s of the company - is basically a handsome cloth backdrop painted abstractly in buff tones and shapes that suggest a vague landscape. There are three large pockets (where the onstage costume changes are kept) sewn into it and vertical slits on either side that serve as entrances and exits for abnormal occasions. The enthusiasm and energy of MTC’s six members has been channeled into the creation of a number of vivid and idiosyncratic characters. Ekman and Weil, in their direction keep the action lively and physically explicit, but the scripts themselves are problematic. Where the writing is specific, it can be clever and meaty and funny; where it’s general, it’s gooey and prettified. The worst annoyance is that everything is in rhyme. Sometimes that’s charming and apt, but about half the time you’re listening to sentences and phrases that either don’t mean anything or that contradict the sense of what’s going on. You’d give your soul to hear some regular talk once in a while. In Three Little Pigs, the piglets (in puffy pink blouson tops and little pink ears) are sentimentally sent away from home by their mother and warned about the wolf (who stands on the sidelines tugging on his orange gloves, like one of those slimy charmers who traditionally waylay young girls.) The whole section where the agile but ill-fated wolf blows down house after house while the pigs escape is beautifully worked out, The first one slips through the wolf’s legs, leaps into her brother’s arms, then both of them are yanked into the wiser sister’s house. A final chase becomes an intricate and witty obstacle course and ends with the wolf diving through a hoop the pigs hold for him. Glub glub glub, they bubble him offstage. Colored cords that attach to the floor and define the pigs’ houses seemed skimpy, but I sympathized with the intention to keep the stage simple and the space free for moving. Nick Kryah, as the wolf, timed his dives and leaps and faux pas beautifully and demonstrated a clear gift for giving a simplistic character honesty and substance, without diminishing the character’s predatory nature. Hansel and Gretel are the dullest characters in this version of Hansel and Gretel. The witch is a wily, saccharine, screech-owl of a lady (played with great spirit by Carol Evans). Nearsighted, she loses her green glasses in a whirling dance, gets twisted up in a rope b Gretel as she sings and flaps through a frenzied song, “Fatten Him Up!” When Gretel shoves her in the oven, she goes neatly, headfirst, through one of those slits in the drop. As a wonderful yellow bird, the chunky, ginger-bearded Peter Fisher Hesed gets up from the piano to eat the crumbs Hansel drops. But the wicked stepmother knocks the story thoroughly off balance. Played with real enjoyment and flair by Phyllis Weil, she’s a fascinating, complex woman of powerful will. She’s bored, nasty, conniving - but to her husband she’s a sexpot and a helpless darling. You don’t believe for a second that lack of food has anything to do with her wanting to dump the kids in the woods. And when it all turns out happily and the father tells the kids “she’s gone and she’s never coming back,” adults in the audience know better. If she’s ever in the mood to return he’ll think himself lucky to have her back. A problem that comes up in Hansel and Gretel and elsewhere is that sometimes when the action should move right along, it’s paralyzed for a song or a dance instead. Just when Hansel and Gretel overhear their stepmother’s plot, are stricken with fear, and must make a plan, they stop to sing some mopey, soupy song. Or, in Jack and the Beanstalk, we’re distracted by a number about the marvelous adventures of the person who trades Jack the beans. We hear a lot of fanciful talk, but it’s pure pretty-pretty paddling. Kryah makes an engaging, openhearted Jack; Branislav Tomich is wonderful as a recalcitrant cow, Suzanne Costello as the giant’s hen and his harp, and Evans as a very sour mother. Can Jack ever satisfy her? Nope. The beanstalk pulls surprisingly from a downstage tub diagonally over the set. Jack hauls himself along the stalk as if he were climbing. He follows his foot through the slit in the backdrop, appears over the top of it as if he’d levitated, then steps through the other slit in the giant’s territory in the sky. A cloth of wide horizontal sections of white and blue has been tossed gently over most of the set. Bundles of white balloons hang on it like clouds. The giant’s wife is a sweet little old lady (maybe she’s really his grandma). But the giant is fabulous: it’s Hesed, the musician, again, in a floppy hat stuffed with balloons. He’s sort of an incarnation of Oliver Hardy in his guise of a cook in Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. He seems about to go into a dangerous rage at any moment, but he’s easily pacified. He’s a big baby. He slurps and chomps his food with sidesplitting bad manners. The first time we see him eat, he nearly has a fit because he can’t find his spoon. The second time, he can’t be bothered with a spoon and just gobbles noisily from the bowl. He’s a toughie, but so vulnerable that when he dozes, a touch of Jack’s finger will set him lightly spinning. And when he crashes down at the end, all we see is his balloon-stuffed hat sailing over the backdrop.
“Because of extensive reconstruction” (already?) the children’s theatre of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. moves from one space to another within the complex. In the curtain-enshrouded Musical Theater Lab, where I saw a performance of Somersault by Metro Theater Circus of St. Louis, the acoustics are wonderful and the space is a perfect size, spacious but intimate - but the roof leaks. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining. Most Saturdays, mobs of people line up early outside for the free performances. First come, first served. So the people who don’t get in can get pretty riled, especially if they’ve already paid to park their cars in the center’s garage. It must be especially infuriating, of course, if Amy C. should decide to pop in late with her secret servicemen after you’ve been turned away. MTC’s show, with script and direction by Phyllis Weil, consists of three fairy tales - The Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk - all, curiously, about eating, or, more exactly, about the main’s character(s) becoming somebody’s dinner. Steven Radecke’s music is excellent. The all-purpose et - conceived by June Ekman (who supervised and choreographed the production) and worked out in detail by member s of the company - is basically a handsome cloth backdrop painted abstractly in buff tones and shapes that suggest a vague landscape. There are three large pockets (where the onstage costume changes are kept) sewn into it and vertical slits on either side that serve as entrances and exits for abnormal occasions. The enthusiasm and energy of MTC’s six members has been channeled into the creation of a number of vivid and idiosyncratic characters. Ekman and Weil, in their direction keep the action lively and physically explicit, but the scripts themselves are problematic. Where the writing is specific, it can be clever and meaty and funny; where it’s general, it’s gooey and prettified. The worst annoyance is that everything is in rhyme. Sometimes that’s charming and apt, but about half the time you’re listening to sentences and phrases that either don’t mean anything or that contradict the sense of what’s going on. You’d give your soul to hear some regular talk once in a while. In Three Little Pigs, the piglets (in puffy pink blouson tops and little pink ears) are sentimentally sent away from home by their mother and warned about the wolf (who stands on the sidelines tugging on his orange gloves, like one of those slimy charmers who traditionally waylay young girls.) The whole section where the agile but ill-fated wolf blows down house after house while the pigs escape is beautifully worked out, The first one slips through the wolf’s legs, leaps into her brother’s arms, then both of them are yanked into the wiser sister’s house. A final chase becomes an intricate and witty obstacle course and ends with the wolf diving through a hoop the pigs hold for him. Glub glub glub, they bubble him offstage. Colored cords that attach to the floor and define the pigs’ houses seemed skimpy, but I sympathized with the intention to keep the stage simple and the space free for moving. Nick Kryah, as the wolf, timed his dives and leaps and faux pas beautifully and demonstrated a clear gift for giving a simplistic character honesty and substance, without diminishing the character’s predatory nature. Hansel and Gretel are the dullest characters in this version of Hansel and Gretel. The witch is a wily, saccharine, screech-owl of a lady (played with great spirit by Carol Evans). Nearsighted, she loses her green glasses in a whirling dance, gets twisted up in a rope b Gretel as she sings and flaps through a frenzied song, “Fatten Him Up!” When Gretel shoves her in the oven, she goes neatly, headfirst, through one of those slits in the drop. As a wonderful yellow bird, the chunky, ginger-bearded Peter Fisher Hesed gets up from the piano to eat the crumbs Hansel drops. But the wicked stepmother knocks the story thoroughly off balance. Played with real enjoyment and flair by Phyllis Weil, she’s a fascinating, complex woman of powerful will. She’s bored, nasty, conniving - but to her husband she’s a sexpot and a helpless darling. You don’t believe for a second that lack of food has anything to do with her wanting to dump the kids in the woods. And when it all turns out happily and the father tells the kids “she’s gone and she’s never coming back,” adults in the audience know better. If she’s ever in the mood to return he’ll think himself lucky to have her back. A problem that comes up in Hansel and Gretel and elsewhere is that sometimes when the action should move right along, it’s paralyzed for a song or a dance instead. Just when Hansel and Gretel overhear their stepmother’s plot, are stricken with fear, and must make a plan, they stop to sing some mopey, soupy song. Or, in Jack and the Beanstalk, we’re distracted by a number about the marvelous adventures of the person who trades Jack the beans. We hear a lot of fanciful talk, but it’s pure pretty-pretty paddling. Kryah makes an engaging, openhearted Jack; Branislav Tomich is wonderful as a recalcitrant cow, Suzanne Costello as the giant’s hen and his harp, and Evans as a very sour mother. Can Jack ever satisfy her? Nope. The beanstalk pulls surprisingly from a downstage tub diagonally over the set. Jack hauls himself along the stalk as if he were climbing. He follows his foot through the slit in the backdrop, appears over the top of it as if he’d levitated, then steps through the other slit in the giant’s territory in the sky. A cloth of wide horizontal sections of white and blue has been tossed gently over most of the set. Bundles of white balloons hang on it like clouds. The giant’s wife is a sweet little old lady (maybe she’s really his grandma). But the giant is fabulous: it’s Hesed, the musician, again, in a floppy hat stuffed with balloons. He’s sort of an incarnation of Oliver Hardy in his guise of a cook in Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. He seems about to go into a dangerous rage at any moment, but he’s easily pacified. He’s a big baby. He slurps and chomps his food with sidesplitting bad manners. The first time we see him eat, he nearly has a fit because he can’t find his spoon. The second time, he can’t be bothered with a spoon and just gobbles noisily from the bowl. He’s a toughie, but so vulnerable that when he dozes, a touch of Jack’s finger will set him lightly spinning. And when he crashes down at the end, all we see is his balloon-stuffed hat sailing over the backdrop.
