Tributes
David White
It’s noon in Sally Sommer’s West 10th Street apartment, and all we can talk about is food. “Burt was a really good eater,” someone says. Surrounded by prints of Loie Fuller at the Folies-Bergere, we have assembled to plan something to remember Burt by, but it is too soon to remember, the loss too close to the bone, we shouldn’t have to remember at this irrevocable moment. Sally’s warming up fish cakes, Laurie Uprichard is making up platters of cheese and asparagus, and someone imagines Burt’s ideal meal: “bacon, chocolate, a pastry from Veniero’s, and maybe a peach melba served in the warm Montpelier night.” We all laugh and improvise around Burt’s delights.
Those delights included ducks and dancers. Burt and his brother Robert collected duck decoys, tracked them down assiduously through country auctions and a favorite 44th Street dealer. The ducks marched everywhere around and across his East Village apartment, an ersatz wetlands. His dance artists were collected with the same intellectual obsession and acerbic glee. It is not too much to say that he loved Marta Renzi and Ulysses Dove and Trisha Brown with unalloyed passion, that he equally embraced the diverse, rough-edged Americana of Dan Wagoner, Donald Byrd and Dan Hurlin, that he took great sensual pleasure in the physical transcendence of dancers as different as Nikki Castro, Desmond Richardson and Paula Gifford. Or that he could announce to the Bessies Committee that the Music and Dance of Sumatra was the best contemporary work he had seen all season.
For 25 years, the collector provided a safe haven for a still fledging and vulnerable art form. Dance as it emerged from the Judson Church period was individualist, lonesome, and without a defined popular base. Through his editorship at The Village Voice, his unwavering support of his partner Deborah Jowitt as well as a strongly eclectic bunch of equally caring and outspoken writers - Sally Banes, Gus Solomons, Jr, Joan Acocella, Sally Somers, Elizabeth Zimmer, Linda Arlene Small, Joseph Mazo, to name only a few - the dance community of New York found its brave public voice.
In an era where the arts are too often juxtaposed with “leisure,” Burt made cultural journalism an art, including stories drawn from the real lives of artists, investigations into the economics of the creative landscape, broader contexts of sex and gender, and larger social issues that transform the artist into citizen. He trumpeted personalities, imaginations, and daring physicality to anyone who would listen. In the last week of his life, he championed Ulysses Dove at ABT, Pooh Kaye, Indian dancer Leela Raja and Rotterdam’s Scapino Ballet for an issue he would never see. Burt knew like nobody else how to cover the waterfront, even on his way to eternity.
Burt Supree was dance’s Max Perkins, an editor of artists in the best sense of the word. He studied, he encouraged, he notated, he talked back, and empowered others to do the same. An Artists Space shirt quotes Wittgenstein’s dictum “Words are deeds.” Well, they were more than deeds for Burt; they were platforms for the art, stages for argument, bricks to build the working community, artist by artist, writer by writer. God may be in the details, but we know that Burt edits them, and they remain in our blood, pounding nonstop across the Marley into the wings of our soul.
*For you non-dancers, the “Marley” is the linoleum-like flexible dance floor used in theaters and studios.
David R. White is executive director and producer of Dance Theatre Workshop.
Those delights included ducks and dancers. Burt and his brother Robert collected duck decoys, tracked them down assiduously through country auctions and a favorite 44th Street dealer. The ducks marched everywhere around and across his East Village apartment, an ersatz wetlands. His dance artists were collected with the same intellectual obsession and acerbic glee. It is not too much to say that he loved Marta Renzi and Ulysses Dove and Trisha Brown with unalloyed passion, that he equally embraced the diverse, rough-edged Americana of Dan Wagoner, Donald Byrd and Dan Hurlin, that he took great sensual pleasure in the physical transcendence of dancers as different as Nikki Castro, Desmond Richardson and Paula Gifford. Or that he could announce to the Bessies Committee that the Music and Dance of Sumatra was the best contemporary work he had seen all season.
