Marina Warner explores the fairy tale

‘Once Upon a Time,’ by Marina Warner
by Aimee Bender, The New York Times, January 23, 2015

New book pays tribute to feminist author Merlin Stone

Cover of Merlin Stone's When God Was A Woman (1976),
a formative work of the Women's Spirituality movement

Merlin Stone Remembered: Her Life and Works
by David B. Axelrod, Carol F. Thomas, Lenny Schneir and Merlin Stone
(Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., 2014; 384 pages)
ISBN: 9780738740911

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody
also posted to hummingwitch

Merlin Stone's research into ancient Goddess civilizations and spiritual beliefs (as author of When God Was A Woman and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood) and her prodigious creativity on the feminist scene of the 1970s and '80s, touched the lives of many women and our male allies. When I was a producer and host at WBAI, New York's Pacifica radio station, I interviewed Stone (World Watch: Goddess at Dawn, May 1988) and, in 1990, had the honor of speaking on a panel with her, Spiderwoman Theater's Gloria Miguel and other feminists working in non-mainstream spiritual traditions and the arts. Later, Stone invited me to assist with a new audio project. We began to meet, but our work was interrupted and never completed. In declining health, she passed in the winter of 2011.

We're now at a time when young women often distance themselves from the feminist label; when the public discourse, even among feminist activists, relegates spirituality to oblivion; and when the religious dictates of patriarchy demonstrate their disastrous effects on a civic and global level. I was excited to learn that Llewellyn Worldwide planned to bring out a book on Merlin Stone's life and contributions. Surely, Stone would speak to our condition once again, offering alternative perspectives and motivation.

Merlin Stone Remembered--a rough patchwork assembled by admiring colleagues and family members--is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the book I'd hoped to read. Ideally, that book might be researched and written by an independent scholar, not a committee intent on unnecessarily and redundantly pleading The Case for Merlin Stone's Greatness. It would offer both a deep, detailed, coherent, reasonably objective portrait of this unusual and unusually determined woman, born Marilyn Claire Jacobson in Brooklyn in 1931. It might give us an engaging account of her many travels throughout the Mediterranean and Near East, to the extent that adequate documentation exists, and a professional assessment of her life's work. At least the introduction by noted ecofeminist Dr. Gloria F. Orenstein takes pains to put Stone in the context of other pioneering, if often controversial, authors such as Helen Diner, Monica Sjoo, and Marija Gimbutas.

The book's collaborators take a preemptive tack, defending their inclusion of a memoir by Stone's companion, Leonard ("Lenny") Schneir. A professional poker player and dealer in gambling memorabilia, Schneir lived with Stone for decades, seeing her through her final illness and death. By all accounts, the relationship was a happy one and, for Schneir, instructive and transforming. Apparently, though, the book team ran into some unidentified women's objections to the idea of Schneir adding his story to Merlin Stone Remembered.

I would never take issue with Schneir having a say here merely because he is male. But I suspect that you, like me, might find yourself hurrying through the lengthy, at times self-indulgent narrative about his journey before and with Stone--and, definitely, you will want to move past the poems. Greater care should have been taken with the overall structure and balance of this book.

Schneir's participation is not the book's only flaw, merely one out of many. Throwing together excerpts from Stone's interviews, bits of her published and (perhaps, justifiably) unpublished work, and repetitive essays like David B. Axelrod's "reflection on the poetic genius of Merlin Stone" and another by Schneir with Axelrod, entitled "The Importance of Merlin Stone" argues that this is a case of opportunities not only missed but willfully refused.

Instead of illuminating substance, we get filler: Stone's honorary doctorate certificate from The California Institute of Integral Studies, her birth certificate, pages of photos not selected to add anything to our understanding of the woman. One section reproduces numerous examples of fan mail from her readers, but I doubt that, even in the Internet Age, this author needs Yelp-style testimonials. What follows these letters? Another essay: this time, "The Legacy of Merlin Stone."

Here's how I want to remember Stone: as the woman who, in a talk with Michael Toms, subtly noted a difference between "planetary consciousness" and "planetary conscience." As a white woman troubled by racism, an observer of psyches and societies who saw fear at the root of repression. As a writer, sometimes pedagogic in tone but broadminded in her vision of feminism and of spirituality. A writer whose informed, complex, inspiring work was everything this book is not.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody
also posted to hummingwitch

Courage of his convictions: Jean Guéhenno in Nazi-occupied Paris

Shedding Light on Nazi-Occupied Paris
David Ball’s Translation of ‘Diary of the Dark Years’
by Alice Kaplan, The New York Times, June 25, 2014

Dance chose me: choreographer Stephen Petronio writes his life

Above: choreographer and Aries, Stephen Petronio
Below: Stephen Petronio Company dances
I Drink the Air Before Me (2010)
(photos by Sarah Silver)

Confessions of A Motion Addict
by Stephen Petronio (self-published, 2014; 288 pp.)
ISBN-13: 9781492736547

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

I should not have been surprised to learn that Stephen Petronio self-published his memoir, Confessions of A Motion Addict. While the dramatic arc of this world-famous artist's life and career--not to mention the literally boldfaced names he can and does drop, sometimes scandalously--should make any publisher salivate, I can't imagine Petronio having much patience for any middleman or woman dictating how he should tell his own story. The book, all 288 pages of it, is Petronio, through and through. As Spike Lee would say, it's his joint.

