Reviews 1978
Five Against the Darkness
December 25
Five women, each with an arm upraised, stand in the darkness against the triple windows at the back of the Warren Street Performance Loft. Outside, lights dim up and silhouette the women in a bluish, lunar glare. When the lights inside come up, the women - in thin, white old-fashioned dresses or ensembles - begin a series of slow advances toward the audience, each softly rocking from side to side until tilted off balance into a few extra staggering steps. Then the rocking begins again. Rocked in the cradle of the deep...
Five women, each with an arm upraised, stand in the darkness against the triple windows at the back of the Warren Street Performance Loft. Outside, lights dim up and silhouette the women in a bluish, lunar glare. When the lights inside come up, the women - in thin, white old-fashioned dresses or ensembles - begin a series of slow advances toward the audience, each softly rocking from side to side until tilted off balance into a few extra staggering steps. Then the rocking begins again. Rocked in the cradle of the deep...
Just before, one of the women arranged 9 (I think) coils of rope at the right side of the loft. After the women have come about as far front as they can, four stagger toward the left wall; the fifth totters determinedly to the right and picks up the first coil of rope. As the others begin to move in a line, along the wall, to the end of the loft, she casts the rope across the floor where it smacks to form a new, twisty forward boundary. Then rejoins the others.
Sometimes in their advance, the women weave and stagger in pairs, or in a group of four. One is always apart. As pairs, they pull each other along gently, sensitively. Joined as four, they are pulled in sequence from one end or the other, and finally lurch into the wall.
The piece, the third and last on Kathy Duncan’s program, is called The Sinking of the Titanic, after the music by Gavin Bryars, a mournful, steady work, with Amazing Grace as its central theme. The windy, ample, organ-like sounds that overlay the hymn, hum with it, replace it, or blot it out, never seem at odds with it, but consonant. Sometimes there are voices speaking, but the words are incomprehensible. The music and Duncan’s work are perfect mates. At the end, blocked from moving forward anymore by the ropes, the women return to the windows where, with the loft again darkened, they’re bathed in blue light.
The Sinking of the Titanic is a restrained but resonant and absorbing work that has the capacity to receive the audience. The preceding two works on the program are constructed with equal formality but are much flatter in effect. The first, Five Phrases in 12 Patterns, the sort of exhaustive exercise that must be satisfying to someone who likes every game played to the finish, was performed plainly and well by Carol Douglas, Melinda Gros, Roxana Newberry, Debi Wayne and Duncan. The second piece, 16 Stories, consists of 16 generally simple patterns enacted by four dancers. When they stop after each section, Tom Johnson dryly reads an interpretation, or several, of the affectless events we have witnessed. He describes the first pattern as a herd of giraffes trying to find a waterhole with different successive leaders; then, in physical terms (“...then everyone tried to keep in line with the third woman, who moved cautiously and reached the other side slightly before the others...”). Each fourth “story” has all four dancers line up behind each other facing a light source set in the ceiling (in a different cardinal direction each time). The first in line who points toward the light, collapses backward into the arms of the second, and then is carried away and laid on her side. Then the next points, collapses, etc. The fourth doesn’t collapse and the three others revive. (One interpretation: “Minsk collapsed, Kiev collapsed, Karkov collapsed. The Russians held firm at Stalingrad and the Nazis surrendered...").
Johnson’s verbal interpretations are often amusing, and sometimes surprising, but eventually the whole notion seems precious. Since the days of the blind men and the elephant, it’s been obvious that events are subject to more than one interpretation; and events that are not much more than fragments, or that have no particular emotional or dramatic tensions, are infinitely and legitimately open to interpretation. Now where does that take us?
At Warren Street Performance Loft (December 9 and 10).
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 scare 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 scare 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.
Books for Kids, Babe Ruth Too
November 13
Family Scrapbook, M.B. Goffstein’s seven very short stories (Farrar, Straus & Girous, $5.95, ages 6-9), narrated by a curly-headed daughter, are the simplest you can imagine: going for a ride in the new blue pick up. Meeting an airman who knew your father before you were born. Going to services on Yom Kippur and sitting in the kitchen afterward, eating sweets. The moments of the stories are almost ordinary, but they’re the best of family life: quiet, comfortable, filled with warmth and feelings of deep attachment In this family of four, no one seems to dominate; everyone belongs and is respected. The affection is palpable and absolutely reliable; no one has to talk about it. And the modest spot drawings by the author, wit their slightly uncertain line, are perfectly n tune with the text.
Lore Segal’s Tell Me a Trudy with pictures by Rosemary Wells (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95), is another book about a family, but a noisier, sillier, more bustling one. These people take up more room in their living, impinge on each other more, fuss and enjoy it: the kind of family where everyone puts his or her two cents in, where relatives drop in. The kids look juts like their parents. There’s a hectic playfulness connected to feelings kids know well - like getting especially giddy and active just as bedtime, or having unaccountable fears (like robbers, or Martians, in the bathroom), which, here, aren’t ridiculed or rationalized, but are so gracefully resolves in fantasy that you’d never have to notice anything serious was going on. (Superman drops in, watches the news on the telly with the family, and takes care of the problem.)