For 25 years, the collector provided a safe haven for a still fledging and vulnerable art form. Dance as it emerged from the Judson Church period was individualist, lonesome, and without a defined popular base. Through his editorship at The Village Voice, his unwavering support of his partner Deborah Jowitt as well as a strongly eclectic bunch of equally caring and outspoken writers - Sally Banes, Gus Solomons, Jr, Joan Acocella, Sally Somers, Elizabeth Zimmer, Linda Arlene Small, Joseph Mazo, to name only a few - the dance community of New York found its brave public voice.
In an era where the arts are too often juxtaposed with “leisure,” Burt made cultural journalism an art, including stories drawn from the real lives of artists, investigations into the economics of the creative landscape, broader contexts of sex and gender, and larger social issues that transform the artist into citizen. He trumpeted personalities, imaginations, and daring physicality to anyone who would listen. In the last week of his life, he championed Ulysses Dove at ABT, Pooh Kaye, Indian dancer Leela Raja and Rotterdam’s Scapino Ballet for an issue he would never see. Burt knew like nobody else how to cover the waterfront, even on his way to eternity.
Burt Supree was dance’s Max Perkins, an editor of artists in the best sense of the word. He studied, he encouraged, he notated, he talked back, and empowered others to do the same. An Artists Space shirt quotes Wittgenstein’s dictum “Words are deeds.” Well, they were more than deeds for Burt; they were platforms for the art, stages for argument, bricks to build the working community, artist by artist, writer by writer. God may be in the details, but we know that Burt edits them, and they remain in our blood, pounding nonstop across the Marley into the wings of our soul.
*For you non-dancers, the “Marley” is the linoleum-like flexible dance floor used in theaters and studios.
David R. White is executive director and producer of Dance Theatre Workshop.
Deborah Jowitt
I try to create a file called “Burt” on my computer and find that one already exists. It’s a note I wrote to him last week to send along with my column. Everywhere I am confronted with his unfathomable absence. I’ve spent the last few days looking into other people’s tear-filled eyes, listening to voices that crack with disbelief and sorrow. “A heart attack! But...” “I went to the ballet with him the night before!” “I had an edit with him on Thursday; he was fine!” The only consolation, we all agree, is that he would have wanted to go like that, dying before he hit the ground.
When I began to write for The Village Voice in 1967, Burt used to sit in one corner of the arts editor’s pie-shaped office typing at the speed of light. Since the office was about the size of a New York bathroom, he tried to be invisible. I didn’t realize that he was a dancer (“Not much of one,” he later said modestly) and had participated in the wildly creative goings-on at Judson Church.
Burt performed in Aileen Pasloff’s Unholy Picnic (1964), Men’s Dance, Belisa in the Garden and Cypher (1965). In 1965, he was also in the Ruth Krauss-Al Carmines A Beautiful Day, directed by Remy Charlip. Passloff, David Vaughan, John Herbert McDowell, Viola Farber and Burt’s friend-for-life June Ekman were among those in the cast. The next year, he replaced an original cast member in a revival of the Gertrude Stein-Al Carmines What Happened and performed in H.M. Kououkas’’s Pomegranada (choreographed by Pasloff). I didn’t learn until recently that he was also in several plays at the American Place Theater and La Mama. Toward the end of the 1960’s, he and Elaine Summers did a performance in the big second-floor meeting room at MOMA - apparently the first dancing ever at the museum.
It wasn’t until Burt had become listings editor for the Voice and was writing the wise, uncondescending Kids column he contributed to that paper from 1973 to 1979 that we had our first long talk. It took place in the lobby of the theater at Riverside Church, and it was about dance. He went back to the paper and volunteered to be my editor.
Among editors, he was a prince. Ask any of the dance writers he championed at the Voice - and he did fight for us, although we rarely found out about it from him. He didn't worry that we’d get swelled heads: he gave praise exuberantly if we merited it. And his criticisms were wise and deftly made. “I don’t think you need that sentence,” he’d say. We didn’t.
At first he wasn’t sure if he should try to write dance criticism, doubting his ability. I never did. I look now at one of the earliest dance reviews that Burt wrote for the Voice, in July of 1977. It concerned a performance by London Contemporary Dance Theatre. A piece of Robert Cohan’s had featured a contorted ritual from which dancers exited one by one. “So they’re fee to leave, eh?” wrote Burt. “So this is the place where they come to be ugly.”