The first sixty or so pages, dense and filling, plunge readers deep into childhood and teenage history: richly remembered Italian-American feasts, furtive sexual experiments, rollercoaster drug experiments, precocious insights into the personalities orbiting him, scary dreams, passion, restlessness and, always, a sense of outsider status. By page 67, his artistic fate is sealed when Contact Improvisation makes a serious pass at this newbie Hampshire College student. He subsequently forgets all about taking pre-med. "Inner motor" revved up, mind blown....

I look down my body, and I realize...it's there. I have a body and it is mine. I have a body and do not understand its power or potential or the invisible stories pressing at my skin. I desperately want to move.

Next up? Judson Dance Theater's Steve Paxton, a guest artist at Hampshire. "I am the bastard child of Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown," Petronio will tell us later on, citing his two greatest influences. Brown is, after all, the woman for whom he harnessed up and walked down the wall of a 14th Century French monastery (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building), a feat he repeated a few years ago at the Whitney Museum.

But there's still a lot of getting there until he's there. Petronio takes us along on an adventurous hitchhiking trip through Canada and the West Coast. The young man, exposed to the rigors of nature and the unpredictability of the human animal--enjoyed unexpected kindness of strangers along the way, the occasional minor bummer and one hugely, hugely major one. He's headstrong and lucky and an Aries, and maybe only an Aries would attempt this type of trip in this type of way--"Like all good Aries, I must try to try on every possible lifestyle as my next incarnation"--and get through intact.

Petronio made it through a lot of stuff intact--personal losses, the early years of the AIDS crisis, displacement, along with a lot of other artists, from a gentrifying SoHo, 9/11, a sex-and-drugs lifestyle that could make a rock star look like a rank amateur.

You see the dancer leap and bound, defy gravity and press the boundaries of human movement possibility, yet the mechanics and sensations of these efforts are for the most part concealed. In the mainstream forms of dance, artists often paint a smile over the top of Herculean efforts, but their soul is gritting and grimacing for dear life. The dancer has come to represent the ethereal, outside the law of physics, but we live on the earth and the pull of gravity is definitive. We work with it, attempt to defy it, and yes, we eat real food, pant, smoke, drink, eliminate, copulate, get married, divorced, addicted and healed. We are human. We sometimes break. And it all hurts at some point or another. And we all do something to deal with that pain. Some more than others.

He has chosen to reveal the pull of gravity and the mechanics of living, to conceal nothing, whether it be a personal lapse or a controversial opinion. And with it all, his story provides the kind of energetic rush one comes to expect from his work on the stage.

Learn more about Confessions of A Motion Addict here.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

A book details the story of Black women in performing arts and activism

Harnessing Celebrity to Civil Rights Cause
‘How It Feels to Be Free’ Salutes Black Female Entertainers
by Farah Jasmine Griffin, The New York Times, January 15, 2014

Eric Fischl: Bad boy in retrospect

 

Bad Boy–My Life On & Off the Canvas

by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone

(Random House, 2013)

ISBN: 978-0-7704-3557-8

reviewed by Deborah Feller

News and Views, DeborahFeller.com

August 25, 2013

Feelings lodged in my subconscious were driving my work toward a form of expressiveness that was raw and graphic and troubling–and sometimes cathartic…images would pop out that were increasingly recognizable both as people and things, avatars of my buried past. -- Eric Fischl

Click to read the review.

Questlove: the man and his music

The Big Man Under the Afro, and His Music

Questlove Publishes His Memoir, ‘Mo’ Meta Blues’

by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, June 25, 2013

Hollywood in the age of Hitler

Film No Evil: ‘Hollywood and Hitler,’ by Thomas Doherty
by Dave Kehr, The New York Times, May 23, 2013

Have you read Lisa Cohen's "All We Know"?

Read This Book: Lisa Cohen’s “All We Know”
by Hilton Als, The New Yorker, March 12, 2012

"All We Know" by Lisa Cohen
by Courtney Gillette, Lamda Literary, July 10, 2012

***

Well, to answer my own question, no. At least, not yet. But last night, I went to a dramatic reading by its author, Lisa Cohen, two brilliant theater performers--Moe Angelos and Camelita Tropicana--and renowned makeup artist Dick Page.