The pictures, rather busy, cluttered -----, are in clear, bright colors - often several on a spread following the ins and outs of the text. Like a series of family clusters that show young Jacob smiling as he advances on his even younger - but old enough to be suspicious - cousin Leonard whose new dump truck he covets, Babe Ruth also makes a cameo appearance as a pretzel vendor.
Grasshopper, in Grasshopper on the Road, by Arnold Lobel (Harper and Row, $4.95, ages 4-8), is a venturesome character and his mind is wide. He takes to the road to “follow that road wherever it goes,” and meets a series of friendly compulsives whose lives are narrow: a housefly who’s a cleanliness fiend, a group of sign-waving beetles who’re promoting the delights of morning over other times of the day, dragonflies who pity him his ability to zip and zoom. Though charming and easygoing, Grasshopper’s neither intimidated nor diverted from what he knows to be his path. The story follows him all day to a temporary bed in a soft place. Lobel’s writing is rhythmic, spirited and witty, and uses repetition as a source of that wit. But you never get that sense of drill that permeates some easy readers.
I disliked Tasha Tudor’s messy illustrations for Efner Tudor Holmes’s Carries Gift (Collins and World, $5.95, ages 6-9), but the story of a farm girl who becomes friendly with an old neighbor recluse is nicely done. The old man isn’t weird or creepy but rather brusque and a bit suspicious. She startles him in the woods one day, but the next guides her to a good berry patch. Later he rescues her dog from a trap. I liked that Holmes doesn’t try to go too far and make them best buddies. The girls goes home, her worry about her dog eased, and with the dg asleep in the kitchen, the old man eats a piece of shortcake the girl has brought him, and sits in the moonlight musing.
Carrie’s Gift is essentially a story augmented by pictures, but in Sally Whitman’s A Special Trade (Harper and Row, $7.95, ages 4-8), the pictures, by Karen Gundersheimer, are more crucial. They’re cute, set in a quaint, homey, small-town America as up-to-date as Brigadoon. The story is a simple switcharoo: when Nelly is little, told Batholemew takes her for walks in her stroller; when they get a little older, and he grows infirm, she pushes his wheelchair. Very nice, very pat, very thin.
Some of the drawings suggest that Nelly and Bartholemew may be descendants of early Sendak children, particularly in a series of nearly two-dozen drawings of Nelly wiggling and slithering around on roller skates. Except that these drawings are color splashed with red, yellow, brown.
Little Wild Chimpanzee, by Anna Michel, pictures by Peter and Virginia Parnall (Pantheon, $3.95), is a fascinating and lucid sketch of the first few years of a chimpanzee’s life: carried, tiny and wrinkled, clinging to his mother’s belly, later riding on her back; learning to climb; building nests and smashing them; going off on his own; eating ants; meeting up with a leopard, and being rescued by the chimpanzee troupe, which screams and throws rocks to scare the cat off. The illustrations, in a soft but strong gray line, focus on expressive details and leave the larger landscape only suggested.
Family Scrapbook, M.B. Goffstein’s seven very short stories (Farrar, Straus & Girous, $5.95, ages 6-9), narrated by a curly-headed daughter, are the simplest you can imagine: going for a ride in the new blue pick up. Meeting an airman who knew your father before you were born. Going to services on Yom Kippur and sitting in the kitchen afterward, eating sweets. The moments of the stories are almost ordinary, but they’re the best of family life: quiet, comfortable, filled with warmth and feelings of deep attachment In this family of four, no one seems to dominate; everyone belongs and is respected. The affection is palpable and absolutely reliable; no one has to talk about it. And the modest spot drawings by the author, wit their slightly uncertain line, are perfectly n tune with the text.
Lore Segal’s Tell Me a Trudy with pictures by Rosemary Wells (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95), is another book about a family, but a noisier, sillier, more bustling one. These people take up more room in their living, impinge on each other more, fuss and enjoy it: the kind of family where everyone puts his or her two cents in, where relatives drop in. The kids look juts like their parents. There’s a hectic playfulness connected to feelings kids know well - like getting especially giddy and active just as bedtime, or having unaccountable fears (like robbers, or Martians, in the bathroom), which, here, aren’t ridiculed or rationalized, but are so gracefully resolves in fantasy that you’d never have to notice anything serious was going on. (Superman drops in, watches the news on the telly with the family, and takes care of the problem.)
The pictures, rather busy, cluttered -----, are in clear, bright colors - often several on a spread following the ins and outs of the text. Like a series of family clusters that show young Jacob smiling as he advances on his even younger - but old enough to be suspicious - cousin Leonard whose new dump truck he covets, Babe Ruth also makes a cameo appearance as a pretzel vendor.
Grasshopper, in Grasshopper on the Road, by Arnold Lobel (Harper and Row, $4.95, ages 4-8), is a venturesome character and his mind is wide. He takes to the road to “follow that road wherever it goes,” and meets a series of friendly compulsives whose lives are narrow: a housefly who’s a cleanliness fiend, a group of sign-waving beetles who’re promoting the delights of morning over other times of the day, dragonflies who pity him his ability to zip and zoom. Though charming and easygoing, Grasshopper’s neither intimidated nor diverted from what he knows to be his path. The story follows him all day to a temporary bed in a soft place. Lobel’s writing is rhythmic, spirited and witty, and uses repetition as a source of that wit. But you never get that sense of drill that permeates some easy readers.