Ondeko-za: Fighting with the Drum
For many centuries, the island of Sado, like Devil’s Island, was a place of exile. Isolated in the Sea of Japan, three hours from Niigata on the mainland of Northern Honshu, Sado is a small island: mountain ranged with a flat valley between. There’s no railroad, no heavy industry; it’s an island of farming and fishing. Winters are severe, the seas are rough, winds off the sea are fierce. In an old grammar school, empty since the ‘60’s, when Japan’s sudden economic growth led to the abandonment of rural communities, the Ondeko-Za, a community of 17 young men and women, mostly in their early twenties, live a monastic life. Their days start at 5 a.m. with a routine six-mile run. They return to prepare a meal, do household chores in teams, train rigorously in dancing and drumming and practice on other instruments, run more (up to 18 miles a day in any weather, no matter how beastly), and go to bed early. (I watch the faces in a 1975 film of the group: blank, infant faces or faces frenzied with effort. Bodies straining to tighten the cords on flattish drums. Bodies at the last gasp coming in from a marathon run to vent themselves with a final barrage of beats on a big drum before staggering into the arms of a comrade or collapsing on the ground.) There’s little free time. But Japanese and international tours take them away occasionally. They came to America for the first time in 1975 to run in the Boston marathon, performed at Tanglewood in 1976, and went on tour to Europe. Now they’re back, performing an austere program of dances and music of ancient, rural Japan at the Beacon Theatre through May 13. (Two young men play the shamisen, adjusting the tuning of the three strings as they play. It has the twangy bite of a banjo. They kneel nearly motionless as possible; their faces are blank with concentration. They barely seem to breathe. One’s face glows red with intensity. Both men’s jaws set tighter as the playing goes on and on.) I knew that Tagayasu Den, founder of Ondeko-za, and his translator, Ken Kochi, weren’t going to turn up in loincloths in a fancy apartment house in Lincoln Square, though I’d have been pleased if they had. Den, a genial 47-year-old man who seems obsessed with his (unremarkably) small size, was in the usual dark-blue Japanese businessman’s suit; Kochi, and Angelino and sometime member of Ondeko-Za, seemed casually at home in a creamy Cardin number. He carried himself with that easy California air of someone who has no shadows in his life. Den says that from the time he was 15, he learned to hate America. “When I was growing up,” he says, I had a dream to go to New York to conquer it.” From the little English I can hear in his conversation before it’s translated, I’m getting a picture of King Kong. In his dream Den set the Japanese flag flying from the top of the Empire State Building. After the Japanese defeat at the end of World War II, Den was overwhelmed by the idea of the power and massiveness of American industry. While he was a first-year student in college, interested in Chinese literature, he became involved in radical campus demonstrations against the American occupation. That was the time of our “police action in Korea. Pursued by the government for his activities, Den began to wander around Japan. Eventually, he came to live in Sado, where he was given shelter by the son of General Homma (who had defeated MacArthur in the Philippines). But any island can feel like a trap. “The desire to leave, leave, leave became my source of energy to do something.” Den talks about what sounds to me like a mythical America, Superman’s America, maybe, or Gary Cooper’s. While we’re worrying abut inflation, oil prices, budget deficits, unemployment, old people, the cost of health care...he talks of America’s massive industrial power, our cultural inundation of Japan, American and imitation-American music. I think of Toyotas, Fujikas, Mitsubishi, sushi, and the yen. In any case, Den seems to have been awed by a mighty America inseparable from the America of the American movies e grew up with. Out of touch and impotent, disgusted with what he judged the flabbiness of Japanese intellectuals, he remained pitted against us, the enemy, the usurpers of his country and despoilers of his culture. But the sound of a primitive drum became a key for him. He began to feel in himself the power of the small: possibilities for growth, the strength that having nothing - no real home to defend, no acquisitive goal - can give. (Today, a poster of Charlie Chaplin as the indomitable little tramp hangs in Ondeko-za’s schoolhouse.) Stirred by the power and energy of the drum, he learned to play. The connotations of “play” don’t apply to the traditional Japanese drum in its various forms. It’s more a religious/ritual object than a musical instrument. The three black signs, like fat commas radiating from a common center, symbolize the goddess of thunder. “We see a goddess in the dark hollow of the drum. To beat it,” says Den, “is to make the goddess come out.” “Drums,” Koch says, “traditionally have a strong connection to death. They are played rarely, and the experience is meant to be tremendous.” He tells a story to illustrate their gravity and sacred character: there were two villages with a stream between. One year, there was a drought. If the villages shared the water, neither would have enough to survive, so it was decided that one village would have it all and the other none. The best drummer from each village was chosen. Whoever could drum the longest would win, and his village - crops, people - would live. “The best drummers,” Kochi says, “never lived to old age.” In performance, in a piece called “Monochrome,” seven men start out playing small, shallow drums, Ko-daiko. They build the sound from the faintest rattle to a terrible, penetrating crescendo that recedes and builds again Two men move to play a big drum mounted on a sort of cradle;: they answer each other with these deeper sounds. The volume of the drumming is not the sort that seems to wound your ears: it creates an intense throbbing in the space. It forces you to blink. It vibrates against your chest, shivers overs your cheeks. You feel it in the diaphragm. in the belly, against your spine. When two drummers bash the mammoth, thundering Oni drum in the final piece, the building shakes. Afterwards, three drummers, with stout, barrel-like drums that rest in stands which tilt them slightly upwards, half-lie, half-sit on the floor, as if coming just part-way up in a sit-up. They grip the drums with their thighs or knees, lean in toward them, then lean away, and attack the drumheads with short clubs. In the film, men using these same drums were sprinkled among the rocky slabs that slat into the violent surf of the Sado coast and beat them against the terrible din of the sea. This isn’t playing; this must be what Den called “fighting with the drum.” The people who initially came together to form Ondeko-za in 1970 were essentially dropouts, young people from the ciy who felt themselves being crushed by modern life, people not so different from Den 20 years before, but who were now against the Vietnam war, who objected to participation in the armed forces, people who wanted to travel who didn’t want to work, people who came together because they were looking for something. Some of this people, who had never run, who didn’t play any instruments, stayed and became the core of Ondeko-za. (“Students who are no match for the political establishment,” says Den, “go into the arts; because they can’t be alone, they create communes.”) Den began to teach them, and the exertion and exhilaration of drumming welded them together. The marathon running seems to have just “happened.” They tried to run a marathon one New Year’s. It turned out that most people couldn’t even run three or four kilometers. Then running began to be integrated into their training. “Running and drumming have nothing to do with each other technically, “ says Kochi. “Of course, there are connections - breath rhythms, rhythms of running, rhythms of music, developing stamina, mental discipline, mental rhythms. When you come to a stage performance, and you want to put it all out for an audience, you know you have it.” While emphasizing the strenuousness of their discipline, Den and Kochi seem to soft-pedal the formality of Ondeko-za’s communal structure. heir publicity calls them “spartan” and “rigidly celibate.” Is celibacy a policy? What’s the concept behind it? What are the rules? Den says there are none. If sex is generally frowned on in any tight group, I’m thinking, rules or no rules, that’s a pretty strong restriction. Den answers with what may be an evasion or an oblique, personal response; “the drum is a female object, the drumsticks are phallic...Depending on a man’s relationship to woman, he can pay very quietly and slowly, or vigorously...” But he insists, there is no restriction, there are no rules. Basically the group is just “shy.” “Ondeko-za is a working group,” Kochadds. There are no real cliques. It doesn’t encourage people o get together either. Most people’s intimate friends are outside the group, from their past lives. “People ask, ‘Is it religious? Is it spiritual’” says Kochi. “Well, yes and no. There is no Buddhism, no Zen, no karate...” But there must be something that the group feels together that keeps them together. I recall someone in the film saying, “We feel we have got hold of something, but we all have different ideas of what it is...” For himself, Kochi says, “There’s the energy that you feel when you play the drum yourself or when you run a marathon. It doesn’t kill you. It’s like - you come back from a long run and you’re feeling stronger than before And after running 25 kilometers, running in the rain, sweating, you get into a hot bath - that bath is so meaningful. The rigid discipline tears you apart, but it simplifies a lot of thinking, simplifies a lot of daily routines.” “For me,” he says, “our performance is not about Japanese folk festivals, not about the drum, not even about music, but more about how one chooses to live one’s life.” Kohoro. The word pulses through Den’s conversation. Kokoro. Heart. He quotes Issac Stern” “Music creates the heart.” The character that designates the goddess Kannon, the goddess of mercy, Den explains, breaks down into “to see sound,” to experience, to understand sound. And Ondeko-za (runners who have no home, no goal, no place to return to, as Den thinks of them) seems to be on a sort of mission into the heart of the American/Western mechanical monster to bring a wordless message: “the raw, original sound of 2000 years.” To help us see within sound the image of Kannon - its spiritual quality.