He got even better with the years. We all have our favorite Supree bon mot; mine is his reference to Renee Jeanmaire as possessing “the world’s oldest semi-permanent spit curl.” I read the last reviews he wrote in February, before an arm injury made typing impossible, pausing over this description of a Spanish dancer: “La Meira flowers into stillness out of a spiraling rosette of whirls,” or his capsuling of Beverly Blossom as “dangerously elfin.” How he loved the heat of dancing - relishing awkwardness and the tumble of body over body in some downtown loft.
But his was not a narrow mind. Four days before he died, he was already in a kind of heaven; he’d seen Alessandra Ferri and Julio Bocca dance Giselle sublimely. He was sympathetic to beginning choreographers, but if he didn’t like something, he often didn’t write about it. Life was too short to spend time being mean when he could be listening to an opera taken from the pile of CDs that had taken over his kitchen, working in his garden at the farm in Pennsylvania, sharing a meal with a friend, taking a nap.
People who sat on panels with him praise his integrity, his firmness. People who took courses with him (like “Making Things Up” which he taught at Sarah Lawrence with June Ekman and Shirley Kaplan) remember him as the best teacher they ever had. Everyone who knew him at the Voice cherished him. We grieved with him when his lover, Ray, died. We looked forward to his sly jokes and delighted laugh, his gusto for the good things of life. For years, scarcely a day went by that I didn’t talk to him on the phone - matters of business easily drifting into talk about what vegetables to plant this summer or what beautiful thing we’d seen. “My pond is almost full,” he said last week in triumph.
How can we learn to bear losing him?
The hero of the beautiful Harlequin and the Gift of Many Colors, a children’s book that Burt wrote with Remy Charlip, goes to the carnival dressed in a suit made of scraps of cloth that his friends, understanding his poverty, cut from their own costumes. Burt was not needy in that way, but if ever a man could be said to have walked “clothed in the love of his friends,” it was he.
When I began to write for The Village Voice in 1967, Burt used to sit in one corner of the arts editor’s pie-shaped office typing at the speed of light. Since the office was about the size of a New York bathroom, he tried to be invisible. I didn’t realize that he was a dancer (“Not much of one,” he later said modestly) and had participated in the wildly creative goings-on at Judson Church.
Burt performed in Aileen Pasloff’s Unholy Picnic (1964), Men’s Dance, Belisa in the Garden and Cypher (1965). In 1965, he was also in the Ruth Krauss-Al Carmines A Beautiful Day, directed by Remy Charlip. Passloff, David Vaughan, John Herbert McDowell, Viola Farber and Burt’s friend-for-life June Ekman were among those in the cast. The next year, he replaced an original cast member in a revival of the Gertrude Stein-Al Carmines What Happened and performed in H.M. Kououkas’’s Pomegranada (choreographed by Pasloff). I didn’t learn until recently that he was also in several plays at the American Place Theater and La Mama. Toward the end of the 1960’s, he and Elaine Summers did a performance in the big second-floor meeting room at MOMA - apparently the first dancing ever at the museum.
It wasn’t until Burt had become listings editor for the Voice and was writing the wise, uncondescending Kids column he contributed to that paper from 1973 to 1979 that we had our first long talk. It took place in the lobby of the theater at Riverside Church, and it was about dance. He went back to the paper and volunteered to be my editor.
Among editors, he was a prince. Ask any of the dance writers he championed at the Voice - and he did fight for us, although we rarely found out about it from him. He didn't worry that we’d get swelled heads: he gave praise exuberantly if we merited it. And his criticisms were wise and deftly made. “I don’t think you need that sentence,” he’d say. We didn’t.
At first he wasn’t sure if he should try to write dance criticism, doubting his ability. I never did. I look now at one of the earliest dance reviews that Burt wrote for the Voice, in July of 1977. It concerned a performance by London Contemporary Dance Theatre. A piece of Robert Cohan’s had featured a contorted ritual from which dancers exited one by one. “So they’re fee to leave, eh?” wrote Burt. “So this is the place where they come to be ugly.”