I disliked Tasha Tudor’s messy illustrations for Efner Tudor Holmes’s Carries Gift (Collins and World, $5.95, ages 6-9), but the story of a farm girl who becomes friendly with an old neighbor recluse is nicely done. The old man isn’t weird or creepy but rather brusque and a bit suspicious. She startles him in the woods one day, but the next guides her to a good berry patch. Later he rescues her dog from a trap. I liked that Holmes doesn’t try to go too far and make them best buddies. The girls goes home, her worry about her dog eased, and with the dg asleep in the kitchen, the old man eats a piece of shortcake the girl has brought him, and sits in the moonlight musing.
Carrie’s Gift is essentially a story augmented by pictures, but in Sally Whitman’s A Special Trade (Harper and Row, $7.95, ages 4-8), the pictures, by Karen Gundersheimer, are more crucial. They’re cute, set in a quaint, homey, small-town America as up-to-date as Brigadoon. The story is a simple switcharoo: when Nelly is little, told Batholemew takes her for walks in her stroller; when they get a little older, and he grows infirm, she pushes his wheelchair. Very nice, very pat, very thin.
Some of the drawings suggest that Nelly and Bartholemew may be descendants of early Sendak children, particularly in a series of nearly two-dozen drawings of Nelly wiggling and slithering around on roller skates. Except that these drawings are color splashed with red, yellow, brown.
Little Wild Chimpanzee, by Anna Michel, pictures by Peter and Virginia Parnall (Pantheon, $3.95), is a fascinating and lucid sketch of the first few years of a chimpanzee’s life: carried, tiny and wrinkled, clinging to his mother’s belly, later riding on her back; learning to climb; building nests and smashing them; going off on his own; eating ants; meeting up with a leopard, and being rescued by the chimpanzee troupe, which screams and throws rocks to scare the cat off. The illustrations, in a soft but strong gray line, focus on expressive details and leave the larger landscape only suggested.
Something Old
October 23
The musicians of the Osaka Garyo-kai enter solemnly in their voluminous gold robes, fat trouser as smooth aqua silk, stiff, pointed black hats bound with a thin white strap that goes over the hat and under the chin. Not one of the gentlemen is young. They seat themselves on a large platform on the Carnegie Hall stage, and tune up in a prescribed process that introduces the mode of the music to come. The tuning-up merges into Etenraku, the first piece, said to have derived from T’ang China, in which all the instruments begin, and drop out in stages until only the koto is left. The music in Etenraku, and in the richer and more stately Rinko Kotatsu that follows, is reedy and sonorous. There’s an occasional shuddering thump from the barrel drum; nasal but celestial background pipings from the mouth organ (hosho). The hosho players are seated in the back; the dark wooden bodies of their instruments turn upward and cover their noses and eyes. I watch the man in thick glasses who taps the little drum (kakko); his eyebrows go up and down.
Many qualities of this music are strange: a wobble in the diminutive oboe; surprising inquisitive inflections in the other winds; passages, between louder and more decisive sections, that seem tentative and rhythmically vague to the uneducated ear. The musicians hardly move as they play. As the instruments in Etenraku fold, and the musicians’ minute movements cease, I wonder if, one by one, they’re going to sleep.
Formal and often military, the dancing is the longer, second part of the program. The musicians now sit on one side. The dancers use the main platform, which is topped in green, bordered in white cloth. Red and black printed hangings decorate the back of the stage;little red fences mark the stage just beyond the corners of the platform. The musicians wear more ornate, orange robes now with helmet-like headpieces. There are no strings - no biwa, no koto - in the music that accompanies the dancing.
Embu, the first dance is, according to the program notes, based on Chinese exorcism (?) and is a prayer to the gods of Heaven and Earth The prayer aspect you might surmise from the way the dancer swings his spear around about a foot above the ground, raises it up and dips it down, in homage to powers in all directions. The steps are few - a slow walk, a lifted knee, a light stamp, a shallow lunge followed by an angular shift in focus - and each is arrested and held. First one dancer, in orange and white robes with a short train, goes through the movements; then a dancer in green does it all; then both do it at once with slight differences like the facing of the head.
The second dance, Hohin, introduced to Japan from Korea in the fifth century, according to the notes, became completely Japanese in style during the Heian periiod. The four performers (it seems odd to call these men “dancers”), as court guards playing at being noblemen, wear kimonos of an acid Chinese yellow, with white pants beneath, and stiff, black, scroll-like headdresses with pale yellow chrysanthemums tucked into them. A mock sword is thrust through their belts in back. They lift a knee, squat, then sharply open their sleeves wide like big wings. They walk slowly with hands on hips (playful? domineering?), then squat again. This dance, like all the others, is ceremonious and built of repetitions. More squats, more imposing stances with hands on hips. Each takes a corner and stands there for awhile. They bend, scoot a leg out, lunge, and open their arms wide. They come quickly out of a squat with a neat jump of surprising lightness. Each move is emphatic, measured, of equal importance. A dancer squats, then twists his head. He bends, puts a flexed foot out with the heel on the ground, then sets the toe down. The flat seriousness of these dances has a curious effect. You don’t want to argue with a form 1500 years old. But I find myself thinking of dances you learn n third grade Of “put your little foot right out,” of “heel and toe, away we go.” You do it that way because.
