Other Writings
Costumes from Newspaper
Most costumes are made to illustrate, enhance or interpret a character already defined. We want to present costume as a way of discovering a character - whether person, place or thing. The focus is on the process of transformation, on having a full experience of making something and letting it evolve, grow, and change into an experience of drama with or without words.
We are using newspaper as our primary material because its properties appeal to us. It is disposable, inexpensive (usually already used), and easy to find. It is not intimidating. It can be shaped to the body, rolled, crumpled, crushed, torn, creased, folded, shredded, and so on.
Participants need not start with a particular costume idea in mind. It can be made up as you go along. The costumes can be developed through an exploration of the paper itself. The character created can then be explored through considering how it moves and feels, and how one costume affects another in the same room.
We want to give minimal instructions because we don’t want to impose our ideas of what can be done with the materials. People always think of things to do that we would never imagine. We want to encourage people to work trustingly with the material, to let it guide and surprise them, and free them to follow their own visionary impulses.
MAKE A COSTUME FROM NEWSPAPER
IT CAN BE ANY SHAPE
ANY SIZE
ANYTHING
MAKE IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG
YOU CAN TEAR
FOLD
PLEAT
CRUMPLE
TAPE
TWIST
TIE
CRUSH
ROLL
STUFF
ETC.
IF YOU NEED HELP REACHING OR TAPING, PLEASE ASK SOMEONE TO HELP YOU.
POSSIBILITIES / WAYS TO EXPLORE
HOW ARE YOU? HOW DO YOU FEEL?
HOW DO YOU MOVE?
HOW DO YOU COMMUNICATE? WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT
WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
ETC.
We are using newspaper as our primary material because its properties appeal to us. It is disposable, inexpensive (usually already used), and easy to find. It is not intimidating. It can be shaped to the body, rolled, crumpled, crushed, torn, creased, folded, shredded, and so on.
Participants need not start with a particular costume idea in mind. It can be made up as you go along. The costumes can be developed through an exploration of the paper itself. The character created can then be explored through considering how it moves and feels, and how one costume affects another in the same room.
We want to give minimal instructions because we don’t want to impose our ideas of what can be done with the materials. People always think of things to do that we would never imagine. We want to encourage people to work trustingly with the material, to let it guide and surprise them, and free them to follow their own visionary impulses.
MAKE A COSTUME FROM NEWSPAPER
IT CAN BE ANY SHAPE
ANY SIZE
ANYTHING
MAKE IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG
YOU CAN TEAR
FOLD
PLEAT
CRUMPLE
TAPE
TWIST
TIE
CRUSH
ROLL
STUFF
ETC.
IF YOU NEED HELP REACHING OR TAPING, PLEASE ASK SOMEONE TO HELP YOU.
POSSIBILITIES / WAYS TO EXPLORE
HOW ARE YOU? HOW DO YOU FEEL?
HOW DO YOU MOVE?
HOW DO YOU COMMUNICATE? WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT
WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
ETC.
Mother, Mother, I feel sick/Send for the doctor quick, quick, quick
From the author’s info on the dust jacket:
BURTON SUPREE is a graduate of City College of New York and is a member of the staff of the New York newspaper, The Village Voice. This is his first book for children. He has performed in Aileen Pasloff’s company at the Judson Dance Theatre and on tour, and also with Surya Kumari. Mr. Supree is currently working on a second book for Parents’ Magazine Press.
REMY CHARLIP is the author and illustrator of
Fortunately, Where is Everybody? and It Looks Like Snow, which was recently made into a movie. This
book, Mr. Charlip’s sixteenth, reflects his active interest in theatre. He is one of the founders of the popular children’s theatre, The Paper Bag Players, and has published two plays performed by this group. He has choreographed and directed the poem-plays of Ruth Kraus and is now working on a collection of plays that children can do themselves.
From the first page of the book:
This story is fun to do as a shadow play.
All you need is a bed sheet hung in front of a table, under the table a box filled with ordinary junk from around the house, and behind the table a very strong lamp that casts shadows onto the sheet.
The audience, seated in the dark on the other
side of the sheet, will see only the shadows. When
the doctor pulls things out of the box it will look as if the objects are coming from the boy lying on the table.
It is better if you make up what to say to go with
the objects you use. (Lots of oohing and aahing
is good and sound effects can be very funny.)
You can also make up tunes as you go along and
just sing the whole thing. Then you have an opera-
shadow-play.
BURTON SUPREE is a graduate of City College of New York and is a member of the staff of the New York newspaper, The Village Voice. This is his first book for children. He has performed in Aileen Pasloff’s company at the Judson Dance Theatre and on tour, and also with Surya Kumari. Mr. Supree is currently working on a second book for Parents’ Magazine Press.
REMY CHARLIP is the author and illustrator of
Fortunately, Where is Everybody? and It Looks Like Snow, which was recently made into a movie. This
book, Mr. Charlip’s sixteenth, reflects his active interest in theatre. He is one of the founders of the popular children’s theatre, The Paper Bag Players, and has published two plays performed by this group. He has choreographed and directed the poem-plays of Ruth Kraus and is now working on a collection of plays that children can do themselves.
From the first page of the book:
This story is fun to do as a shadow play.
All you need is a bed sheet hung in front of a table, under the table a box filled with ordinary junk from around the house, and behind the table a very strong lamp that casts shadows onto the sheet.
The audience, seated in the dark on the other
side of the sheet, will see only the shadows. When
the doctor pulls things out of the box it will look as if the objects are coming from the boy lying on the table.
It is better if you make up what to say to go with
the objects you use. (Lots of oohing and aahing
is good and sound effects can be very funny.)