He got even better with the years. We all have our favorite Supree bon mot; mine is his reference to Renee Jeanmaire as possessing “the world’s oldest semi-permanent spit curl.” I read the last reviews he wrote in February, before an arm injury made typing impossible, pausing over this description of a Spanish dancer: “La Meira flowers into stillness out of a spiraling rosette of whirls,” or his capsuling of Beverly Blossom as “dangerously elfin.” How he loved the heat of dancing - relishing awkwardness and the tumble of body over body in some downtown loft.
But his was not a narrow mind. Four days before he died, he was already in a kind of heaven; he’d seen Alessandra Ferri and Julio Bocca dance Giselle sublimely. He was sympathetic to beginning choreographers, but if he didn’t like something, he often didn’t write about it. Life was too short to spend time being mean when he could be listening to an opera taken from the pile of CDs that had taken over his kitchen, working in his garden at the farm in Pennsylvania, sharing a meal with a friend, taking a nap.
People who sat on panels with him praise his integrity, his firmness. People who took courses with him (like “Making Things Up” which he taught at Sarah Lawrence with June Ekman and Shirley Kaplan) remember him as the best teacher they ever had. Everyone who knew him at the Voice cherished him. We grieved with him when his lover, Ray, died. We looked forward to his sly jokes and delighted laugh, his gusto for the good things of life. For years, scarcely a day went by that I didn’t talk to him on the phone - matters of business easily drifting into talk about what vegetables to plant this summer or what beautiful thing we’d seen. “My pond is almost full,” he said last week in triumph.
How can we learn to bear losing him?
The hero of the beautiful Harlequin and the Gift of Many Colors, a children’s book that Burt wrote with Remy Charlip, goes to the carnival dressed in a suit made of scraps of cloth that his friends, understanding his poverty, cut from their own costumes. Burt was not needy in that way, but if ever a man could be said to have walked “clothed in the love of his friends,” it was he.
Paulus Berensohn
Although I had met Burt Supree when still living in New York City, it was not until he, Remy Charlip and June Ekman joined Laurie Graham, Larry Wilson, M.C. Richards and I to share our lives on a former farm in Northeast Pennsylvania that I got to know him, that we became friends. Laurie, Larry, M.C. and I lived on the farm year round. June and Remy came often, Burt every weekend - increasingly longer weekends.
Our friendship ripened due to my curiosity about and admiration for the poetry he was writing and because of our mutual love of woven things Burt had made several trips to Mexico and Guatemala with Remy and then June where he was especially taken by indigenous cloth and needle work. He would bring examples of what he had collected to show me.
Four of us living and working on the farm loved to make things by hand. Although I worked primarily with clay then, I also worked with needle and thread, filled journals with doodled fabric patterns, and knitted. Burt, who I do not believe had ever done hand work before, soon taught himself an original way to crochet and for several years made scarves and blankets that many of his friends still treasure. One winter we collaborated on a hooked rug based on chance procedures.
For the first year or two, when we would walk the land, Burt - New York City born and bred - kept his eyes focused on the ground, nervously on the lookout for snakes. It wasn’t long before he became comfortable and then enthusiastic about living closer to nature. His way into it began when he offered to assist M.C. in our vegetable garden, and then deepened with Laurie’s learned and experienced help and fellowship. He grew to love gardening. A vivid memory I hold of him is of him driving down our road after several days of his city work. When he came abreast of his garden, he would stop and, without turning off his car, dash into his garden to see what had happened to the life there during his days away, and what called for his immediate attention.
Burt was a man of enormous and quiet sensibilities. He was the link to my earlier life, every week bringing news of the performances he attended, books he was reading, exhibitions of artists we admired. I especially looked forward to reading the reviews he wrote for The Village Voice. His writing had a unique quality that differed from other critical writing I was familiar with then. Instead of telling if he liked a performance or not, if it was, in his opinion, good or questionable work, he would describe, with poetic detail, what he had seen and how he had experienced it, leaving it up to me as to how I might imagine what it was that he had beheld. I liked his softer, more inclusive tone. I came to think of Burt as a fair witness.