In the second section, the four men kneel, open one side of their robes above the waist to expose a white sleeve bordered with scarlet. When they move, they form a pinwheel pattern, which they periodically open up and tighten. Overall, something vaguely cruel is suggested. Think of the cramped parades of painted figures that cross the pages of post-conquest Aztec codices.
Genjoraku, of Chinese origin, shows a man who likes to catch snakes. He’s in a fringed, orange nomad outfit, soft boots and a toothy red mask from which dangles a fat red-tasseled ring. From a bold, wide-legged, erect stance, he raises his right knee high, takes a step, and brings the other leg quickly to it. He takes little sliding steps forward with the toe angled up, then paced down. He whips out a small rod, flashes it in the air, then rubs it firmly on his thigh. In a squat, he brings the rod sharply against the back of his neck and holds it there. I’m struck by significant gestures like this one that don’t, literally, mean a thing to me, but that seem to have a very particular and precise meaning. In the final dance, Bairo Hajinraku, which celebrates a martial victory, the four dancers open their arms, lift a leg, and bring the middle and index fingers of each hand together. The gesture seems to have a beneficent, religious quality, a sudden immediacy and sweetness. Moments later, they touch those fingers to join the wedded fingers of both hands, then break them apart by sweeping the arms down.
Maybe these gestures are as soldierly and explainable as most of the actions of the dance. With spears in one hand, the dancer-soldiers raise their swords in the other, and march past each other on and off the back of the platform as if they were on duty. They sheath their swords, kneel, lay aside their spears, lean their shields carefully together in pairs, and face each other. (The oblong white shields, each with openwork flames at the top and a flower at the center, have the charm of dainty old European porcelain teacups. Leaning together, they suggest campfires. The dancers brush one foot, squat, advance with their swords, back off, and turn away...
Many people in the audience became impatient with the repetitions and the slow pace. The dancing was not exciting or remarkable for its finesse. But in its ritual, ceremonial, circumscribed way, it was splendid and satisfying. Sometimes going through the motions is its own justification.
At Carnegie Hall (October 4).
The musicians of the Osaka Garyo-kai enter solemnly in their voluminous gold robes, fat trouser as smooth aqua silk, stiff, pointed black hats bound with a thin white strap that goes over the hat and under the chin. Not one of the gentlemen is young. They seat themselves on a large platform on the Carnegie Hall stage, and tune up in a prescribed process that introduces the mode of the music to come. The tuning-up merges into Etenraku, the first piece, said to have derived from T’ang China, in which all the instruments begin, and drop out in stages until only the koto is left. The music in Etenraku, and in the richer and more stately Rinko Kotatsu that follows, is reedy and sonorous. There’s an occasional shuddering thump from the barrel drum; nasal but celestial background pipings from the mouth organ (hosho). The hosho players are seated in the back; the dark wooden bodies of their instruments turn upward and cover their noses and eyes. I watch the man in thick glasses who taps the little drum (kakko); his eyebrows go up and down.
Many qualities of this music are strange: a wobble in the diminutive oboe; surprising inquisitive inflections in the other winds; passages, between louder and more decisive sections, that seem tentative and rhythmically vague to the uneducated ear. The musicians hardly move as they play. As the instruments in Etenraku fold, and the musicians’ minute movements cease, I wonder if, one by one, they’re going to sleep.
Formal and often military, the dancing is the longer, second part of the program. The musicians now sit on one side. The dancers use the main platform, which is topped in green, bordered in white cloth. Red and black printed hangings decorate the back of the stage;little red fences mark the stage just beyond the corners of the platform. The musicians wear more ornate, orange robes now with helmet-like headpieces. There are no strings - no biwa, no koto - in the music that accompanies the dancing.
Embu, the first dance is, according to the program notes, based on Chinese exorcism (?) and is a prayer to the gods of Heaven and Earth The prayer aspect you might surmise from the way the dancer swings his spear around about a foot above the ground, raises it up and dips it down, in homage to powers in all directions. The steps are few - a slow walk, a lifted knee, a light stamp, a shallow lunge followed by an angular shift in focus - and each is arrested and held. First one dancer, in orange and white robes with a short train, goes through the movements; then a dancer in green does it all; then both do it at once with slight differences like the facing of the head.