You can also make up tunes as you go along and
just sing the whole thing. Then you have an opera-
shadow-play.
Harlequin and the Gift of of Many Colors
From author's notes:
Remy Charlip and Burton Supree have wanted to do this book for a long time. They twice visited the historic town of Bergamo, Italy, where the famous Commedia dell’arte character, Harlequin, comes from. Bergamo and some of the children of the town provide inspiration and background for the paintings in this book.
This is the second book by Mr. Charlip and Mr. Supree published by Parents. The first, MOTHER MOTHER I FEEL SICK SEND FOR THE DOCTOR QUICK QUICK QUICK received the gold medal award from the Boys Club of America.
Both are active in theater and education in New York City. This is Mr. Supree’s third book and Mr. Charlip’s twentieth, including ARM IN ARM and FORTUNATELY, both published by Parents. ARM IN ARM was the winner of the first prize in graphic arts at the Bologna Book Fair in 1971.
from the introduction:
Harlequin’s diamond-patterned costume is well-known. But the earliest drawings of four hundred years ago show him wearing a suit with irregular patches, roughly sewn on. Only later was it formalized into the familiar diamond shapes.
This story about how Harlequin got his patchwork suit takes place during the merry holiday of Carnival. It is based on an outline found in Larousse’s Dictionnaire Universel du XXIX Siecle, 1865.
Carnival comes just before Lent, a time when people give up what they like best. Everyone can have their fill of their favorite things at Carnival, so that afterwards they won’t mind so much going without them.
Giving things up is an important part of the story too. For if his friends had not given up a little of something that was dear to them, Harlequin would never had gotten his costume.
Remy Charlip and Burton Supree have wanted to do this book for a long time. They twice visited the historic town of Bergamo, Italy, where the famous Commedia dell’arte character, Harlequin, comes from. Bergamo and some of the children of the town provide inspiration and background for the paintings in this book.
This is the second book by Mr. Charlip and Mr. Supree published by Parents. The first, MOTHER MOTHER I FEEL SICK SEND FOR THE DOCTOR QUICK QUICK QUICK received the gold medal award from the Boys Club of America.
Both are active in theater and education in New York City. This is Mr. Supree’s third book and Mr. Charlip’s twentieth, including ARM IN ARM and FORTUNATELY, both published by Parents. ARM IN ARM was the winner of the first prize in graphic arts at the Bologna Book Fair in 1971.
from the introduction:
Harlequin’s diamond-patterned costume is well-known. But the earliest drawings of four hundred years ago show him wearing a suit with irregular patches, roughly sewn on. Only later was it formalized into the familiar diamond shapes.
This story about how Harlequin got his patchwork suit takes place during the merry holiday of Carnival. It is based on an outline found in Larousse’s Dictionnaire Universel du XXIX Siecle, 1865.
Carnival comes just before Lent, a time when people give up what they like best. Everyone can have their fill of their favorite things at Carnival, so that afterwards they won’t mind so much going without them.
Giving things up is an important part of the story too. For if his friends had not given up a little of something that was dear to them, Harlequin would never had gotten his costume.
Rough-Hewn: Dan Wagoner’s Dances
November 1984, Dan Wagoner, who has had his own company for fifteen years and plays the Joyce Theater this month, lives in a loft on Broadway that, with its peaked ceiling of dark wood, looks about as close to a barn as you can get in New York City. It is furnished largely with early American antiques that are put to daily use. Since images redolent of rural American heritage crop up in many of Wagoner’s dances, and a broad respect for traditional manners and values informs his works, the logic of the decor and the ambience is almost too perfect. But collecting American antiques sort of crept up on him.
Back in West Virginia’s Allegheny mountains, Wagoner’s family lived with country things in a simple style echoing a pioneer life. The youngest of ten children, Wagoner wanted to dance. “There was no precedent for that in Springfield, West Virginia,” he says. “I didn’t even know for a long time that you could do it as a profession.”
But he knew that dancing meant going to New York and when he eventually got there (after college, the army, working with Ethel Butler in Washington), he met New England-born and -bred George Montgomery, who had an old house in New Hampshire. Wagoner went to visit, but something made him uneasy there: “I went to get something from the corner cupboard one day, and I thought I smelled apple butter, which was like being home again. All of a sudden, I realized why I was uncomfortable - I still had that feeling I had to get out and get to New York to dance.” Then, able to relax, Wagoner began to go along with Montgomery to antique shops. The first thing he bought was a quilted coverlet of glazed wool in a butternut brown. “It was five dollars. And there was also a painting of some sheep in a pasture and some trees. And that was five dollars. I just bought what I liked.”
“The first real painting that I hung on my wall made such a difference!” He shows me a small painting with little children rowing in a boat that he bought on Bleecker Street. “That was in 1964, the year I went to the Far East with Paul Taylor. We’d been paid all our money in advance. I saw this painting and I just kept talking about it. And George said, ‘Then you should go buy it.’ It was about $135, which was a lot of money for a modern dancer. So I went in with my hands shaking and paid the money. It changed my life to be able to look up at that painting every morning. Living with things like these makes me see space and design differently. It adds a grace to one’s life.
“Any kind of naive and awkward landscape with people in it just bowls me over,” Wagoner confesses. He shows me a small landscape with a funny little house, a big lake and mountains in the distance and a rapids and a small pond close up. But the scale is amazing, the sense of space weird. The people rowing in the foreground are infinitely small, like toys, or as if they belonged way in the distance near the mountains.
Naive painting, “at its best, is extremely strong and evocative,” he says. “Very gutsy. You can almost smell it.” Wagoner felt emanating from that kind of painting a powerful sense of the painter’s self. And he admired the qualities of people who were self-taught and did for themselves, like his own family.