Respect for the Madman
August 14
In early evening, between the arch and the fountain in Washington Square, Gilyak Amagasaki puts down a small suitcase, two cloth bundles, and draws a 20-foot circle in chalk. A friend begins to sweep it with a short, yellow broom, giving particular care to the spaces between those hexagonal cement tiles. Amagasaki sits cross-legged on a reed mat; he puts on a red kimono, a short white shift over that, and a coarse net to keep his shoulder-length hair out of the way while he makes up. Briskly, he smears his face with white grease, blends in dots of red. He makes his eyelids pale blue, reddens his lips. That’s it. He loosens his hair from the net. A crowd has gathered. One guy keeps telling people to sit down. Somebody floats nearby, offering loose joints in a mumble. Amagasaki unbundles a sort of flat peasant headdress which he ties in front of his chin. He unfurls a cloth sign in Japanese, and pivoting bit by bit in about a dozen different directions, announces the name of the first piece, Jongara Ichidari, each time. He starts a tape of Japanese folk music. With the mat rolled under his arm, a sort of crude, mock shamisen slung over his shoulder, and his eyes slitted closed like a blind musician, he begins a rhythmic trek around the circle. When he sits, he mimes playing the instrument, and strikes it with a big pick in his fist. The head of the “shamisen” is covered with layers of red cloth; they’re torn and ragged. Amagasaki leans over the instrument, raises it into the air, wails sometimes. As the piece continues, he grows more distressed, more pleading. He sucks in his lips, wrinkles up his face - as if his face were first one mask, then another. There’s pain beneath the servile smile, always an expression beneath the expression of the surface. His strange, long face seems almost concave; his body is cruelly skinny. My eyes keeps being drawn to a bruise on his hip. Each of his dances - except a rather high-spirited, but unfocused one where he pulls in some members of the audience - gets more furious as it goes on. “He jumps in the fountain,” says an enthusiastic voice behind me in a moment between dances. “Comes out swinging these beads, man. Forget it!” The audience respects Amagasaki’s commitment, his ruthlessness with himself. It’s like the respect given a spirit-crazed madman in a primitive society. In Nenriki, he starts in a crouch, straightens up, but he can’t make it. He curves back down, then swoops his arms and torso in lose waves. As it grows wilder, he runs aggressively toward the audience, again and again to the same spot. He’s just in front of me; against the light sky, I see that in a gesture of torment, he has pulled some hair out of his head. It’s hard to grasp, though, why one particular action succeeds another; the motives seem to shift without a clue. Or maybe he doesn’t mean to be the same person at all from one section to the next. In Nenbutsu Jongara, I think of him, at first, as a toothless old nun. He makes an unsteady trek around the circle, hunched and bent-legged, leaning on a cane as he jabs each foot down. He tilts his weight far forward. Then, sitting on a mat, he tugs on his necklace - a sort of Japanese rosary of wooden prayer beads and silk tassels - and keeps shifting position, Kneeling on his shins, he jumps and lands again to face one edge of the mat, then another, then another. Finally, he rolls off, whirls to collapse on the ground in the beginning of a remorseless fit. He flops, smacks the ground, pushes himself along on his back. Then he bursts through the crowd - and lots of people follow - to the fountain. He runs back. Sopping wet, he continues to roll and thrash. Two photographers are tracking him in the circle. He smashes the beads against the cement and some of them break. He beats himself on the chest, smacks himself on the thighs and ribs. He slips on the wet tiles. A woman from the audience steps into the circle to pick up some of the broken beads so he won’t hurt his feet on them. There’s the sound of wind on the tape. He finishes in a sort of crouch, wrings the rosary in his hands, collapses with his arms thrust up behind him like a prisoner.
In Washington Square Park (evenings from the end of June through July).
In early evening, between the arch and the fountain in Washington Square, Gilyak Amagasaki puts down a small suitcase, two cloth bundles, and draws a 20-foot circle in chalk. A friend begins to sweep it with a short, yellow broom, giving particular care to the spaces between those hexagonal cement tiles. Amagasaki sits cross-legged on a reed mat; he puts on a red kimono, a short white shift over that, and a coarse net to keep his shoulder-length hair out of the way while he makes up. Briskly, he smears his face with white grease, blends in dots of red. He makes his eyelids pale blue, reddens his lips. That’s it. He loosens his hair from the net. A crowd has gathered. One guy keeps telling people to sit down. Somebody floats nearby, offering loose joints in a mumble. Amagasaki unbundles a sort of flat peasant headdress which he ties in front of his chin. He unfurls a cloth sign in Japanese, and pivoting bit by bit in about a dozen different directions, announces the name of the first piece, Jongara Ichidari, each time. He starts a tape of Japanese folk music. With the mat rolled under his arm, a sort of crude, mock shamisen slung over his shoulder, and his eyes slitted closed like a blind musician, he begins a rhythmic trek around the circle. When he sits, he mimes playing the instrument, and strikes it with a big pick in his fist. The head of the “shamisen” is covered with layers of red cloth; they’re torn and ragged. Amagasaki leans over the instrument, raises it into the air, wails sometimes. As the piece continues, he grows more distressed, more pleading. He sucks in his lips, wrinkles up his face - as if his face were first one mask, then another. There’s pain beneath the servile smile, always an expression beneath the expression of the surface. His strange, long face seems almost concave; his body is cruelly skinny. My eyes keeps being drawn to a bruise on his hip. Each of his dances - except a rather high-spirited, but unfocused one where he pulls in some members of the audience - gets more furious as it goes on. “He jumps in the fountain,” says an enthusiastic voice behind me in a moment between dances. “Comes out swinging these beads, man. Forget it!” The audience respects Amagasaki’s commitment, his ruthlessness with himself. It’s like the respect given a spirit-crazed madman in a primitive society. In Nenriki, he starts in a crouch, straightens up, but he can’t make it. He curves back down, then swoops his arms and torso in lose waves. As it grows wilder, he runs aggressively toward the audience, again and again to the same spot. He’s just in front of me; against the light sky, I see that in a gesture of torment, he has pulled some hair out of his head. It’s hard to grasp, though, why one particular action succeeds another; the motives seem to shift without a clue. Or maybe he doesn’t mean to be the same person at all from one section to the next. In Nenbutsu Jongara, I think of him, at first, as a toothless old nun. He makes an unsteady trek around the circle, hunched and bent-legged, leaning on a cane as he jabs each foot down. He tilts his weight far forward. Then, sitting on a mat, he tugs on his necklace - a sort of Japanese rosary of wooden prayer beads and silk tassels - and keeps shifting position, Kneeling on his shins, he jumps and lands again to face one edge of the mat, then another, then another. Finally, he rolls off, whirls to collapse on the ground in the beginning of a remorseless fit. He flops, smacks the ground, pushes himself along on his back. Then he bursts through the crowd - and lots of people follow - to the fountain. He runs back. Sopping wet, he continues to roll and thrash. Two photographers are tracking him in the circle. He smashes the beads against the cement and some of them break. He beats himself on the chest, smacks himself on the thighs and ribs. He slips on the wet tiles. A woman from the audience steps into the circle to pick up some of the broken beads so he won’t hurt his feet on them. There’s the sound of wind on the tape. He finishes in a sort of crouch, wrings the rosary in his hands, collapses with his arms thrust up behind him like a prisoner.
In Washington Square Park (evenings from the end of June through July).
Snake in the Glass
January 9
You don’t have to do anything special to get people interested in snakes. So though the American Museum of Natural History’s new Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians seems rather academic at first glance, no one is put off, and a wealth of detailed information is made available in a very visual and lucid format. On a Sunday afternoon I could hardly get near the exhibition cases, so I returned on a quieter weekday. I was naturally struck first by the large exhibits. One of a group of three wicked-looking Komodo Dragons from Indonesia (between eight and 10 feet long) is beginning to feed on a freshly killed wild boar. Huge Leatherback sea turtles lay their eggs on a sandy beach. A 25-foot reticulated python on a fallen tree is about to strike a jungle fowl by a pool of water. “Look!” commands a little kid with a hoarse voice. “A rooster!” Then he’s on to the next case, eyeing a lizard and a small snaked he takes for an earthworm. His mind flicks back and he asks his mother, “Do you have to stay away from pythons?” I’m still checking out that python exhibit. I see tadpoles in the pool, but I’m searching for a pair of Malaysian horned frogs that are supposed to be in there somewhere, One’s camouflaged on a mat of dead leaves, the other’s in the middle of a heap of rocks. Better than looking for Ninas in a Hirschfeld cartoon. Most of the displays offer much more than the satisfaction of finding and identifying. There are exhibits on size and longevity, on nesting, hatching, and birth, on parental care, on how a rattlesnake’s rattle develops, how snakes slough their skins and turtles their shells. There are turtle, python, alligator, and lizard skeletons, and models examining the internal anatomy of reptiles and amphibians. The snake’s slender lung seems to run down half the length of its body. A pair of python skulls are used to demonstrate how a snake can swallow prey larger than itself. The left at the right sides of the lower jaws are not joined. I’m fascinated, and vaguely appalled, but the explanation of how the jaws “walk” over the prey. “While teeth n one side grip and pull the prey backward, the jaws on the other side slip forward to obtain a new grip.” Other displays within the cases deal with intimidation behavior and defenses like spines and disposable tails. There are half a dozen snakes and lizards in a display on protective coloration. A fer-de-lance lies on a bed of leaves. A giant gray gecko I had to move away from to notice sits flatly along a branch. With amphibians, the information is equally wide-ranging, from illustrations of larval development and metamorphosis, to explanations of how frogs call, to nesting habits and prey. Some giant amphibians, like a five-foot Japanese salamander, or the foot-long Goliath frog of Africa, with their odd, rubbery-looking bodies, suggest the sci-fi aftermath of atomic war, when cockroaches and critters like this take over. Oddities so often make the deepest impressions - like those giants, or the dull-black, spade-headed Surinam toad (the museum’s model is about three times larger than the real thing). Its eggs stick to the mother’s back “where they sink in, forming pits, in which the embryos grow until the froglets emerge in the water some 80 to 100 days later.” Like some fantasy from a medieval bestiary, the young pop miraculously, and rather horribly, out of holes in the toad’s back.