The second dance, Hohin, introduced to Japan from Korea in the fifth century, according to the notes, became completely Japanese in style during the Heian periiod. The four performers (it seems odd to call these men “dancers”), as court guards playing at being noblemen, wear kimonos of an acid Chinese yellow, with white pants beneath, and stiff, black, scroll-like headdresses with pale yellow chrysanthemums tucked into them. A mock sword is thrust through their belts in back. They lift a knee, squat, then sharply open their sleeves wide like big wings. They walk slowly with hands on hips (playful? domineering?), then squat again. This dance, like all the others, is ceremonious and built of repetitions. More squats, more imposing stances with hands on hips. Each takes a corner and stands there for awhile. They bend, scoot a leg out, lunge, and open their arms wide. They come quickly out of a squat with a neat jump of surprising lightness. Each move is emphatic, measured, of equal importance. A dancer squats, then twists his head. He bends, puts a flexed foot out with the heel on the ground, then sets the toe down. The flat seriousness of these dances has a curious effect. You don’t want to argue with a form 1500 years old. But I find myself thinking of dances you learn n third grade Of “put your little foot right out,” of “heel and toe, away we go.” You do it that way because.
In the second section, the four men kneel, open one side of their robes above the waist to expose a white sleeve bordered with scarlet. When they move, they form a pinwheel pattern, which they periodically open up and tighten. Overall, something vaguely cruel is suggested. Think of the cramped parades of painted figures that cross the pages of post-conquest Aztec codices.
Genjoraku, of Chinese origin, shows a man who likes to catch snakes. He’s in a fringed, orange nomad outfit, soft boots and a toothy red mask from which dangles a fat red-tasseled ring. From a bold, wide-legged, erect stance, he raises his right knee high, takes a step, and brings the other leg quickly to it. He takes little sliding steps forward with the toe angled up, then paced down. He whips out a small rod, flashes it in the air, then rubs it firmly on his thigh. In a squat, he brings the rod sharply against the back of his neck and holds it there. I’m struck by significant gestures like this one that don’t, literally, mean a thing to me, but that seem to have a very particular and precise meaning. In the final dance, Bairo Hajinraku, which celebrates a martial victory, the four dancers open their arms, lift a leg, and bring the middle and index fingers of each hand together. The gesture seems to have a beneficent, religious quality, a sudden immediacy and sweetness. Moments later, they touch those fingers to join the wedded fingers of both hands, then break them apart by sweeping the arms down.
Maybe these gestures are as soldierly and explainable as most of the actions of the dance. With spears in one hand, the dancer-soldiers raise their swords in the other, and march past each other on and off the back of the platform as if they were on duty. They sheath their swords, kneel, lay aside their spears, lean their shields carefully together in pairs, and face each other. (The oblong white shields, each with openwork flames at the top and a flower at the center, have the charm of dainty old European porcelain teacups. Leaning together, they suggest campfires. The dancers brush one foot, squat, advance with their swords, back off, and turn away...
Many people in the audience became impatient with the repetitions and the slow pace. The dancing was not exciting or remarkable for its finesse. But in its ritual, ceremonial, circumscribed way, it was splendid and satisfying. Sometimes going through the motions is its own justification.
At Carnegie Hall (October 4).
Merce: Working Backwards
October 2
On the City Center stage, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is about to rehearse Fractions, which has its New York premiere October 3 during the second week of the company’s season there. The dancers are in practice clothes. Everybody’s wearing shoes because the linoleum dance floor hasn’t been put down yet. I like to be close, so I sit in the third row of the orchestra; that means the dancers’ feet get chopped off at the ankles. Karole Armitage rehearses her solo center stage: a sudden thrust twists and extends her body. Merce comes down into the audience, calls “places”, then “curtain.” The house lights are on full, a single bright wor-light high over the front of the stage shines a hard light on the upper edges of the dancers’ limbs and caps their heads.
I let Fractions flow over me. It’s as if I’m looking at the configurations on the surface of a stream. It seems curiously pleasant, the way people sometimes simply come out and stand at the side of the stage, then go away. I like the way Lisa Fox dances with a kind of sporty abandon, yet has an air of choosiness and refinement. Chris Komar is bold and pragmatic; he starts each new phrase with a controlled burst of energy. Robert Kovich has a certain distant nobleness, an expansiveness, a sense of character that informs every movement and creates its own context. He draws you in. Totally, different in style, they have equal force on stage and are beautiful together. I specially love a moment when Komar moves offstage in a few slow, interrupted turns amid a busy cluster of three women. During each turn, he lazily raises his arms, then brings them down. It’s as if he were a dreamer, in a world alone, yet protected. I don’t know why it moves me so.
When the runthrough’s over, I watch Merce listening to a conversation between Komar and Ellen Cornfield, about a minor trouble spot. In a hooded sweatshirt, with his hands clasped behind his back, he seems like an interloper, an eavesdropper. But when he opens his mouth, though I can’t hear the words, his tone speaks concern and authority.
Merce originally made Fractions as a video piece in collaboration with Charles Atlas, and the title refers to the breaking up of images between video monitors (which often fill one or two corners of the screen) and the live space. Atlas had an idea that he might be able to get more depth, develop more visual interest, and move more fluidly from shot to shot if the monitors were visible on screen and he could go from the monitor and whip out to the space. In Fractions, he tells me, “Merce wanted to make it not end. We’d stop shooting but we’d try for a transition that would keep it flowing.”