The sense of identity and clear purpose Wagoner recognized in those naive artists and craftsmen, as well as in his father, fascinated him. And so did the daily lives of the artists and their subjects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “I wanted to know what it feels like to cook in a fireplace and hold these handmade implements. What it’s like when you pick up a wooden spoon and stir soup in an iron pot. I get an incredible sense of individuality and beauty from these things.” And the same with fabrics. He found vegetable colors mellow and beautiful, so he began to dye fabric with vegetable dyes. He began to do crewel embroidery and to hook rugs in order to restore the early but worn things he’d bought in New England, sometimes in such tattered condition that the shopkeeper was embarrassed to sell them. But repairing a rug, knowing that someone else had conceived and worked on it, gave Wagoner the feeling of picking up somebody’s fantasy and carrying it forward. And then he started to make his own pieces as well. “When you start using the tools and actual techniques that they used, designs just suggest themselves.”
“For me, in old things, there’s a tremendous sense of everything having been touched. Every inch of fabric has been stitched by hand and woven first. Every bit. The beams are hand-hewn. You see the marks where someone made each stroke of the adze. Because of all that personal kind of attention, there’s an inherent sense of rightness in proportion and design. I find that in trying to fashion something for myself, like a shirt, if I take as much care as I can, I can’t go wrong. The finished thing may be curious and strange in its way, but it usually has interest as a garment when you wear it.”
Furniture always costs more,” Wagoner notes, “and I used to parcel my money out bit by bit and get smaller things.” But he has fallen for furniture, particularly things from West Virginia, like a small chest with ball feet, a pie safe in the studio, some ladder-back chairs in a house he bought a few years ago. “Those things are special - my ancestors looked at the very same things.”
The 1789 West Virginia house is a huge, stone structure with walls a foot-and-a-half to two feet thick, set in a clump of trees in a river-bottom meadow. There’s no road (you row across the river when the water’s high, ford it in a jeep when it’s low), no electricity, no pump (you throw a bucket down the well and haul it up). “The house exerts itself so completely,” says Wagoner. “I’m often intimidated by it. It really dominates and takes hold of you.” Its stone, aged to a mellow greenish yellow, glows like gold in the slanted evening sunlight. “I’ll often think of that stone during the year,” says Wagoner, “and think that that house can’t possibly be sitting there, It goes up in smoke whenever I leave.”
Some of Wagoner’s dances have a strong, particular flavor of a post-pioneering just-settled rural America. But even when his dances are abstract, or set in a very different context, they often convey a kind of sociable gaiety, and companionableness, a gracious formality and affection, with the emotions contained behind a modest demeanor. There’s the kind of playfulness that can burst out of people who are done with their work. Openhearted and upright - words which translate the Tibetan name of Wagoner’s first Lhasa Apso dog, Tubsen - are the qualities of his dances. And they are ideal American qualities.
Wagoner may use Dowland, Purcell, Haydn but more likely traditional banjo or dulcimer music, or a Scott Joplin rag, or sappy country hits, or romantic pop songs of the 1930’s or Louis Moreau Gottschalk (for his new Magnolia), or Charles Tomlinson Griffes, or contemporary variations on traditional material - like Michael Sahl’s versions of “Yankee Doodle” for Yonker Dingle Variations, or Robert Sallier’s and Carol Webber’s music for A Dance for Grace and Elwood. Sallier, whose ancestry is Choctaw and Cajun, “included a little waltz in there that’s like Cajun music. It keeps sounding like it’s going to go off any minute.”
Wagoner’s 1976 TV program, George’s House, produced by Nancy Mason Hauser for WGBH, done in and around Montgomery’s New Hampshire house, is all to traditional music. But Changing Your Mind was drawn from a watercolor by the Baroness Hyde de Neuville at the New York Historical Society. It show American Indians invited to Washington to dance for President Monroe and European dignitaries. In the piece, Montgomery pulls a newspaper from a wastebasket and reads random items from it as he comes across them, and then, finally, a planted story about American Indians. “George made up that little blurb. He loves sad endings - so he said that rather than go back to a life of deprivation, they chose to protest by taking their own lives. Something like that.”
In A Play with Images and Walls, Montgomery strolls through the whole dance walking the floor plan of his New Hampshire house, speaking his poems from the places in the house where he wrote them. And in the course of the piece, Wagoner introduces specific folk art objects - a bench, a washtub, a handwoven blanket, a candlestick - which remain onstage. “I thought of it as making naive paintings for myself,” says Wagoner. “I really was making pictures.” The dancers sit quietly as solos and duets are done, sometimes responding to them and sometimes not. Two people sitting on the bench as if in front of a fireplace just change position and lean against each other, stand up and sit down. “The whole dance is very simple. Finally, at the end, there’s a big hubbub and three of them jump into a tub of water and it splashes. JoAnn Fregalette-Jansen comes out with a candle and starts to go off, but she can’t resist standing in the water for a minute. So she hitches up her skirt and steps in the tub and smiles as she wiggles her toes. It’s partly the innocence of these pleasures, which aren’t the slightest bit corny, and the homeliness of the details, the familial sense of continuity, that seem so rooted in traditional virtues. But these are virtues without narrowness, without exclusiveness, without the self-righteousness that condemns whatever doesn’t hew the line. Wagoner elevates our notion of ourselves, and shows it to us, within a dance, unsentimentally and without any salesmanship. Social virtues like cooperation and courtesy are not what his dances are about; they are part of the ground they grow in.