All We Know: The Passions of Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland--directed by Sarah Krohn and presented at Dixon Place--has inspired me to seek out Cohen's All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012), the biography of three queer modernists encircled by illustrious friends. Nearly two hours, intermission-less and intricately dense, the reading's effectiveness as theater only came in variously witty fits and starts, and I'm convinced the book will be much more fun. I found Page (the non-actor, reading as British Vogue fashion editor Madge Garland) the most intriguing in that way that happens when a soft manner and British accent force you to lean in to catch half-muffled words and meanings. Not until Angelos (Murphy), Tropicana (de Acosta) and Page, to our surprise, got sprung from their historical roles, free to be themselves, did the evening take off as they launched amusing, if garrulous, monologues dealing with experiences of failure. Just as each of Cohen's subjects could have merited a book of her own, each of these striking personalities are a joy to look at and listen to at length--maybe not all in the same evening, though.

Lisa Cohen on Tumblr

Purchase All We Know: Three Lives

Connect with Dixon Place here.

Wojnarowicz's fire in the belly

‘Fire in the Belly,’ on David Wojnarowicz, by Cynthia Carr
by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, July 19, 2012

Don't miss Jena Strong.

Don't Miss This
by Jena Strong

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa (InfiniteBody)

The photo on the back of poet Jena Strong's Don't Miss This shows her amusingly askew but forward, a woman with a wry smirk, scrinched up eyes, dynamic asymmetry. She looks like a rascal--fun, smart, trouble. Maybe the trouble first. I discover that she has named her WordPress blog Bullseye, Baby! and, like any other blog name, there must be one hell of a story in that and that might become clear later, but it certainly fits the face.

On Bullseye, Baby!, I'm greeted by a photo portrait of Strong that spans the top banner. Only it's sideways--or, I guess, she was lying down--and the radical cropping and narrowness of it hems her in. I get, right away, that any kind of cropping or narrowing or hemming in does not go well with the energy emanating from this personality. So that banner photo is a little disturbing.

Looking further afield--because photos, and peering into them, beyond the surface image, matter to me--I discover someone else's blog (name now forgotten) that features an interview with Strong and a small photo of her rocking what might be some kind of yoga pose. It's a jaunty and, yep, sideways position. What the...?

Strong's self-published Don't Miss This, a memoir in poetry, confirms these initial impressions of the irrepressible. The Vermont-based writer shares intimate material--the stuff of everyday family life, the arc of relationships, the potentially disruptive discovery of self--yet she is never insular. A child and woman of the world, she always has its often troubling conditions on her mind even as she keeps her beloved daughters in sight ("This is the Faith"). Her work is as confident, brazen even, in its universal vision and embrace as anything by Walt Whitman. In poem after poem, she balances an honest inward insight and familial gaze with an instinctual and easygoing connection to the natural world, the seasons and timelessness. Inside poems like "The Clearing," she embeds that comfy, rural sense of having all the time in the world with a darker awareness of time passing--with a river's breadth and heedlessness--out of one's control. In poems like "Always is Never True," it's clear that she chooses to understand herself as a force of nature, too.

A prelude--entitled Prelude--pulls us into Strong's world. She gives us the image of two Northern cardinals singing to each other. From that avian backdrop, we anticipate a human conversation that will possess, because it is human, a greater capacity for freedom, nuance and...unraveling. And so Strong, in tears, speaks of "...the space I wedged open/contracting" and concludes (her thought and her poem), "It's anyone's guess."

Don't Miss This traces a history of heterosexual love, marriage and parenting and the sudden realization that she is--to use Strong's word--"gay" that upended everything.

She is an engaging, captivating storyteller. Some of her moments made me catch my breath because...well, because they are sudden and so very there. In "Wingspan," for instance, she writes of "my enormous wingspan cramped, contained," and I flashed back to the energy captured in her photos. "Moon Dates" is--can I just say it?--perfect. A perfect Jena Strong poem. Lucid, poignant, full of imagery and feeling. I wanted to find someone to read it to. "Open Door," with its opening, swaying, swinging, many things saying hello, holds loveliness, an invitation.

Each of the book's three sections opens with a poem written by another author. Linda Pastan's haunting "What We Want" ("We don't remember the dream,/but the dream remembers us./It is there all day as an animal is there/under the table....") leads off everything before I/She Who Stays lines up behind Anna Swir's "Myself and My Person." II/Land Mine, which tracks the difficult aftermath of Strong's self-revelation and coming out--is prefaced by Yeats' "Second Coming," an extreme and awkward choice. As it happens, this section, devoted to Strong's rockiest times, contains the book's least accomplished work. III/What I'll Miss, introduced by David Whyte's deceptively simple, gorgeous "The Journey," presents weightier, denser, frankly better crafted work. Here Strong gives us a visceral sense of what it means to deal head on with what truth leaves in its wake. Her storyteller's voice returns in trusty coherence. Wearier, heavier, it is nevertheless back in full force.