September 2008
Our friendship ripened due to my curiosity about and admiration for the poetry he was writing and because of our mutual love of woven things Burt had made several trips to Mexico and Guatemala with Remy and then June where he was especially taken by indigenous cloth and needle work. He would bring examples of what he had collected to show me.
Four of us living and working on the farm loved to make things by hand. Although I worked primarily with clay then, I also worked with needle and thread, filled journals with doodled fabric patterns, and knitted. Burt, who I do not believe had ever done hand work before, soon taught himself an original way to crochet and for several years made scarves and blankets that many of his friends still treasure. One winter we collaborated on a hooked rug based on chance procedures.
For the first year or two, when we would walk the land, Burt - New York City born and bred - kept his eyes focused on the ground, nervously on the lookout for snakes. It wasn’t long before he became comfortable and then enthusiastic about living closer to nature. His way into it began when he offered to assist M.C. in our vegetable garden, and then deepened with Laurie’s learned and experienced help and fellowship. He grew to love gardening. A vivid memory I hold of him is of him driving down our road after several days of his city work. When he came abreast of his garden, he would stop and, without turning off his car, dash into his garden to see what had happened to the life there during his days away, and what called for his immediate attention.
Burt was a man of enormous and quiet sensibilities. He was the link to my earlier life, every week bringing news of the performances he attended, books he was reading, exhibitions of artists we admired. I especially looked forward to reading the reviews he wrote for The Village Voice. His writing had a unique quality that differed from other critical writing I was familiar with then. Instead of telling if he liked a performance or not, if it was, in his opinion, good or questionable work, he would describe, with poetic detail, what he had seen and how he had experienced it, leaving it up to me as to how I might imagine what it was that he had beheld. I liked his softer, more inclusive tone. I came to think of Burt as a fair witness.
September 2008
Happy is the Man in Whose Hand Line A Joins Line B
Burt: 60 centavos, musicians
June: 1 peso, dice
Burt: 1 peso, dice
June: 2 pesos, anatomy chart
Burt: 1 peso, 30 centavos, almond skin cream
June: 14 pesos 50 centavos, lunch
Burt: 1 peso 20 centavos, soda
June: 1 peso 35 centavos, almond skin cream
Burt: 5 pesos, movie
June: 20 centavos, incorrect weight
Burt: 17 pesos 50 centavos, dinner
June: 1 peso 20 centavos, soda
5 pesos, Tony Rome
9 pesos, dinner
60 centavos, lifesavers
August 3, VeraCruz
Burt: 25 pesos, Hotel Imperial
June: 7 pesos, breakfast
Burt: 7 pesos, breakfast
June: 6 pesos 50 centavos, hat
Burt: 12 pesos, baseball shirt
June: 1 peso 20 centavos, postcards of Doris Day
Burt: 12 pesos 50 centavos, one leather glove without fingertips
June: 25 pesos, Hotel Imperial
Burt: 1 peso 20 centavos, postcards of Liz
June: 60 centavos, musicians
June: 1 peso, dice
Burt: 1 peso, dice
June: 2 pesos, anatomy chart
Burt: 1 peso, 30 centavos, almond skin cream
June: 14 pesos 50 centavos, lunch
Burt: 1 peso 20 centavos, soda
June: 1 peso 35 centavos, almond skin cream
Burt: 5 pesos, movie
June: 20 centavos, incorrect weight
Burt: 17 pesos 50 centavos, dinner
June: 1 peso 20 centavos, soda
5 pesos, Tony Rome
9 pesos, dinner
60 centavos, lifesavers
August 3, VeraCruz
Burt: 25 pesos, Hotel Imperial
June: 7 pesos, breakfast
Burt: 7 pesos, breakfast
June: 6 pesos 50 centavos, hat
Burt: 12 pesos, baseball shirt
June: 1 peso 20 centavos, postcards of Doris Day
Burt: 12 pesos 50 centavos, one leather glove without fingertips
June: 25 pesos, Hotel Imperial
Burt: 1 peso 20 centavos, postcards of Liz
June: 60 centavos, musicians