The recent Amara I and II, set to Griffes, is a thorough reconception of Otjibwa Ango (1982), though much of the movement is the same. In Amara’s earlier incarnation, Wagoner was thinking about American Indians, but he began to realize that his idea was too specific, and that what was needed was a made-up place, a made-up culture. “What I did is start with a limbo space and accumulate dancers, creatures, a sophistication in the use of space. Then people recognizing each other, finally touching, almost devising a calligraphy of moving as a group that gets more complex and builds an energy that brings forth a whole new place, an idyllic civilization, and then disintegrates.” “You mean, you like sad endings, too?” I tease. “I guess,” Wagoner answers gravely. “In most of my dances, people often smile and laugh, but I think that life - and the dance too - isn’t divided into one year of seriousness and one year of comedy.”
“I like to think it’s not only the Americana thing that reflects in the dances,” says Wagoner, “but it’s been a way for me to latch on to a sense of myself and even a sense of design and of beauty.” It’s not something that translates in a literal way. Making a dance or a rug or a piece of furniture is not the work of a second. It’s something that’s worked over, and worked over, considered and fiddled with, and refined. The maker has to continue to enjoy the doing of it for quite some time.
Wagoner consciously chooses to live with certain objects that delight him and make him feel at home. And just as you can see the harmony in the knobby turnings and worn paint of an old table, that same harmony and individuality, even eccentricity, are made welcome in Wagoner’s dances.
Back in West Virginia’s Allegheny mountains, Wagoner’s family lived with country things in a simple style echoing a pioneer life. The youngest of ten children, Wagoner wanted to dance. “There was no precedent for that in Springfield, West Virginia,” he says. “I didn’t even know for a long time that you could do it as a profession.”
But he knew that dancing meant going to New York and when he eventually got there (after college, the army, working with Ethel Butler in Washington), he met New England-born and -bred George Montgomery, who had an old house in New Hampshire. Wagoner went to visit, but something made him uneasy there: “I went to get something from the corner cupboard one day, and I thought I smelled apple butter, which was like being home again. All of a sudden, I realized why I was uncomfortable - I still had that feeling I had to get out and get to New York to dance.” Then, able to relax, Wagoner began to go along with Montgomery to antique shops. The first thing he bought was a quilted coverlet of glazed wool in a butternut brown. “It was five dollars. And there was also a painting of some sheep in a pasture and some trees. And that was five dollars. I just bought what I liked.”
“The first real painting that I hung on my wall made such a difference!” He shows me a small painting with little children rowing in a boat that he bought on Bleecker Street. “That was in 1964, the year I went to the Far East with Paul Taylor. We’d been paid all our money in advance. I saw this painting and I just kept talking about it. And George said, ‘Then you should go buy it.’ It was about $135, which was a lot of money for a modern dancer. So I went in with my hands shaking and paid the money. It changed my life to be able to look up at that painting every morning. Living with things like these makes me see space and design differently. It adds a grace to one’s life.
“Any kind of naive and awkward landscape with people in it just bowls me over,” Wagoner confesses. He shows me a small landscape with a funny little house, a big lake and mountains in the distance and a rapids and a small pond close up. But the scale is amazing, the sense of space weird. The people rowing in the foreground are infinitely small, like toys, or as if they belonged way in the distance near the mountains.
Naive painting, “at its best, is extremely strong and evocative,” he says. “Very gutsy. You can almost smell it.” Wagoner felt emanating from that kind of painting a powerful sense of the painter’s self. And he admired the qualities of people who were self-taught and did for themselves, like his own family.
The sense of identity and clear purpose Wagoner recognized in those naive artists and craftsmen, as well as in his father, fascinated him. And so did the daily lives of the artists and their subjects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “I wanted to know what it feels like to cook in a fireplace and hold these handmade implements. What it’s like when you pick up a wooden spoon and stir soup in an iron pot. I get an incredible sense of individuality and beauty from these things.” And the same with fabrics. He found vegetable colors mellow and beautiful, so he began to dye fabric with vegetable dyes. He began to do crewel embroidery and to hook rugs in order to restore the early but worn things he’d bought in New England, sometimes in such tattered condition that the shopkeeper was embarrassed to sell them. But repairing a rug, knowing that someone else had conceived and worked on it, gave Wagoner the feeling of picking up somebody’s fantasy and carrying it forward. And then he started to make his own pieces as well. “When you start using the tools and actual techniques that they used, designs just suggest themselves.”
“For me, in old things, there’s a tremendous sense of everything having been touched. Every inch of fabric has been stitched by hand and woven first. Every bit. The beams are hand-hewn. You see the marks where someone made each stroke of the adze. Because of all that personal kind of attention, there’s an inherent sense of rightness in proportion and design. I find that in trying to fashion something for myself, like a shirt, if I take as much care as I can, I can’t go wrong. The finished thing may be curious and strange in its way, but it usually has interest as a garment when you wear it.”
Furniture always costs more,” Wagoner notes, “and I used to parcel my money out bit by bit and get smaller things.” But he has fallen for furniture, particularly things from West Virginia, like a small chest with ball feet, a pie safe in the studio, some ladder-back chairs in a house he bought a few years ago. “Those things are special - my ancestors looked at the very same things.”
The 1789 West Virginia house is a huge, stone structure with walls a foot-and-a-half to two feet thick, set in a clump of trees in a river-bottom meadow. There’s no road (you row across the river when the water’s high, ford it in a jeep when it’s low), no electricity, no pump (you throw a bucket down the well and haul it up). “The house exerts itself so completely,” says Wagoner. “I’m often intimidated by it. It really dominates and takes hold of you.” Its stone, aged to a mellow greenish yellow, glows like gold in the slanted evening sunlight. “I’ll often think of that stone during the year,” says Wagoner, “and think that that house can’t possibly be sitting there, It goes up in smoke whenever I leave.”