Late in this section, in "What I'll Miss," while musing on what it might be like to leave this earth and her loved ones for good, she once again offers the invitation to not miss

Your shame, all those moments
when you wanted to hide,
to disappear, to retract and retreat--
these are your gifts.
Open them.
Look inside. Don't run.

You will find me here,
find yourself here, exposed,
clear as moonstone
letting the light through.

Don't miss this, I'll whisper.
Don't miss this.

For more information and to purchase Don't Miss This, click here, or visit:

Createspace e-store

Amazon.com
Kindle Edition

Susan Rethorst: A Choreographic Mind

I've just finished reading essays by a dancemaker who, while pressing words to fine use, celebrates quiet, visceral intuition over verbal, intellectual modes of being that are usually more highly prized. Susan Rethorst's A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (Teatterikorkeakoulu: Kinesis 2, 2012) takes her readers deep into the sensibilities of an artist who chooses to embrace "not knowing, not quite controlling," honoring what her body tells her and what the dances she makes tell her, too.

The book presents two strands for us to follow: Rethorst's life-altering experiences in youth and her application of personal transformation to creative process. In a custody dispute, her father kidnapped her and her brother Johnny when they were quite young. Two years later, he kidnapped the boy again and, this time, she would not see Johnny until he was 21. I get the impression that while Rethorst must relate this disturbing history--which left her, into adulthood, disinclined to speak but inclined to watch people intently and read the subtle currents and language of bodies--she does so only to set the stage for a calm exploration of how dances are made, how they reveal and present themselves and how they might best be perceived by maker and witness alike.

Rethorst's discussions could benefit fellow choreographers; clearly, she hopes to share her ideas with young artists who frequently stumble over treacherous piles of shoulds and shouldn'ts--what this favored artist does, what that prominent critic appears to reject or champion, what Teacher says is the right thing to do, what's trendy among peers or presenters this season. To these artists, she offers her trust in the unconscious, the body, the ongoing conversation with the dance itself.

The mainstream dance critic, picking up this book, will feel his/her ears burn:

Basically, they tell you what they want to see, and how the piece before them does, or does not, answer to that. It is rare to hear people try to cut through their own taste to try to examine what the dance maker is doing with the form.

Elsewhere, she writes,

What it, the dance, is doing is a door to see what it is valuing, what its goals are, how it functions. Talk about dance is too often, in my opinion, full of implied lack, and the lacks reveal what the particular talker desires to get out of dance.

For someone who grew up not caring to talk much--and, in this and in Rethorst's talent for intuitive perception of people, spaces and things, I strongly identify with her--she certainly enlivens these pages with an impressive, persuasive voice. But, she advises, "don't take my word for it." (Word. There's that word, again....) Yes, your mileage may vary at times, but the journey will take you places you could never anticipate.

Order this book online.

Marina Warner's ‘Stranger Magic’

Gardens of Unearthly Delights: ‘Stranger Magic’ by Marina Warner
by Harold Bloom, The New York Times, March 23, 2012

Your next read: Jeanette Winterson

This book sounds fantastic!

Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’
by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, March 8, 2012

A tale of Tanaquil Le Clercq

Dancing Around the Truth
by Holly Brubach, The New York Times, February 15, 2012

I no longer want my MTV

Who Killed Radio Stars: ‘I Want My MTV,’ by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
reviewed by Dwight Garner, The New York Times, October 24, 2011

Erin Brannigan examines dance on film

Continuing the Conversation
Erin Brannigan’s Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image
reviewed by Terry Sprague

Trinidad embraces co-author of Primus bio

A Gift to Africa
by Glenvile Ashby, The Trinidad Guardian, August 1, 2011

The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus
by Peggy and Murray Schwartz (Yale University Press, 2011)

To authors Peggy and Murray Schwartz, the Trinidad-born dancer, choreographer, anthropologist and educator Pearl Primus (1919-1994) was an extraordinary lifelong friend. Their biography reflects honest but compassionate insight into a towering artist who was not always easy to understand or work with. The Dance Claimed Me ably portrays Primus and the times and experiences that molded her--from racism and Red-baiting in America to a life-transforming, if sometimes unreliably welcoming, Africa. Regal, headstrong and as complex as only a driven genius can be, Primus can be credited with infusing the American dance stage with the profundities and subtleties of African ritual dance and music, influential if impossible to duplicate to perfection. I recommend this engrossing, poignant study of her life and contributions.

Peggy Schwartz is professor of dance and former director of the Dance Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Murray Schwartz is former Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches literature at Emerson College.

The Dance Claimed Me on Amazon.com