Atlas has made two video versions of Fractions, and is planning to put together a third. “To me and Merce, it was very interesting to do the two versions. In a way, it’s analogous to performance. Once you get a ape and have to look at it again and again, it’s always the same, the dancers are always dancing the same. There’s no performance variation. Usually Merce doesn’t even like to do the same piece the same way. So I thought it would be interesting, like seeing several different performances, even though it’s really just different angles.” Merce says one should see Fractions I on a big screen. Or better, he says mischievously, to see Fractions I and II at the same time side by side, “to really confuse everybody.” They worked with three black and white cameras (one for close-ups), one color camera (for the first time) and the four monitors in different arrangements to define the dance space. A major problem was “how to keep everybody either in or out of the picture,” which became more complicate as they increased the number of monitors seen on screen. But the first concern remained, in Merce’s words, “not to make pictures, to make dancing.”
The translation to the stage seems to have been pretty straightforward. When you see people come out and stand on the side of the stage, they’re on the monitor in the video version. Exits where people go off and toward the camera have been changes, since it’s inconvenient for them to come forward and plop into the orchestra pit. Things like that. The dancers did the dance as they’d learned it for the taping; Merce looked at it to see how much could work unchanged, and a good deal of the adapting involved tying up loose ends. “When people were off camera,” Atlas says, “they were off. And now they’d been abandoned on stage, and he had to make things for them to do to get rid of them.”
"Some things that you do because of the restrictions,” Merce says, “you keep. It’s interesting. Suddenly, a relationship is changed by the transition. He describes a section when Kovich and Komar are spinning. The camera follows Komar on the monitor till his face fills the screen, he turns his head, and the camera pulls back from the monitor to four women leaping in the live space. On stage, the same sequence is very different. Chris’s head turning doesn’t provide that connection.
I visit Atlas in his workshop full of electronic equipment in the Cunningham Studio in Westbeth. On his bulletin board are tacked movie stills of Lon Chaney, Joan Bennet and Dan Duryea, and Richard Widmark with a cigarette in his lips that casts a disconcertingly deep shadow down his jaw. “It’s fascinating for me to work on dance,” Atlas says, “though I’m interested in other things, like movies - that’s how I got involved in this. I wanted to make movies, not these kind of movies, gangster movies.
“I was always dissatisfied with dance films because they never approximated how I saw things in the theater. Especially if it’s work you respect, you want to see what it is with wide shots of the whole stage from the back of the house. But that’s deadly. You have to give in to the medium, about cutting, that’s the main thing. I find that I try to watch myself watching to see what my eye is taken with, what a performer does to direct my eye somewhere. Whether things do or don’t work for me depends a lot on whether I see in it on screen the same way I see it live. On one of the Balanchine programs in the Dance in America series, there’s a Suzanne Farrell thing, a full shot. First I saw it on television, and I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t very exciting. Then I saw it in the theatre, the way she directs your attention to different parts of her body. Of course, it could be very distracting to cut from the dancer to a shot of her leg kicking out...That’s where the art is - thinking for the medium is a very different process from thinking for the stage.”
Cunningham and Atlas do their videotaping in the dance studio and plan to do one video/dance a year. IUt would be better Atlas says, if they had a 30-foot instead of a 12-foot backdrop, so they could get shots lower, which works better for dance. But they’re no about to remove the roof to do it. And if they could get the cameras further back, if the walls weren’t in the way, they could get wider shots. Now, to get any width and distance, the dancers have to be jammed against a wall. “But we’re always pushing to get the maximum out of whatever we have. Whenever we upgrade our system, we try to do more than we can with whatever that new thing is, more than it’s really capable of doing. I always feel we’re at a primitive level. Like with the color camera. We didn’t really have enough light to shoot color, that’s why the color lags. So it’s like lousy color. This year we’re trying to get enough light to get a decent color picture. We used every single watt we had, but it wasn’t enough.
“We want to do things that are visually different, but you have to remember that every day at 4:30 this place turns back into a classroom. You have to strike everything. You can’t put in anything permanent or anything too elaborate, that takes too long to either set up or break down, or you spend all your time doing that,
“But some of the things we do here we could never do if we were working in a broadcast situation. Our luxury is time. Not having a million union people around so we can’t afford to stop to figure something out. I think our Dance in America show was good because we spent four weeks figuring out all the shots, the cuts, everything. We were able to do that, in the context of the series, because we don’t have music problems. It costs s much to record an orchestra and then pay them every time they play back or whatever it is they have to do. But our music just goes on afterwards - we don’t have to listen to it when we dance. For video, that’s a big plus. It gives you flexibility. You can’t usually cut out bars of music, but without music you can do whatever you must to make it work visually.” Making pieces for video, says Atlas, has also turned out to be another chance procedure. “The first piece we did was Westbeth. It was never intended to be done live, but after it was over, we just ran it in the space. It was very weird, because it all had to do with apparatus that wasn’t there anymore. And the same thing with Fractions. The way the space is used is almost like an Event, where Merce takes things from different dances and puts them all over - here, and here, and here. Because of the monitors, we had to use the extreme sides a lot. But Fractions is all one piece. It’s abstract, but it seems to me to be a lot about the qualities of different people. There’s a lot of jumping. But there’s always something strange about Merce’s pieces. Like putting that long, slow duet for Robert and Karole right near the end. Like a romantic duet.