Some of Wagoner’s dances have a strong, particular flavor of a post-pioneering just-settled rural America. But even when his dances are abstract, or set in a very different context, they often convey a kind of sociable gaiety, and companionableness, a gracious formality and affection, with the emotions contained behind a modest demeanor. There’s the kind of playfulness that can burst out of people who are done with their work. Openhearted and upright - words which translate the Tibetan name of Wagoner’s first Lhasa Apso dog, Tubsen - are the qualities of his dances. And they are ideal American qualities.
Wagoner may use Dowland, Purcell, Haydn but more likely traditional banjo or dulcimer music, or a Scott Joplin rag, or sappy country hits, or romantic pop songs of the 1930’s or Louis Moreau Gottschalk (for his new Magnolia), or Charles Tomlinson Griffes, or contemporary variations on traditional material - like Michael Sahl’s versions of “Yankee Doodle” for Yonker Dingle Variations, or Robert Sallier’s and Carol Webber’s music for A Dance for Grace and Elwood. Sallier, whose ancestry is Choctaw and Cajun, “included a little waltz in there that’s like Cajun music. It keeps sounding like it’s going to go off any minute.”
Wagoner’s 1976 TV program, George’s House, produced by Nancy Mason Hauser for WGBH, done in and around Montgomery’s New Hampshire house, is all to traditional music. But Changing Your Mind was drawn from a watercolor by the Baroness Hyde de Neuville at the New York Historical Society. It show American Indians invited to Washington to dance for President Monroe and European dignitaries. In the piece, Montgomery pulls a newspaper from a wastebasket and reads random items from it as he comes across them, and then, finally, a planted story about American Indians. “George made up that little blurb. He loves sad endings - so he said that rather than go back to a life of deprivation, they chose to protest by taking their own lives. Something like that.”
In A Play with Images and Walls, Montgomery strolls through the whole dance walking the floor plan of his New Hampshire house, speaking his poems from the places in the house where he wrote them. And in the course of the piece, Wagoner introduces specific folk art objects - a bench, a washtub, a handwoven blanket, a candlestick - which remain onstage. “I thought of it as making naive paintings for myself,” says Wagoner. “I really was making pictures.” The dancers sit quietly as solos and duets are done, sometimes responding to them and sometimes not. Two people sitting on the bench as if in front of a fireplace just change position and lean against each other, stand up and sit down. “The whole dance is very simple. Finally, at the end, there’s a big hubbub and three of them jump into a tub of water and it splashes. JoAnn Fregalette-Jansen comes out with a candle and starts to go off, but she can’t resist standing in the water for a minute. So she hitches up her skirt and steps in the tub and smiles as she wiggles her toes. It’s partly the innocence of these pleasures, which aren’t the slightest bit corny, and the homeliness of the details, the familial sense of continuity, that seem so rooted in traditional virtues. But these are virtues without narrowness, without exclusiveness, without the self-righteousness that condemns whatever doesn’t hew the line. Wagoner elevates our notion of ourselves, and shows it to us, within a dance, unsentimentally and without any salesmanship. Social virtues like cooperation and courtesy are not what his dances are about; they are part of the ground they grow in.
The recent Amara I and II, set to Griffes, is a thorough reconception of Otjibwa Ango (1982), though much of the movement is the same. In Amara’s earlier incarnation, Wagoner was thinking about American Indians, but he began to realize that his idea was too specific, and that what was needed was a made-up place, a made-up culture. “What I did is start with a limbo space and accumulate dancers, creatures, a sophistication in the use of space. Then people recognizing each other, finally touching, almost devising a calligraphy of moving as a group that gets more complex and builds an energy that brings forth a whole new place, an idyllic civilization, and then disintegrates.” “You mean, you like sad endings, too?” I tease. “I guess,” Wagoner answers gravely. “In most of my dances, people often smile and laugh, but I think that life - and the dance too - isn’t divided into one year of seriousness and one year of comedy.”
“I like to think it’s not only the Americana thing that reflects in the dances,” says Wagoner, “but it’s been a way for me to latch on to a sense of myself and even a sense of design and of beauty.” It’s not something that translates in a literal way. Making a dance or a rug or a piece of furniture is not the work of a second. It’s something that’s worked over, and worked over, considered and fiddled with, and refined. The maker has to continue to enjoy the doing of it for quite some time.
Wagoner consciously chooses to live with certain objects that delight him and make him feel at home. And just as you can see the harmony in the knobby turnings and worn paint of an old table, that same harmony and individuality, even eccentricity, are made welcome in Wagoner’s dances.
Exploring Contradictions: The Dance-Theater of Maguy Marin
October, 1987
In early July in Montpelier, France, Maguy Marin plunks herself down at our outdoor cafe table, fresh from a little spree in a toy store. Gleefully, she displays a small Meccano set (like an Erector set) she’ll use in working out some of her next piece, provided that her five-year-old doesn’t appropriate it. Well, this set’s too small anyway; she needs something bigger, with more pieces. Too bad the store’s already closed. What’s in the works is The Seven Deadly Sins, a major collaboration with the Lyon Opera Ballet (for which she choreographed Cendrillon) that will feature her own dancers as well as the ballet company, like Twyla Tharp’s original Deuce Coupe mingled her company with the Joffrey Ballet.
Marin is simply gleaming. Her hair is a little damp with sweat; smiling impishly, she,s wearing a loose dark gray dress that’s almost as casual as a bathrobe and barely touches the body - a good idea in the heat. Last night Marin was with her company in Aix-en-Provence to perform Eden, one of the works she’ll be bringing to BAM this fall. Tonight she’s headed back to Paris. This afternoon she’s been walking around with Jean-Paul Montanari, director of Montpelier’s annual international dance festival, checking out indoor and outdoor dance spaces because she’s been commissioned to do a new work here next year. Both her collaborations with the Lyon Opera Ballet will be presented as well.