You don’t have to do anything special to get people interested in snakes. So though the American Museum of Natural History’s new Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians seems rather academic at first glance, no one is put off, and a wealth of detailed information is made available in a very visual and lucid format. On a Sunday afternoon I could hardly get near the exhibition cases, so I returned on a quieter weekday. I was naturally struck first by the large exhibits. One of a group of three wicked-looking Komodo Dragons from Indonesia (between eight and 10 feet long) is beginning to feed on a freshly killed wild boar. Huge Leatherback sea turtles lay their eggs on a sandy beach. A 25-foot reticulated python on a fallen tree is about to strike a jungle fowl by a pool of water. “Look!” commands a little kid with a hoarse voice. “A rooster!” Then he’s on to the next case, eyeing a lizard and a small snaked he takes for an earthworm. His mind flicks back and he asks his mother, “Do you have to stay away from pythons?” I’m still checking out that python exhibit. I see tadpoles in the pool, but I’m searching for a pair of Malaysian horned frogs that are supposed to be in there somewhere, One’s camouflaged on a mat of dead leaves, the other’s in the middle of a heap of rocks. Better than looking for Ninas in a Hirschfeld cartoon. Most of the displays offer much more than the satisfaction of finding and identifying. There are exhibits on size and longevity, on nesting, hatching, and birth, on parental care, on how a rattlesnake’s rattle develops, how snakes slough their skins and turtles their shells. There are turtle, python, alligator, and lizard skeletons, and models examining the internal anatomy of reptiles and amphibians. The snake’s slender lung seems to run down half the length of its body. A pair of python skulls are used to demonstrate how a snake can swallow prey larger than itself. The left at the right sides of the lower jaws are not joined. I’m fascinated, and vaguely appalled, but the explanation of how the jaws “walk” over the prey. “While teeth n one side grip and pull the prey backward, the jaws on the other side slip forward to obtain a new grip.” Other displays within the cases deal with intimidation behavior and defenses like spines and disposable tails. There are half a dozen snakes and lizards in a display on protective coloration. A fer-de-lance lies on a bed of leaves. A giant gray gecko I had to move away from to notice sits flatly along a branch. With amphibians, the information is equally wide-ranging, from illustrations of larval development and metamorphosis, to explanations of how frogs call, to nesting habits and prey. Some giant amphibians, like a five-foot Japanese salamander, or the foot-long Goliath frog of Africa, with their odd, rubbery-looking bodies, suggest the sci-fi aftermath of atomic war, when cockroaches and critters like this take over. Oddities so often make the deepest impressions - like those giants, or the dull-black, spade-headed Surinam toad (the museum’s model is about three times larger than the real thing). Its eggs stick to the mother’s back “where they sink in, forming pits, in which the embryos grow until the froglets emerge in the water some 80 to 100 days later.” Like some fantasy from a medieval bestiary, the young pop miraculously, and rather horribly, out of holes in the toad’s back.
Snap, Crackle, Pop-Up
January 30
I know I haven’t seen a pop-up book nearly so detailed and gorgeous as Nicola Bayler’s Puss in Boots (Greenwillow, $6.95) since I was a child. Probably not then either. The mechanism that enables something crushed between pages to erect when those pages are opened continues to fascinate until you manage to wear and tear the pop-ups from the pages. But the complexity of Bayley’s pop-ups is particularly intriguing. They don’t simply stand up but are 3D structures with backs and sides as well as fronts. The paintings, glowing with the rich enamel colors of medieval cloisonne (fading to pastels in the distance), are lavishly detailed. The story itself (retold by Christopher Logue), is printed across three spreads, starting on what are really the end papers. There are four pop-up spreads in all - the final two the most elaborate. In the third pop-up, Puss comes upon the barbaric, green-faced, fangy ogre in his castle, sprawled like a sultan among pillows, while in the foreground, we’re shown the transformations Puss tricks the ogre into: from lion into mouse. A spiraling vault of water leaps from lion on one side to mouse on the other, with a fountain between that that roots the images to the castle itself. Not the sort of picture that advances the plot or makes anything clear - you’ve got to know what’s going on for it to make any sense. Each of these pop-up spreads, even when it simply depicts one event in the story (unlike this one which incorporates several), creates a sense of a static, unending moment in a comfortable, even luscious world. This quality is a hallmark of Bayley’s work. In another painting, we find a dragonfly among a stand of yellow iris,a squirrel and nesting birds in the white oak from behind which Puss hails the king and his daughter as they ride by in a coach which is designed as part swan, part assemblage of scallop shells. The horses drawing it are caparisoned with trappings that look like great gold wings, and their blinders are shaped like shells. Part of the satisfyingly placid, eternal quality of these pages comes from the fact that there’s so much to absorb in each one. But they’re also quite safely without emotion without danger. Puss in Boots is a pretty benign story anyway. The expressions of the characters (when they have expressions), are of no more interest or import than anything else in the design. Bayley has illustrated two other books published here, The Tyger Voyage, written by Richard Adams (Knopf, $6.95), and Nicola Bayley’s Book of Nursery Rhymes (Knopf, $4.95). Nursery Rhymes is full of cameos illustrating a line or a stanza. In Goosey, goosey, gander,” we see the goose (or gander), flapping its wings as someone in a robe, striped pajama bottoms, and red slippers, falls backwards from the landing. My lady’s fan, necklace, powder box and puff are scattered on the floor. Makes you wonder what’s going on. So you look for the story half-secreted in the nonsensical rhyme. And in a corner of the mirror, you glimpse the lady, aghast, her hand to her mouth. It’s surprising to discover something dramatic happening in any of these pictures. Most just depict the characters in a general situation. A cow floats in the sky as the cat fiddles dreamily. “Doctor Foster went to Gloucester” is a full-page egg-shaped cameo. We see only his stout middle; he’s in striped pants and tailcoat, with an umbrella hiding his head, and up to his hips in a placid flood that’s engulfed the entire city. The Tyger Voyage goes from the cozy clutter of Victorian England, to a sea voyage, volcanic eruption, a gypsy camp, back to a train station, a state dinner and the parlor at home. Adams’s rhymed text is quaintly pleasant and dull: you’ll invent a more interesting plot from any one of the illustrations. You can have no fear for the doughy tiger brothers, sailing off in their cheerful blue vessel, as the narrator’s (human) family and the boys tiger mama, wrapped in a shawl, wave goodbye from the jetty. When the boat is caught in a crashing lightning storm, with the sea slate gray and foaming with white crests, on tiger stands at the helm and the other cowers n the cabin. But nothing so beautiful and so carefully organized can be frightening.
I know I haven’t seen a pop-up book nearly so detailed and gorgeous as Nicola Bayler’s Puss in Boots (Greenwillow, $6.95) since I was a child. Probably not then either. The mechanism that enables something crushed between pages to erect when those pages are opened continues to fascinate until you manage to wear and tear the pop-ups from the pages. But the complexity of Bayley’s pop-ups is particularly intriguing. They don’t simply stand up but are 3D structures with backs and sides as well as fronts. The paintings, glowing with the rich enamel colors of medieval cloisonne (fading to pastels in the distance), are lavishly detailed. The story itself (retold by Christopher Logue), is printed across three spreads, starting on what are really the end papers. There are four pop-up spreads in all - the final two the most elaborate. In the third pop-up, Puss comes upon the barbaric, green-faced, fangy ogre in his castle, sprawled like a sultan among pillows, while in the foreground, we’re shown the transformations Puss tricks the ogre into: from lion into mouse. A spiraling vault of water leaps from lion on one side to mouse on the other, with a fountain between that that roots the images to the castle itself. Not the sort of picture that advances the plot or makes anything clear - you’ve got to know what’s going on for it to make any sense. Each of these pop-up spreads, even when it simply depicts one event in the story (unlike this one which incorporates several), creates a sense of a static, unending moment in a comfortable, even luscious world. This quality is a hallmark of Bayley’s work. In another painting, we find a dragonfly among a stand of yellow iris,a squirrel and nesting birds in the white oak from behind which Puss hails the king and his daughter as they ride by in a coach which is designed as part swan, part assemblage of scallop shells. The horses drawing it are caparisoned with trappings that look like great gold wings, and their blinders are shaped like shells. Part of the satisfyingly placid, eternal quality of these pages comes from the fact that there’s so much to absorb in each one. But they’re also quite safely without emotion without danger. Puss in Boots is a pretty benign story anyway. The expressions of the characters (when they have expressions), are of no more interest or import than anything else in the design. Bayley has illustrated two other books published here, The Tyger Voyage, written by Richard Adams (Knopf, $6.95), and Nicola Bayley’s Book of Nursery Rhymes (Knopf, $4.95). Nursery Rhymes is full of cameos illustrating a line or a stanza. In Goosey, goosey, gander,” we see the goose (or gander), flapping its wings as someone in a robe, striped pajama bottoms, and red slippers, falls backwards from the landing. My lady’s fan, necklace, powder box and puff are scattered on the floor. Makes you wonder what’s going on. So you look for the story half-secreted in the nonsensical rhyme. And in a corner of the mirror, you glimpse the lady, aghast, her hand to her mouth. It’s surprising to discover something dramatic happening in any of these pictures. Most just depict the characters in a general situation. A cow floats in the sky as the cat fiddles dreamily. “Doctor Foster went to Gloucester” is a full-page egg-shaped cameo. We see only his stout middle; he’s in striped pants and tailcoat, with an umbrella hiding his head, and up to his hips in a placid flood that’s engulfed the entire city. The Tyger Voyage goes from the cozy clutter of Victorian England, to a sea voyage, volcanic eruption, a gypsy camp, back to a train station, a state dinner and the parlor at home. Adams’s rhymed text is quaintly pleasant and dull: you’ll invent a more interesting plot from any one of the illustrations. You can have no fear for the doughy tiger brothers, sailing off in their cheerful blue vessel, as the narrator’s (human) family and the boys tiger mama, wrapped in a shawl, wave goodbye from the jetty. When the boat is caught in a crashing lightning storm, with the sea slate gray and foaming with white crests, on tiger stands at the helm and the other cowers n the cabin. But nothing so beautiful and so carefully organized can be frightening.