“We like to do things for broadcast, and we think of our work here as making models for better produced broadcast versions - although we’re both sick of Fractions and we don’t want to do it again because it was so complicated. But I think it holds together for repeated viewings and even, you know, mapmaking. You can watch it and try to figure out who went where. It’s like a puzzle, really. Wherre did they go? Where are they really?”
Though I couldn’t grasp Fractions very well the first time watched it through, and I felt that Jon Gbson’s solos flute music was numbing, the second time I find that my eye can take in more, flicks easily from the live space to the cross-references and comments of the monitors, and tends to create its own game with the material. Watching becomes intellectual and effortless. I like the pink-beige flood of the first color shot, its strange lack of accent, and even the way the color lag leaves a shadow. Lisa Fox does the solo I saw Karole Armitage dance live, bending, twisting her legs in and out, lifting her knees high. Her torso is broken in two sections on the monitors. In a brief duet for Ellen Cornfield and Komar, she gently arches back. On the monitor, Kovich simultaneously, and at the same pace, bends forward.
Back at City Center, the company is warming up. Merce is doing battements with his hand on the proscenium for balance. The house is black. The stage is dark. It is oddly silent except for the gentle creak of a ballet slipper, the muted whoosh of a foot sliding out in tendu.
On the City Center stage, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is about to rehearse Fractions, which has its New York premiere October 3 during the second week of the company’s season there. The dancers are in practice clothes. Everybody’s wearing shoes because the linoleum dance floor hasn’t been put down yet. I like to be close, so I sit in the third row of the orchestra; that means the dancers’ feet get chopped off at the ankles. Karole Armitage rehearses her solo center stage: a sudden thrust twists and extends her body. Merce comes down into the audience, calls “places”, then “curtain.” The house lights are on full, a single bright wor-light high over the front of the stage shines a hard light on the upper edges of the dancers’ limbs and caps their heads.
I let Fractions flow over me. It’s as if I’m looking at the configurations on the surface of a stream. It seems curiously pleasant, the way people sometimes simply come out and stand at the side of the stage, then go away. I like the way Lisa Fox dances with a kind of sporty abandon, yet has an air of choosiness and refinement. Chris Komar is bold and pragmatic; he starts each new phrase with a controlled burst of energy. Robert Kovich has a certain distant nobleness, an expansiveness, a sense of character that informs every movement and creates its own context. He draws you in. Totally, different in style, they have equal force on stage and are beautiful together. I specially love a moment when Komar moves offstage in a few slow, interrupted turns amid a busy cluster of three women. During each turn, he lazily raises his arms, then brings them down. It’s as if he were a dreamer, in a world alone, yet protected. I don’t know why it moves me so.
When the runthrough’s over, I watch Merce listening to a conversation between Komar and Ellen Cornfield, about a minor trouble spot. In a hooded sweatshirt, with his hands clasped behind his back, he seems like an interloper, an eavesdropper. But when he opens his mouth, though I can’t hear the words, his tone speaks concern and authority.
Merce originally made Fractions as a video piece in collaboration with Charles Atlas, and the title refers to the breaking up of images between video monitors (which often fill one or two corners of the screen) and the live space. Atlas had an idea that he might be able to get more depth, develop more visual interest, and move more fluidly from shot to shot if the monitors were visible on screen and he could go from the monitor and whip out to the space. In Fractions, he tells me, “Merce wanted to make it not end. We’d stop shooting but we’d try for a transition that would keep it flowing.”
Atlas has made two video versions of Fractions, and is planning to put together a third. “To me and Merce, it was very interesting to do the two versions. In a way, it’s analogous to performance. Once you get a ape and have to look at it again and again, it’s always the same, the dancers are always dancing the same. There’s no performance variation. Usually Merce doesn’t even like to do the same piece the same way. So I thought it would be interesting, like seeing several different performances, even though it’s really just different angles.” Merce says one should see Fractions I on a big screen. Or better, he says mischievously, to see Fractions I and II at the same time side by side, “to really confuse everybody.” They worked with three black and white cameras (one for close-ups), one color camera (for the first time) and the four monitors in different arrangements to define the dance space. A major problem was “how to keep everybody either in or out of the picture,” which became more complicate as they increased the number of monitors seen on screen. But the first concern remained, in Merce’s words, “not to make pictures, to make dancing.”
The translation to the stage seems to have been pretty straightforward. When you see people come out and stand on the side of the stage, they’re on the monitor in the video version. Exits where people go off and toward the camera have been changes, since it’s inconvenient for them to come forward and plop into the orchestra pit. Things like that. The dancers did the dance as they’d learned it for the taping; Merce looked at it to see how much could work unchanged, and a good deal of the adapting involved tying up loose ends. “When people were off camera,” Atlas says, “they were off. And now they’d been abandoned on stage, and he had to make things for them to do to get rid of them.”