One of the foremost French choreographers, Marin is justly gaining an international reputation. Her past is checkered. She started ballet training at the age of eight in a conservatory in Toulouse. She dreamed of being a ballerina, and at the age of 16 battled with her parents to let her go to Paris to study further. Succeeding in wearing them down into acceptance, she took classes there with Nina Virubova, a romantic dancer who had been a star with the Marquis de Cuevas. At 18, she got her first professional contract with the ballet company in Strasbourg.
It was in Strasbourg that her dream got a serious jolt. She became friendly with some young actors from the school there, and suddenly realized that what she was doing in her dancing was “very far away from my real feelings. You know, in classic dance you learn discipline, you learn to do the steps the way they tell you to do them and you really learn humility because you have to do exactly what the teachers say.” She saw the discipline in her friends’ training too, but in their free time they were trying to make theater pieces on their own. “What are they doing? she thought. “I like that!” And she began to ask herself what she was doing in a tutu.
She decided to leave the company and study again: “To go to a modern class, maybe to study theater, singing. Maybe this and maybe that. I wanted to know.” By chance, she heard of Maurice Bejart’s school, Mudra, which was scheduled to open the next year, went to Brussels to audition, and was accepted. “And then started a fantastic time of opening, and of contradiction. When I went there I knew only classic ballet, and suddenly it was like: aaah! My mouth was opening and opening and opening.
“I started doing improvisation. In the beginning I cried, because I couldn’t imagine creating something myself. Just to be invited to move on my own! Nobody telling me to do something and having to do it. What are you asking me? I was out of my mind because of that. I did yoga too for three years. And learning to work without words but in a theatrical way. We were working from eight in the morning sometimes till eleven in the night because we couldn’t stop. It was like a drug, it was so passionate.”
She became loathe to take the ballet classes, thinking of it as a stiff technique, not in accord with her spirit. So when she graduated, she didn’t directly join Bejart’s company, thinking it was too “classic” for her, but for almost a year tried to make work with other people just coming out of the school. And then, at 22, she had an urge to go back to dancing, sure that if she didn’t do it then she never would. “I was not so concerned anymore about dancing on the technical heights.” Bejart took her in the company. “I was happy I think. I was at least doing my dream in a certain way, my little girl dream.”
Again, after about four years, she began wondering what she was doing there. “What was my place? I wanted to work with a different spirit - maybe with a little company, not a big one. I feel it’s important that you keep the human relation. I need it - even as a dancer, between me as a dancer and the choreographer. I need to have a personal feeling. I want to be concerned with what the choreographer’s doing, to be happy to defend the work, not only to be there because I’m being paid.”
She and her husband, Daniel Ambash, fought with Bejart and left the company to “go and look and see what else is in the world.” So they went to Paris (and wanted to come to New York but didn’t have the money). They took classes, but it wasn’t satisfying: they were itchy. Looking at a dance magazine they read about a new choreographic competition in Switzerland. They decided to work on something for a month and go to the competition, which they won hands down, Marin says, because “we were pretty good dancers” and the quality of the other work shown was so bad. They came back to Paris wanting more.
More was the 1978 Bagnolet competition, which they also won. “We were French - we almost forgot about that. The Ministry of Culture saw two French people win and they gave us some money. We couldn’t believe it. So we took the money and decided to do more. Why not?”
They rented a small, old theater in Paris, and founded Ballet Theatre de l’Arche (which became Compagnie Maguy Marin in 1984). Working with three or four dancers they did a whole evening, followed up by performing here and there. The next year the ministry laid a bit more money on them. “For three years we were working like mad people. Because we didn’t have money for technicians and like that, we were the technicians, the costumes, choreographers - everything. But we had a lot of satisfaction.”
She devised a project based on Samuel Beckett’s work, May B (premiered in 1981), and was trying to raise money for it; she needed five men and five women and only had four in the company. Finally, the Maison des Arts of Creteil, a Paris suburb, took it on and gave her a studio of her own to work in for the first time. (“Before that we were working from two to four in one studio, then we’d take the Metro to work in another studio from five to seven. It was terrible.”) Her next piece, Babel Babel (1982 - also to be seen at BAM) was on a grander scale, created for the big stage at Creteil, at the urging of the director of the Maison des Arts. “In the beginning, I wanted to make a work using voice - voice and movement, That’s why I took the title Babel Babel, and because I chose that title, I took the theme of the Tower of Babel as a base for the work.
“I don’t much like text theater, you know, where there’s a lot of blahblahblahblahblah. I like it when it’s visual. When people are standing in front of you saying fantastic things, I’m not so responsive, but when they’re saying fantastic things and what I see is fantastic also I get involved. If it’s just words and words and words, you might as well read it.”
In Babel Babel, the dancers speak in an invented language. “You don’t understand the words, but I’m sure you understand what they mean because of the way they say it, because of the emotion that goes into the voice. It’s like movement. If you are angry or if you are happy you don’t do the same arabesque. Sometimes when you’re talking with people they’re telling you something very nice and you feel it’s not really nice at all. Sometimes it’s the contrary. I wanted to explore that contradiction.”
In Babel Babel, the dancers are naked for the beginning and end sections of the piece. “That was good for me because I couldn’t do many technical things. There are positions I couldn’t use. For example, I couldn’t use the legs as freely as I could if they were clothed. So I had to work sculpturally, putting bodies together like molding something out of mud.”