Staying Within the Mystery
February 27
For 11 years, as long as Diane Wolkstein has been telling stories, adults have been listening. When she told stories to children years ago in Craig Park in Harlem, she says, “I would see the faces of the adults, and they would be completely gone. Sometimes the children would act up., but the adults wouldn’t notice because they’d completely disappeared in the story.” As years went by, she came to feel that adults needed stories as much, or more, than children. “From children, you get fun and good times...but from adults, you get silence.” On Tuesday evenings this month, at the Open Eye loft, Diane has been telling long stories to adults. She removes the plain glasses she usually wears. Standing, modestly, alone in front of everyone, she closes her eyes for a moment. Her face seems melancholy. Then she focuses, takes everything in. When she speaks, her voice is light and precisely inflected. She;s dead serious. The first evening she told four stories,one of them, “Layla and Majnun,” a 45-minute Persian romance from the 12th-century was an unswerving tale of two lovers who find each other as children, and, though kept apart, abandon themselves utterly and insistently to their love. Diance worked on it for a month, living with it, reading Persian history, Persian poems, Arabic poems. “Id hear the words in my drams and I’d wake up and I’d be in the middle of the story. “I once read a very interesting book about storytelling among the Limba-speaking people in Africa,” she says. “It described three different storytellers: one of them was a friend of the king and he told stories which maintained social order ad made people content with what they had. The second was a blacksmith who was doing well, ad he told stories mostly about the differences between the social order and himself. And the third storyteller was a poor man who had to go to the factories. He always told stories of revolt. I know that at all times I’m telling stories because of who I am, and who I am keeps changing. The stories are mine, but I believe they’re related to other people very deeply. I’m like Majnun who stood up in the classroom and shouted ‘Layla,’ the name of his beloved. That’s how I feel inside. Everything seems to be askew, but no one is saying what the real truth is. “Once I went to a conference in New Jersey on techniques of teaching. All these educators had gathered together and the speaker went on and on, and he was so boring people were dying. I stood up and interrupted him - it was just horrendous. Everyone got crazed. But I found it intolerable to be in a position in which the lie is being borne by everyone there. It’s easier to tell stories, which contain he truth, than to stand up[ and take upon myself the shame and terror that comes after you outrage people. “And storytelling is so beautiful,” she says. Her voice becomes very quiet. “Sometimes I think I’ll die for what’s beautiful. I’ll throw myself in the lake.” She laughs, but she mans it. “You have these exquisite images which have power of their own to pull you. They’re like rivets, and they give you strength.” She quotes a passage from a Celtic myth she’s telling, speaking slowly, isolating each image: “Beside the largest tree in the forest is a fountain. Next to the fountain is a marble slab and on the marble slab is a silver bowl fastened to a silver chain. And if you take the silver bowl and dip it in the fountain and pour the water on the marble slab, there will be a peal of thunder which will shake heaven and earth and a great cold hailstorm will come down. Every leaf on the tree will be removed...” She’s got me transfixed. I think we’re both a little giddy. When she first started telling stories, he was able to tell a one- or a five-minute story; in a few years she could handle a 10-minute story that still made a single point. But when you have a long story, “you have to stretch what’s taking place in the inner world.” As her capacity for concentration and relationship with an audience grew, she became able “to stay within the mystery for a longer and longer period.” She wanted to tell really long stories, knew she could do it,and knew that it had to be done with adults. “That first night she tells me, “in the audience there was one child. She was eight years old. Her grandmother called me and asked if she could bring her because she couldn’t get home because of a blizzard and the grandmother couldn’t come unless she brought the child. I said yes...while I was telling the story, I could see that the ay the little girl absorbed it was not the same as everyone else. When I looked at her, I immediately began to readjust the story for her, and I had to force myself not to look at her at all. “When you look at people as a storyteller - it’s like being a palm reader - you know them, and you adjust the story for where they are at that moment. For children, you go a little slower, you adjust it to their understanding. Each individual adult has a different psyche, but there’’s such a jump between a child’s and an adult’s. And this was such a fragile story...” “We think that children are growing,” se says, “and we forget that we’re growing. “Sometimes I tell a story I don’t mean to tell. Something pulls me to tell it because I think there might be someone who needs to hear it Like in the beginning of ‘Layla and Majnun’, there’s a chieftain ‘who has everything but that which he wants most.’ There’s always something in the nature of living that you don’t have. You can’t get in contact with it. You don’t know what it is. But whatever the story is, it’s true, it will hit yu and begin to release it...” Some stories really get to you, and others don’t. The second story Diane told that night, “The Red Lion,” abut a prince who flees from the lion he fears, affected me east, because I understood it best. The stories I remember (though I may forget nearly everything about them, the characters as well as what happened) leave me bewildered, furious, in a state of assent and incomprehension. “The point of a story,” she says, “is that it’s half-buried.” Beyond the grasp of intellect. It’s just that quality of a story refusing to come up out of the ground completely that forces you down into trying to pul it up, grapple with it, and wrest it into consciousness. “What happens in a story when it’s really working,” she ays, “is that you have this one psyche who’s struggling, usually with its deepest part. So your psyche begins, unknown to you, to struggle too.” You’re absorbed, you participate. A story is so simple: just one voice. There’s nothing happening except the one voice speaking to you, telling you, on some level, what you need to hear. And in your mind’s eye you see it - your version, your vision - and somewhere in yourself you accomplish it. “Usually the character starts out with you. You know, he’s asking the question: Why is the world constructed this way? He gets the intellectual answer and he refuses the answer. Which is the situation we’re all in. We don’t know why, and we’re told that’s the way it has to be. But he persists. In the listening or the telling, the unpredictable thing is how, or if, a story works. “It’s going to come or it’s not going to come, and you can’t buy it,” says Diane. “When I was collecting stories in Haiti, the longest and best story I got was ‘The Gizzard’. I went back the next year and tried to get another story from the same storyteller, but he wasn’t there. And I went back the following year and tried to get it and he wasn’t there. And the next year I went back again and, finally, he was there. I asked him if he would tell another story. He began, and he got confused, and he began again, and people said, ‘you’re not telling a story at all.’ And he just couldn’t. No mater how much you might offer - and I offered him a lot of money because he insisted on being paid a great deal because he knew I’d been looking for him for three years - it doesn’t make any difference. I’ve learned that about the whole process of storytelling - it’s either going to be there or it isn’t. And it’s not something you can do night after night. If you push it, it will disappear. Diane Wolkstein’s final session
at the Open Eye loft, 78 Fifth Avenue, will be on Tuesday February 28 at 8:30 p.m., when she’ll tell a single, long, mystic story from the Jewish tradition. Admission is $5; for reservations, call 688-3516.