"Some things that you do because of the restrictions,” Merce says, “you keep. It’s interesting. Suddenly, a relationship is changed by the transition. He describes a section when Kovich and Komar are spinning. The camera follows Komar on the monitor till his face fills the screen, he turns his head, and the camera pulls back from the monitor to four women leaping in the live space. On stage, the same sequence is very different. Chris’s head turning doesn’t provide that connection.
I visit Atlas in his workshop full of electronic equipment in the Cunningham Studio in Westbeth. On his bulletin board are tacked movie stills of Lon Chaney, Joan Bennet and Dan Duryea, and Richard Widmark with a cigarette in his lips that casts a disconcertingly deep shadow down his jaw. “It’s fascinating for me to work on dance,” Atlas says, “though I’m interested in other things, like movies - that’s how I got involved in this. I wanted to make movies, not these kind of movies, gangster movies.
“I was always dissatisfied with dance films because they never approximated how I saw things in the theater. Especially if it’s work you respect, you want to see what it is with wide shots of the whole stage from the back of the house. But that’s deadly. You have to give in to the medium, about cutting, that’s the main thing. I find that I try to watch myself watching to see what my eye is taken with, what a performer does to direct my eye somewhere. Whether things do or don’t work for me depends a lot on whether I see in it on screen the same way I see it live. On one of the Balanchine programs in the Dance in America series, there’s a Suzanne Farrell thing, a full shot. First I saw it on television, and I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t very exciting. Then I saw it in the theatre, the way she directs your attention to different parts of her body. Of course, it could be very distracting to cut from the dancer to a shot of her leg kicking out...That’s where the art is - thinking for the medium is a very different process from thinking for the stage.”
Cunningham and Atlas do their videotaping in the dance studio and plan to do one video/dance a year. IUt would be better Atlas says, if they had a 30-foot instead of a 12-foot backdrop, so they could get shots lower, which works better for dance. But they’re no about to remove the roof to do it. And if they could get the cameras further back, if the walls weren’t in the way, they could get wider shots. Now, to get any width and distance, the dancers have to be jammed against a wall. “But we’re always pushing to get the maximum out of whatever we have. Whenever we upgrade our system, we try to do more than we can with whatever that new thing is, more than it’s really capable of doing. I always feel we’re at a primitive level. Like with the color camera. We didn’t really have enough light to shoot color, that’s why the color lags. So it’s like lousy color. This year we’re trying to get enough light to get a decent color picture. We used every single watt we had, but it wasn’t enough.
“We want to do things that are visually different, but you have to remember that every day at 4:30 this place turns back into a classroom. You have to strike everything. You can’t put in anything permanent or anything too elaborate, that takes too long to either set up or break down, or you spend all your time doing that,
“But some of the things we do here we could never do if we were working in a broadcast situation. Our luxury is time. Not having a million union people around so we can’t afford to stop to figure something out. I think our Dance in America show was good because we spent four weeks figuring out all the shots, the cuts, everything. We were able to do that, in the context of the series, because we don’t have music problems. It costs s much to record an orchestra and then pay them every time they play back or whatever it is they have to do. But our music just goes on afterwards - we don’t have to listen to it when we dance. For video, that’s a big plus. It gives you flexibility. You can’t usually cut out bars of music, but without music you can do whatever you must to make it work visually.” Making pieces for video, says Atlas, has also turned out to be another chance procedure. “The first piece we did was Westbeth. It was never intended to be done live, but after it was over, we just ran it in the space. It was very weird, because it all had to do with apparatus that wasn’t there anymore. And the same thing with Fractions. The way the space is used is almost like an Event, where Merce takes things from different dances and puts them all over - here, and here, and here. Because of the monitors, we had to use the extreme sides a lot. But Fractions is all one piece. It’s abstract, but it seems to me to be a lot about the qualities of different people. There’s a lot of jumping. But there’s always something strange about Merce’s pieces. Like putting that long, slow duet for Robert and Karole right near the end. Like a romantic duet.
“We like to do things for broadcast, and we think of our work here as making models for better produced broadcast versions - although we’re both sick of Fractions and we don’t want to do it again because it was so complicated. But I think it holds together for repeated viewings and even, you know, mapmaking. You can watch it and try to figure out who went where. It’s like a puzzle, really. Wherre did they go? Where are they really?”
Though I couldn’t grasp Fractions very well the first time watched it through, and I felt that Jon Gbson’s solos flute music was numbing, the second time I find that my eye can take in more, flicks easily from the live space to the cross-references and comments of the monitors, and tends to create its own game with the material. Watching becomes intellectual and effortless. I like the pink-beige flood of the first color shot, its strange lack of accent, and even the way the color lag leaves a shadow. Lisa Fox does the solo I saw Karole Armitage dance live, bending, twisting her legs in and out, lifting her knees high. Her torso is broken in two sections on the monitors. In a brief duet for Ellen Cornfield and Komar, she gently arches back. On the monitor, Kovich simultaneously, and at the same pace, bends forward.
Back at City Center, the company is warming up. Merce is doing battements with his hand on the proscenium for balance. The house is black. The stage is dark. It is oddly silent except for the gentle creak of a ballet slipper, the muted whoosh of a foot sliding out in tendu.