In Eden, made in 1986 (a commission from the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers), the dancers wear body stockings painted with breasts and genitals to suggest nakedness. Their faces are masked, their hair is false. At first Marin worked without realizing that she would want the dancers undressed. She was concentrating on making duets. Once the piece was done, she considered how it should be costumed, and realized that the best costume would be to have the dancers naked once again. But the immodesty of the choreography - opening the legs, for example - made it impossible. “So I had to make them naked without being naked.
“When I started working on the duets, I was thinking the theme will be love. Again. And I called it Eden because the first love story was there. For the music, I wanted to take all kinds of little phrases - from opera, movies, songs, anything - that speak about love. Like, there is a film of Hitchcock where the woman says ‘I love you so much,’ and she cries after. So I took that phrase. And Callas in La Forza del Destino singing, ‘I love you, I love you, yes, I love you. You don’t believe me, yes, I love you, me too.’ I put love phrases together one after another. Suddenly I felt in French that the words were too clear, so reversed them and I liked it a lot better. Because you get the same emotion.”
Generally, Marin begins to work not with a big conception, but a small idea, an inclination. “I have some idea in consciousness. I know it somewhere in my head. But I don’t say it, even to myself. I won’t want to tell what it is because I don’t want to give things a form too soon. I have the feeling of the conception - like for Cendrillon, I knew I wanted a doll world, and for Eden something Biblical, like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Somehow I’m looking for that. It will take about a month before I can begin to explain things to the people I’m working with. Then I can say, ‘I would like that to be...whatever.’ Before that, I keep it inside, I leave it to nature.”
For Eden, she arrived in Angers with maybe 60 or 70 types of sounds, all those love words from Forza to Gone with the Wind. She knew that the base of the score would be the sound of heavy rain, thunderstorms, and that the other sounds would come out of the rain. “I was doing the choreography in silence, and I was putting together the music at the same time as the steps. That was magical - to start working on it together. Actually, it was done like a film. First I would do three, four images, then I would make a montage. And then when you have all the cuts done you put the sound on it. It was exactly like that: making the images, deciding the order, thinking this one should stay longer, these others go quick, quick, quick. I was imagining the stage as if it were TV or a movie. I’d like to do a movie, in a few years. A dance movie. Not filming dance, but a dance movie.”
“It’s very funny to be a choreographer,” she says, eagerly ripping the cellophane wrap off her Meccano set.
In early July in Montpelier, France, Maguy Marin plunks herself down at our outdoor cafe table, fresh from a little spree in a toy store. Gleefully, she displays a small Meccano set (like an Erector set) she’ll use in working out some of her next piece, provided that her five-year-old doesn’t appropriate it. Well, this set’s too small anyway; she needs something bigger, with more pieces. Too bad the store’s already closed. What’s in the works is The Seven Deadly Sins, a major collaboration with the Lyon Opera Ballet (for which she choreographed Cendrillon) that will feature her own dancers as well as the ballet company, like Twyla Tharp’s original Deuce Coupe mingled her company with the Joffrey Ballet.
Marin is simply gleaming. Her hair is a little damp with sweat; smiling impishly, she,s wearing a loose dark gray dress that’s almost as casual as a bathrobe and barely touches the body - a good idea in the heat. Last night Marin was with her company in Aix-en-Provence to perform Eden, one of the works she’ll be bringing to BAM this fall. Tonight she’s headed back to Paris. This afternoon she’s been walking around with Jean-Paul Montanari, director of Montpelier’s annual international dance festival, checking out indoor and outdoor dance spaces because she’s been commissioned to do a new work here next year. Both her collaborations with the Lyon Opera Ballet will be presented as well.
One of the foremost French choreographers, Marin is justly gaining an international reputation. Her past is checkered. She started ballet training at the age of eight in a conservatory in Toulouse. She dreamed of being a ballerina, and at the age of 16 battled with her parents to let her go to Paris to study further. Succeeding in wearing them down into acceptance, she took classes there with Nina Virubova, a romantic dancer who had been a star with the Marquis de Cuevas. At 18, she got her first professional contract with the ballet company in Strasbourg.
It was in Strasbourg that her dream got a serious jolt. She became friendly with some young actors from the school there, and suddenly realized that what she was doing in her dancing was “very far away from my real feelings. You know, in classic dance you learn discipline, you learn to do the steps the way they tell you to do them and you really learn humility because you have to do exactly what the teachers say.” She saw the discipline in her friends’ training too, but in their free time they were trying to make theater pieces on their own. “What are they doing? she thought. “I like that!” And she began to ask herself what she was doing in a tutu.
She decided to leave the company and study again: “To go to a modern class, maybe to study theater, singing. Maybe this and maybe that. I wanted to know.” By chance, she heard of Maurice Bejart’s school, Mudra, which was scheduled to open the next year, went to Brussels to audition, and was accepted. “And then started a fantastic time of opening, and of contradiction. When I went there I knew only classic ballet, and suddenly it was like: aaah! My mouth was opening and opening and opening.
“I started doing improvisation. In the beginning I cried, because I couldn’t imagine creating something myself. Just to be invited to move on my own! Nobody telling me to do something and having to do it. What are you asking me? I was out of my mind because of that. I did yoga too for three years. And learning to work without words but in a theatrical way. We were working from eight in the morning sometimes till eleven in the night because we couldn’t stop. It was like a drug, it was so passionate.”
She became loathe to take the ballet classes, thinking of it as a stiff technique, not in accord with her spirit. So when she graduated, she didn’t directly join Bejart’s company, thinking it was too “classic” for her, but for almost a year tried to make work with other people just coming out of the school. And then, at 22, she had an urge to go back to dancing, sure that if she didn’t do it then she never would. “I was not so concerned anymore about dancing on the technical heights.” Bejart took her in the company. “I was happy I think. I was at least doing my dream in a certain way, my little girl dream.”