For 11 years, as long as Diane Wolkstein has been telling stories, adults have been listening. When she told stories to children years ago in Craig Park in Harlem, she says, “I would see the faces of the adults, and they would be completely gone. Sometimes the children would act up., but the adults wouldn’t notice because they’d completely disappeared in the story.” As years went by, she came to feel that adults needed stories as much, or more, than children. “From children, you get fun and good times...but from adults, you get silence.” On Tuesday evenings this month, at the Open Eye loft, Diane has been telling long stories to adults. She removes the plain glasses she usually wears. Standing, modestly, alone in front of everyone, she closes her eyes for a moment. Her face seems melancholy. Then she focuses, takes everything in. When she speaks, her voice is light and precisely inflected. She;s dead serious. The first evening she told four stories,one of them, “Layla and Majnun,” a 45-minute Persian romance from the 12th-century was an unswerving tale of two lovers who find each other as children, and, though kept apart, abandon themselves utterly and insistently to their love. Diance worked on it for a month, living with it, reading Persian history, Persian poems, Arabic poems. “Id hear the words in my drams and I’d wake up and I’d be in the middle of the story. “I once read a very interesting book about storytelling among the Limba-speaking people in Africa,” she says. “It described three different storytellers: one of them was a friend of the king and he told stories which maintained social order ad made people content with what they had. The second was a blacksmith who was doing well, ad he told stories mostly about the differences between the social order and himself. And the third storyteller was a poor man who had to go to the factories. He always told stories of revolt. I know that at all times I’m telling stories because of who I am, and who I am keeps changing. The stories are mine, but I believe they’re related to other people very deeply. I’m like Majnun who stood up in the classroom and shouted ‘Layla,’ the name of his beloved. That’s how I feel inside. Everything seems to be askew, but no one is saying what the real truth is. “Once I went to a conference in New Jersey on techniques of teaching. All these educators had gathered together and the speaker went on and on, and he was so boring people were dying. I stood up and interrupted him - it was just horrendous. Everyone got crazed. But I found it intolerable to be in a position in which the lie is being borne by everyone there. It’s easier to tell stories, which contain he truth, than to stand up[ and take upon myself the shame and terror that comes after you outrage people. “And storytelling is so beautiful,” she says. Her voice becomes very quiet. “Sometimes I think I’ll die for what’s beautiful. I’ll throw myself in the lake.” She laughs, but she mans it. “You have these exquisite images which have power of their own to pull you. They’re like rivets, and they give you strength.” She quotes a passage from a Celtic myth she’s telling, speaking slowly, isolating each image: “Beside the largest tree in the forest is a fountain. Next to the fountain is a marble slab and on the marble slab is a silver bowl fastened to a silver chain. And if you take the silver bowl and dip it in the fountain and pour the water on the marble slab, there will be a peal of thunder which will shake heaven and earth and a great cold hailstorm will come down. Every leaf on the tree will be removed...” She’s got me transfixed. I think we’re both a little giddy. When she first started telling stories, he was able to tell a one- or a five-minute story; in a few years she could handle a 10-minute story that still made a single point. But when you have a long story, “you have to stretch what’s taking place in the inner world.” As her capacity for concentration and relationship with an audience grew, she became able “to stay within the mystery for a longer and longer period.” She wanted to tell really long stories, knew she could do it,and knew that it had to be done with adults. “That first night she tells me, “in the audience there was one child. She was eight years old. Her grandmother called me and asked if she could bring her because she couldn’t get home because of a blizzard and the grandmother couldn’t come unless she brought the child. I said yes...while I was telling the story, I could see that the ay the little girl absorbed it was not the same as everyone else. When I looked at her, I immediately began to readjust the story for her, and I had to force myself not to look at her at all. “When you look at people as a storyteller - it’s like being a palm reader - you know them, and you adjust the story for where they are at that moment. For children, you go a little slower, you adjust it to their understanding. Each individual adult has a different psyche, but there’’s such a jump between a child’s and an adult’s. And this was such a fragile story...” “We think that children are growing,” se says, “and we forget that we’re growing. “Sometimes I tell a story I don’t mean to tell. Something pulls me to tell it because I think there might be someone who needs to hear it Like in the beginning of ‘Layla and Majnun’, there’s a chieftain ‘who has everything but that which he wants most.’ There’s always something in the nature of living that you don’t have. You can’t get in contact with it. You don’t know what it is. But whatever the story is, it’s true, it will hit yu and begin to release it...” Some stories really get to you, and others don’t. The second story Diane told that night, “The Red Lion,” abut a prince who flees from the lion he fears, affected me east, because I understood it best. The stories I remember (though I may forget nearly everything about them, the characters as well as what happened) leave me bewildered, furious, in a state of assent and incomprehension. “The point of a story,” she says, “is that it’s half-buried.” Beyond the grasp of intellect. It’s just that quality of a story refusing to come up out of the ground completely that forces you down into trying to pul it up, grapple with it, and wrest it into consciousness. “What happens in a story when it’s really working,” she ays, “is that you have this one psyche who’s struggling, usually with its deepest part. So your psyche begins, unknown to you, to struggle too.” You’re absorbed, you participate. A story is so simple: just one voice. There’s nothing happening except the one voice speaking to you, telling you, on some level, what you need to hear. And in your mind’s eye you see it - your version, your vision - and somewhere in yourself you accomplish it. “Usually the character starts out with you. You know, he’s asking the question: Why is the world constructed this way? He gets the intellectual answer and he refuses the answer. Which is the situation we’re all in. We don’t know why, and we’re told that’s the way it has to be. But he persists. In the listening or the telling, the unpredictable thing is how, or if, a story works. “It’s going to come or it’s not going to come, and you can’t buy it,” says Diane. “When I was collecting stories in Haiti, the longest and best story I got was ‘The Gizzard’. I went back the next year and tried to get another story from the same storyteller, but he wasn’t there. And I went back the following year and tried to get it and he wasn’t there. And the next year I went back again and, finally, he was there. I asked him if he would tell another story. He began, and he got confused, and he began again, and people said, ‘you’re not telling a story at all.’ And he just couldn’t. No mater how much you might offer - and I offered him a lot of money because he insisted on being paid a great deal because he knew I’d been looking for him for three years - it doesn’t make any difference. I’ve learned that about the whole process of storytelling - it’s either going to be there or it isn’t. And it’s not something you can do night after night. If you push it, it will disappear. Diane Wolkstein’s final session
at the Open Eye loft, 78 Fifth Avenue, will be on Tuesday February 28 at 8:30 p.m., when she’ll tell a single, long, mystic story from the Jewish tradition. Admission is $5; for reservations, call 688-3516.
Wagoner Trusts His Behind
March 20
What a difference live music makes! Composer Michael Sahl is pounding out his Parlor Music as Dan Wagoner and Dancers course wildly through Dan’s Variations on Yonker Dingle [Yankee Doodle]. The piano’s bouncing up and down. I can tell because I’m leaning against it. The first time I watched Yankee Doodle, it stretched over two hours of rehearsal with time for corrections and clarifications of movement and spacing. This time, it seems to whiz by in abut three minutes. Actually, it’s about 15. Dan once heard Michael playing bits of Yankee Doodle while they were warming up for Taxi Dances (for which Michael played and did the arrangements). Later, Dan asked him to write some variations. “Michael’s music is very...muscular,” says Dan. “The feeling comes right into your muscles and makes certain things happen. You don’t know why you’re moving that way, but you realize it’s right. He pays a lot of syncopation in some of the variations. I love it, though it drives me mad. I can’t really figure it out - but I can do it. To try and analyze rhythmically what I’ve done is hard, but it provokes me.” The Yankee Doodle dance, which Dan is readying for performances on the Dance Umbrella series, through March 19, is chock full of vernacular, even jazzy feeling, flurries of precise but odd movement, quick shifts of weight. It starts with a solo for Heidi Bunting. Then everyone, spaced apart in the studio, does a single movement in a sequence broken by brief pauses; quickly the movements begin to pile up. Many of the steps bounce and smack smartly off the floor. JoAnn Fregaette-Jansen, who’s quick to smile and tease, is going like a little jackhammer. When it’s over, after a furious finale, everyone staggers off, gasping. Wrecked for a moment, hanging over, Heidi bursts out with a couple of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon’s great dog King yips. Laughing and panting and sounding well satisfied, another woman’s voice behind me says, “That’s a sonofabitch!” “I enjoy looking at movement,” Dan tells me later, “when there’s almost too much for the eye to take in. I like reversals of direction, sudden stops and starts, unexpected entrances. I like things that are intricate and pieced together. I like going around corners. If I like what’s going on on one part of the stage, then I know there’s probably something marvelous going on on the other side. And I like having to make a choice. I like all of that information coming at one time. It makes things jump around in my own head, gives me energy.” He wants to get something okayed by Michael. In the “square dance” section, in which a quilt is twisted smaller and smaller by four dancers, Dan thought the movement just wasn’t sharp enough when people counted it themselves. So, in rehearsals, he has been counting out loud, across the music on the tape. “In eights?” asks Michael. “Yes,” says Dan. “The music’s not in eights,” “Yes,” says Dan. “I know. But he doesn’t really count numbers anyway. What he counts is tata or ya da da da or tatum tum tum ta. “We should have a fast battle,” says Dan, pleased, as everyone is, with the extra push Michael’s piano playing gives them. “Then the victorious king and queen mount the dais and this whole piece could be divertissements. Like Dance of the WASPs. Danse Frantique. The two of them,” Dan goes on fantasizing, “could sit up there eating candy. And my father could sit up there, too, in his rocker, chewing tobacco and spitting...” A week before when I turned up at what I thought would be the middle of rehearsal, things weren’t so bright. Everyone is clustered around the entrance. Bob Clifford is changing out of his practice clothes, JoAnn, in a green leotard, a sweater round her hips, sprawls across a chair with her legs on the piano bench. Christopher Banner slouches in a nook between the piano and the wall. Dan is very discouraged because the other new piece he’s been working on isn’t working out as he envisioned. Several of the dancers have hurt themselves and s time has gotten impossibly short. Diann Sichel injured her ankle and has had to take things gently. Sally Hess fell down stairs and hurt her back. “I could have done it any time all year. I chose to do it last Tuesday.” A yellow scrim Dan wanted for the piece would be too expensive, even undyed, and Dan doesn’t feel he can afford to go further into debt. “It’s time,” he says glumly, “to review all the reasons for doing something else.” Sally, serious and erect, sits with her hands folded over a cup of take-out tea. She’s scrunching up her mouth, shaking her head “no.” No to Dan’s discouragement. Dan sits on the linoleum floor, near the heater, lower than anyone else. He swallows a couple of vitamins. His frustration and distress as even made him dubious about Yankee Doodle. He feels he can’t see it clearly enough, he’s not sure it adds up. “Those sections are so short,” he worries, “that it’s hard to be involved in it the way I like to be involved.” The dancers pooh-pooh him. He’s worried about the transitions. “It’s very different from what I thought It seems inconsequential.” The problem is, partly, that Dan is already in love with the other piece, Green Leaves and Gentle Differences. Tidying up Yankee Doodle is no longer his main interest. He wants to do something opposite. Something, as Sally says, hat scares him - something slow and open. “It’s very hard for me,” Dan says, “to sit down and be quiet.” Anyway, Dan schedules a day off before the next rehearsal and things begin to loosen up. JoAnn goes to the barre, does a few simple stretches and ports de bras, starts to fool around. Christopher “instructs” her. She hunches her shoulders, stiffens her arm,. caves in her chest, does terrible tendus. “The other way doesn’t work so great,” she remarks with a gleam in her eye. “Everybody ends up in the hospital anyway.” “No injuries,” Sally says firmly, going down in the elevator. “Thoughts create reality.” A few days later, I watch that section-by-section rehearsal of Yankee Doodle. Dan is in an open-neck, navy shirt, black tights, and leg warmers pulled up high on the thigh, which gives him the look of a pirate or one of the four musketeers. His corrections are technical, exact. He goes over a short, slithery section with Diann, who, because of her ankle, hadn’t been able to learn it before. She wiggles, he wiggles, giving just the right flavor to the grind. “I trust my behind,” he explains, slapping himself on the butt, and gives the hips another go round. Lots of spots in this sassy, lickety-split dance get cleaned up. Where Heidi whops Bob and shoves him in the wrong direction when she pushes off him. Where Sally and JoAnn come with in a hair of colliding. Dan goes over his own part in one section. He rebounds sharply from the floor. His arms are stiff, fingers spread, as if he were some fledgling trying desperately to fly. “Teetee ta tata,” I hear, under his breath. I’m seeing lots of flashes of birds in this piece (though they disappear in the runthrough a few days later). Sally and Christopher often suggest big, placidly soaring birds, beneficent eagles. In another part, Dan clarifies the quality of a movement for a puzzled, slightly worried-looking Sally by telling her she’s like “a heron walking through a big puddle.” In another section, he shows her how he wants her to sit on Christopher’s back. He seats himself delicately, brings his arms down as he twists front. Each time he demonstrates something new, or refines something that may be slipping away, he defines with his body exactly what he’s after, delicately but insistently, pressing out a precise shape and quality of feeling. Then he asks them to duplicate something he does with JoAnn. From a sort of social dance position, Sally has to throw her body neatly forward, in a block, under Christopher’s arm, and then he circles round and rights her. But it’s hard to control and, after each try, they seem to wheel about like a top just before it loses momentum and topples. But after they figure out what’s wrong, with JoAnn’s help, the enthusiastic Sally simply zooms forward, winds up nearly flat on her back on the floor instead of on a modest diagonal. “Sometimes,” Christopher says to me later, “Dan is just wanting to race ahead and we simply can’t do the movement quickly enough for him.” “When you start a piece,” Dan tells me, “you know the incredible energy it will take to get from the beginning to the end - and it’s frightening. Sometimes I can think of things in my head in the morning and I know they’ll work. Other times they just don’t work at all and I have to go over and over and over until I get tired and my muscles start to ache and I just can’t keep going...But the way dance happens is a muscular, visceral, pelvic thing, and you can only get at it by going through it and doing it. “You keep nudging your ideas along. Then you have to work things out on the dancers, with them. At the same time, you wish they’d go away so you could figure it all out. You don’t know why one thing is right and another isn’t, but you just make those decisions and act on them and hopefully it adds up to something. “It’s like making a cake or pancakes or bread or anything else. You can have a recipe of exactly what to do. In one hour, it will double in size. But in one hour, it hasn’t even begun to double in size. And then what do you do? Throw it out? You wait, you plunge in, you do something!” One thing that’s been intriguing to me in Dan’s dances over the past few years is the way they’ve been flowering with a strange, colorful, personal vocabulary of movements and gestures - like the quizzical alertness you might note in animals, the luxuriance of a dog’s yawn, the curious compulsive or unconscious habits of strangers, the lone gestural remnant in your memory of someone once familiar. Dan seems to honor these moves, these unique gestures infiltrating and enriching his dances, by leaving them alone, by not commenting. Innocent of their origin, they contain clues to alien dramas and identities. “If you dance in clear, open shapes,” he says, “it can be very general, very easy to hide behind. Some people can only look at the open, unthreatening positions they’ve come to expect and know. But I like the idea that any movement is possible and can be beautiful if it’s done with awareness and commitment I enjoy showing something very beautiful with something a little bit awkward or gauche or unexpected right alongside it...One’s imagination is limiting enough as it is. If you do the wildest things you can think of, if they delight you, then you trust them and you do them. I don’t mean that anything goes. But anything does go - after a tremendous amount of energy and effort and feeling and openness and trying and trying and trying and trying...”
What a difference live music makes! Composer Michael Sahl is pounding out his Parlor Music as Dan Wagoner and Dancers course wildly through Dan’s Variations on Yonker Dingle [Yankee Doodle]. The piano’s bouncing up and down. I can tell because I’m leaning against it. The first time I watched Yankee Doodle, it stretched over two hours of rehearsal with time for corrections and clarifications of movement and spacing. This time, it seems to whiz by in abut three minutes. Actually, it’s about 15. Dan once heard Michael playing bits of Yankee Doodle while they were warming up for Taxi Dances (for which Michael played and did the arrangements). Later, Dan asked him to write some variations. “Michael’s music is very...muscular,” says Dan. “The feeling comes right into your muscles and makes certain things happen. You don’t know why you’re moving that way, but you realize it’s right. He pays a lot of syncopation in some of the variations. I love it, though it drives me mad. I can’t really figure it out - but I can do it. To try and analyze rhythmically what I’ve done is hard, but it provokes me.” The Yankee Doodle dance, which Dan is readying for performances on the Dance Umbrella series, through March 19, is chock full of vernacular, even jazzy feeling, flurries of precise but odd movement, quick shifts of weight. It starts with a solo for Heidi Bunting. Then everyone, spaced apart in the studio, does a single movement in a sequence broken by brief pauses; quickly the movements begin to pile up. Many of the steps bounce and smack smartly off the floor. JoAnn Fregaette-Jansen, who’s quick to smile and tease, is going like a little jackhammer. When it’s over, after a furious finale, everyone staggers off, gasping. Wrecked for a moment, hanging over, Heidi bursts out with a couple of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon’s great dog King yips. Laughing and panting and sounding well satisfied, another woman’s voice behind me says, “That’s a sonofabitch!” “I enjoy looking at movement,” Dan tells me later, “when there’s almost too much for the eye to take in. I like reversals of direction, sudden stops and starts, unexpected entrances. I like things that are intricate and pieced together. I like going around corners. If I like what’s going on on one part of the stage, then I know there’s probably something marvelous going on on the other side. And I like having to make a choice. I like all of that information coming at one time. It makes things jump around in my own head, gives me energy.” He wants to get something okayed by Michael. In the “square dance” section, in which a quilt is twisted smaller and smaller by four dancers, Dan thought the movement just wasn’t sharp enough when people counted it themselves. So, in rehearsals, he has been counting out loud, across the music on the tape. “In eights?” asks Michael. “Yes,” says Dan. “The music’s not in eights,” “Yes,” says Dan. “I know. But he doesn’t really count numbers anyway. What he counts is tata or ya da da da or tatum tum tum ta. “We should have a fast battle,” says Dan, pleased, as everyone is, with the extra push Michael’s piano playing gives them. “Then the victorious king and queen mount the dais and this whole piece could be divertissements. Like Dance of the WASPs. Danse Frantique. The two of them,” Dan goes on fantasizing, “could sit up there eating candy. And my father could sit up there, too, in his rocker, chewing tobacco and spitting...” A week before when I turned up at what I thought would be the middle of rehearsal, things weren’t so bright. Everyone is clustered around the entrance. Bob Clifford is changing out of his practice clothes, JoAnn, in a green leotard, a sweater round her hips, sprawls across a chair with her legs on the piano bench. Christopher Banner slouches in a nook between the piano and the wall. Dan is very discouraged because the other new piece he’s been working on isn’t working out as he envisioned. Several of the dancers have hurt themselves and s time has gotten impossibly short. Diann Sichel injured her ankle and has had to take things gently. Sally Hess fell down stairs and hurt her back. “I could have done it any time all year. I chose to do it last Tuesday.” A yellow scrim Dan wanted for the piece would be too expensive, even undyed, and Dan doesn’t feel he can afford to go further into debt. “It’s time,” he says glumly, “to review all the reasons for doing something else.” Sally, serious and erect, sits with her hands folded over a cup of take-out tea. She’s scrunching up her mouth, shaking her head “no.” No to Dan’s discouragement. Dan sits on the linoleum floor, near the heater, lower than anyone else. He swallows a couple of vitamins. His frustration and distress as even made him dubious about Yankee Doodle. He feels he can’t see it clearly enough, he’s not sure it adds up. “Those sections are so short,” he worries, “that it’s hard to be involved in it the way I like to be involved.” The dancers pooh-pooh him. He’s worried about the transitions. “It’s very different from what I thought It seems inconsequential.” The problem is, partly, that Dan is already in love with the other piece, Green Leaves and Gentle Differences. Tidying up Yankee Doodle is no longer his main interest. He wants to do something opposite. Something, as Sally says, hat scares him - something slow and open. “It’s very hard for me,” Dan says, “to sit down and be quiet.” Anyway, Dan schedules a day off before the next rehearsal and things begin to loosen up. JoAnn goes to the barre, does a few simple stretches and ports de bras, starts to fool around. Christopher “instructs” her. She