Again, after about four years, she began wondering what she was doing there. “What was my place? I wanted to work with a different spirit - maybe with a little company, not a big one. I feel it’s important that you keep the human relation. I need it - even as a dancer, between me as a dancer and the choreographer. I need to have a personal feeling. I want to be concerned with what the choreographer’s doing, to be happy to defend the work, not only to be there because I’m being paid.”
She and her husband, Daniel Ambash, fought with Bejart and left the company to “go and look and see what else is in the world.” So they went to Paris (and wanted to come to New York but didn’t have the money). They took classes, but it wasn’t satisfying: they were itchy. Looking at a dance magazine they read about a new choreographic competition in Switzerland. They decided to work on something for a month and go to the competition, which they won hands down, Marin says, because “we were pretty good dancers” and the quality of the other work shown was so bad. They came back to Paris wanting more.
More was the 1978 Bagnolet competition, which they also won. “We were French - we almost forgot about that. The Ministry of Culture saw two French people win and they gave us some money. We couldn’t believe it. So we took the money and decided to do more. Why not?”
They rented a small, old theater in Paris, and founded Ballet Theatre de l’Arche (which became Compagnie Maguy Marin in 1984). Working with three or four dancers they did a whole evening, followed up by performing here and there. The next year the ministry laid a bit more money on them. “For three years we were working like mad people. Because we didn’t have money for technicians and like that, we were the technicians, the costumes, choreographers - everything. But we had a lot of satisfaction.”
She devised a project based on Samuel Beckett’s work, May B (premiered in 1981), and was trying to raise money for it; she needed five men and five women and only had four in the company. Finally, the Maison des Arts of Creteil, a Paris suburb, took it on and gave her a studio of her own to work in for the first time. (“Before that we were working from two to four in one studio, then we’d take the Metro to work in another studio from five to seven. It was terrible.”) Her next piece, Babel Babel (1982 - also to be seen at BAM) was on a grander scale, created for the big stage at Creteil, at the urging of the director of the Maison des Arts. “In the beginning, I wanted to make a work using voice - voice and movement, That’s why I took the title Babel Babel, and because I chose that title, I took the theme of the Tower of Babel as a base for the work.
“I don’t much like text theater, you know, where there’s a lot of blahblahblahblahblah. I like it when it’s visual. When people are standing in front of you saying fantastic things, I’m not so responsive, but when they’re saying fantastic things and what I see is fantastic also I get involved. If it’s just words and words and words, you might as well read it.”
In Babel Babel, the dancers speak in an invented language. “You don’t understand the words, but I’m sure you understand what they mean because of the way they say it, because of the emotion that goes into the voice. It’s like movement. If you are angry or if you are happy you don’t do the same arabesque. Sometimes when you’re talking with people they’re telling you something very nice and you feel it’s not really nice at all. Sometimes it’s the contrary. I wanted to explore that contradiction.”
In Babel Babel, the dancers are naked for the beginning and end sections of the piece. “That was good for me because I couldn’t do many technical things. There are positions I couldn’t use. For example, I couldn’t use the legs as freely as I could if they were clothed. So I had to work sculpturally, putting bodies together like molding something out of mud.”
In Eden, made in 1986 (a commission from the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers), the dancers wear body stockings painted with breasts and genitals to suggest nakedness. Their faces are masked, their hair is false. At first Marin worked without realizing that she would want the dancers undressed. She was concentrating on making duets. Once the piece was done, she considered how it should be costumed, and realized that the best costume would be to have the dancers naked once again. But the immodesty of the choreography - opening the legs, for example - made it impossible. “So I had to make them naked without being naked.
“When I started working on the duets, I was thinking the theme will be love. Again. And I called it Eden because the first love story was there. For the music, I wanted to take all kinds of little phrases - from opera, movies, songs, anything - that speak about love. Like, there is a film of Hitchcock where the woman says ‘I love you so much,’ and she cries after. So I took that phrase. And Callas in La Forza del Destino singing, ‘I love you, I love you, yes, I love you. You don’t believe me, yes, I love you, me too.’ I put love phrases together one after another. Suddenly I felt in French that the words were too clear, so reversed them and I liked it a lot better. Because you get the same emotion.”
Generally, Marin begins to work not with a big conception, but a small idea, an inclination. “I have some idea in consciousness. I know it somewhere in my head. But I don’t say it, even to myself. I won’t want to tell what it is because I don’t want to give things a form too soon. I have the feeling of the conception - like for Cendrillon, I knew I wanted a doll world, and for Eden something Biblical, like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Somehow I’m looking for that. It will take about a month before I can begin to explain things to the people I’m working with. Then I can say, ‘I would like that to be...whatever.’ Before that, I keep it inside, I leave it to nature.”
For Eden, she arrived in Angers with maybe 60 or 70 types of sounds, all those love words from Forza to Gone with the Wind. She knew that the base of the score would be the sound of heavy rain, thunderstorms, and that the other sounds would come out of the rain. “I was doing the choreography in silence, and I was putting together the music at the same time as the steps. That was magical - to start working on it together. Actually, it was done like a film. First I would do three, four images, then I would make a montage. And then when you have all the cuts done you put the sound on it. It was exactly like that: making the images, deciding the order, thinking this one should stay longer, these others go quick, quick, quick. I was imagining the stage as if it were TV or a movie. I’d like to do a movie, in a few years. A dance movie. Not filming dance, but a dance movie.”
“It’s very funny to be a choreographer,” she says, eagerly ripping the cellophane wrap off her Meccano set.