hunches her shoulders, stiffens her arm,. caves in her chest, does terrible tendus. “The other way doesn’t work so great,” she remarks with a gleam in her eye. “Everybody ends up in the hospital anyway.” “No injuries,” Sally says firmly, going down in the elevator. “Thoughts create reality.” A few days later, I watch that section-by-section rehearsal of Yankee Doodle. Dan is in an open-neck, navy shirt, black tights, and leg warmers pulled up high on the thigh, which gives him the look of a pirate or one of the four musketeers. His corrections are technical, exact. He goes over a short, slithery section with Diann, who, because of her ankle, hadn’t been able to learn it before. She wiggles, he wiggles, giving just the right flavor to the grind. “I trust my behind,” he explains, slapping himself on the butt, and gives the hips another go round. Lots of spots in this sassy, lickety-split dance get cleaned up. Where Heidi whops Bob and shoves him in the wrong direction when she pushes off him. Where Sally and JoAnn come with in a hair of colliding. Dan goes over his own part in one section. He rebounds sharply from the floor. His arms are stiff, fingers spread, as if he were some fledgling trying desperately to fly. “Teetee ta tata,” I hear, under his breath. I’m seeing lots of flashes of birds in this piece (though they disappear in the runthrough a few days later). Sally and Christopher often suggest big, placidly soaring birds, beneficent eagles. In another part, Dan clarifies the quality of a movement for a puzzled, slightly worried-looking Sally by telling her she’s like “a heron walking through a big puddle.” In another section, he shows her how he wants her to sit on Christopher’s back. He seats himself delicately, brings his arms down as he twists front. Each time he demonstrates something new, or refines something that may be slipping away, he defines with his body exactly what he’s after, delicately but insistently, pressing out a precise shape and quality of feeling. Then he asks them to duplicate something he does with JoAnn. From a sort of social dance position, Sally has to throw her body neatly forward, in a block, under Christopher’s arm, and then he circles round and rights her. But it’s hard to control and, after each try, they seem to wheel about like a top just before it loses momentum and topples. But after they figure out what’s wrong, with JoAnn’s help, the enthusiastic Sally simply zooms forward, winds up nearly flat on her back on the floor instead of on a modest diagonal. “Sometimes,” Christopher says to me later, “Dan is just wanting to race ahead and we simply can’t do the movement quickly enough for him.” “When you start a piece,” Dan tells me, “you know the incredible energy it will take to get from the beginning to the end - and it’s frightening. Sometimes I can think of things in my head in the morning and I know they’ll work. Other times they just don’t work at all and I have to go over and over and over until I get tired and my muscles start to ache and I just can’t keep going...But the way dance happens is a muscular, visceral, pelvic thing, and you can only get at it by going through it and doing it. “You keep nudging your ideas along. Then you have to work things out on the dancers, with them. At the same time, you wish they’d go away so you could figure it all out. You don’t know why one thing is right and another isn’t, but you just make those decisions and act on them and hopefully it adds up to something. “It’s like making a cake or pancakes or bread or anything else. You can have a recipe of exactly what to do. In one hour, it will double in size. But in one hour, it hasn’t even begun to double in size. And then what do you do? Throw it out? You wait, you plunge in, you do something!” One thing that’s been intriguing to me in Dan’s dances over the past few years is the way they’ve been flowering with a strange, colorful, personal vocabulary of movements and gestures - like the quizzical alertness you might note in animals, the luxuriance of a dog’s yawn, the curious compulsive or unconscious habits of strangers, the lone gestural remnant in your memory of someone once familiar. Dan seems to honor these moves, these unique gestures infiltrating and enriching his dances, by leaving them alone, by not commenting. Innocent of their origin, they contain clues to alien dramas and identities. “If you dance in clear, open shapes,” he says, “it can be very general, very easy to hide behind. Some people can only look at the open, unthreatening positions they’ve come to expect and know. But I like the idea that any movement is possible and can be beautiful if it’s done with awareness and commitment I enjoy showing something very beautiful with something a little bit awkward or gauche or unexpected right alongside it...One’s imagination is limiting enough as it is. If you do the wildest things you can think of, if they delight you, then you trust them and you do them. I don’t mean that anything goes. But anything does go - after a tremendous amount of energy and effort and feeling and openness and trying and trying and trying and trying...”
Watching Kids Watching Movies
February 20
The Children’s Film Theatre, a project of the Media Center for Children, has been concerned with the quality of films for children since it was begun in 1971. In 1973, the American Library Association (ALA) published Films Kids Like (edited by Susan Rice), an amiable and selective catalogue of over 200 shorts that described each film and audience responses to it, made suggestions on how to show and program films for children and suggested follow-up art activities. Most previously available catalogues, if not commercial, had been compiled on the basis of what adults thought children would or should like. Now an excellent second volume, More Films Kids Like (edited by Maureen Gaffney, director of Children’s Film Theatre), describing an additional 200 films, has appeared (published by the ALA, 1977, $8.95 paper). Both books emerged from projects in which films were screened weekly over a long period. For More Films Kids Like, research began in 1974. About 1000 films were prescreened; 400 of these were tested over two years with children in elementary schools on the West Side, day-care and community centers in the Village, SoHo, Chinatown and Red Hook, and in public elementary and junior high schools upstate. As Rice wrote in the first volume, “Children will watch almost anything that slithers through a projector as long as it is moderately short.” And when asked directly for opinions about what they’ve seen, children will often say what they intuit an adult questioner wants to hear. So evaluation of the films ad to come from careful observation of the children. As Gaffney writes, “If they were quiet, was it due to boredom or rapt attention? If they were active, was it because of restlessness or excitement? Did the children turn into zombies? Did they talk about the film or just talk while it was on?” A further, and vital, aspect of the evaluations reflects the conviction that film viewing “should be more than a passive experience for the child, that their experience with movies should generate expression along with interest”(Rice). Beyond the catalogues and another upcoming book, What to Do When the Lights Come On, CFT is sponsoring conferences later this month and again in November on children’s media and plans either a conference on or festival of child-made films in 1979. But this small organization’s main concern is to find ways to promote independently made films and to get them seen. They;ve received a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to he=lp with this. But there’s still great hypocrisy in the areas of education and children’s art. No one is willing to directly fund children’s films. Few people have taken them seriously enough to learn about them. “Now that’s alarming,” says Maureen Gaffney. “If people care about art and about social change, and they won’t foster film or other arts for kids, then I’d like to know when they expect to get around to them.” Gaffney is particularly insistent and enthusiastic because :when you make films, or any art, for kids, you have a chance of really reaching them.” Instead, “when people think about doing something serious, they exclude children. And when they do get serious, with children they’re so moralizing and pedantic it’s horrible.” The lack of support is especially wasteful, since Americans and Canadians, in Gaffney’s estimation, are making he best children’s films anywhere, partly because they have become more psychologically aware. “I think finally,” she says, “young Americans are really becoming interested in children as people, not as colonial subjects. And they’re approaching film that way.”
The Children’s Film Theatre, a project of the Media Center for Children, has been concerned with the quality of films for children since it was begun in 1971. In 1973, the American Library Association (ALA) published Films Kids Like (edited by Susan Rice), an amiable and selective catalogue of over 200 shorts that described each film and audience responses to it, made suggestions on how to show and program films for children and suggested follow-up art activities. Most previously available catalogues, if not commercial, had been compiled on the basis of what adults thought children would or should like. Now an excellent second volume, More Films Kids Like (edited by Maureen Gaffney, director of Children’s Film Theatre), describing an additional 200 films, has appeared (published by the ALA, 1977, $8.95 paper). Both books emerged from projects in which films were screened weekly over a long period. For More Films Kids Like, research began in 1974. About 1000 films were prescreened; 400 of these were tested over two years with children in elementary schools on the West Side, day-care and community centers in the Village, SoHo, Chinatown and Red Hook, and in public elementary and junior high schools upstate. As Rice wrote in the first volume, “Children will watch almost anything that slithers through a projector as long as it is moderately short.” And when asked directly for opinions about what they’ve seen, children will often say what they intuit an adult questioner wants to hear. So evaluation of the films ad to come from careful observation of the children. As Gaffney writes, “If they were quiet, was it due to boredom or rapt attention? If they were active, was it because of restlessness or excitement? Did the children turn into zombies? Did they talk about the film or just talk while it was on?” A further, and vital, aspect of the evaluations reflects the conviction that film viewing “should be more than a passive experience for the child, that their experience with movies should generate expression along with interest”(Rice). Beyond the catalogues and another upcoming book, What to Do When the Lights Come On, CFT is sponsoring conferences later this month and again in November on children’s media and plans either a conference on or festival of child-made films in 1979. But this small organization’s main concern is to find ways to promote independently made films and to get them seen. They;ve received a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to he=lp with this. But there’s still great hypocrisy in the areas of education and children’s art. No one is willing to directly fund children’s films. Few people have taken them seriously enough to learn about them. “Now that’s alarming,” says Maureen Gaffney. “If people care about art and about social change, and they won’t foster film or other arts for kids, then I’d like to know when they expect to get around to them.” Gaffney is particularly insistent and enthusiastic because :when you make films, or any art, for kids, you have a chance of really reaching them.” Instead, “when people think about doing something serious, they exclude children. And when they do get serious, with children they’re so moralizing and pedantic it’s horrible.” The lack of support is especially wasteful, since Americans and Canadians, in Gaffney’s estimation, are making he best children’s films anywhere, partly because they have become more psychologically aware. “I think finally,” she says, “young Americans are really becoming interested in children as people, not as colonial subjects. And they’re approaching film that way.”