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

Memorial service tomorrow for Diane Wolkstein

Read: Why Travel to the Other Side of the World

by Diane Wolkstein, January 2013

The Most Incredible Thing of All at Central Park (2010)

Courtesy Rosegarden Television (CC BY–NC–ND)

 A message from Diane's daughter, Rachel: 

"It is with profound sadness that I tell you that my mother, Diane Wolkstein, passed away very early this morning in Taiwan. She had had emergency heart surgery but the procedure was not sufficient to allow her heart to work on its own. She was not conscious and she was not alone. She had several of her close friends from Taiwan there with her and at the very end she had a rabbi say kaddish and Buddhist prayers were said as well. Her death is a terrible shock. Her life overflowed with joy, intensity, friendship, love and spirit. Her love for each of us and the stories she told live inside of us forever." —Rachel Zucker

Obituary:

Diane Wolkstein, world-renowned storyteller, folklorist, mythologist and author of many books for children and adults, died following emergency heart surgery on January 31 while on a trip to Taiwan working on her most recent project, the Chinese epic story of Monkey King or Journey to the West.

Diane was the author of 23 books of folklore and performed to sold-out crowds throughout the world. What set Diane apart as a storyteller are her performing gifts as well as the depth of knowledge and research she devoted to the stories she told. Diane’s collection, The Magic Orange Tree, was the result of numerous visits to Haiti during which Diane recorded stories told on porches and in late-night gatherings. In Australia, Diane met Aboriginal storytellers who granted her special permission to tell their stories. Wolkstein spent years working with Samuel Noah Kramer, one of the world’s pre-eminent archeologists, to create the definitive telling of the great Sumerian epic, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, which she performed at the United Nations and the British Museum. Because of Diane’s work, Inanna has become an influential text in feminist studies and studies of ancient history.

Diane’s belief in story and its potential to transform people’s lives propelled her to the forefront of the modern storytelling movement as early as 1967, when she joined the New York City’s Department of Parks & Recreation and started a year–round storytelling program for the city’s parks and schools. Diane initiated America’s first graduate storytelling program at Bank Street College of Education and was a regular visiting teacher of mythology at New York University for 18 years. She is a founding member of both America’s National Storytelling Conference and the Storytelling Center of New York City, and has held hundreds of workshops on the art of storytelling throughout her long career. For thirteen years Diane’s radio show, Stories from Many Lands, was broadcast on WNYC–AM/FM bi–weekly, and in 2007 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg named June 22nd of that year “Diane Wolkstein Day” in honor of Diane’s 40 years of storytelling for the people of New York City.

New York City’s children gathered at the foot of the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park to hear Diane tell stories every Saturday for more than forty summers. The culminating event of the storytelling season was her telling of Elsie Piddock Skips in her Sleep and the skip rope competition that followed.

Diane is survived by her daughter, Rachel Zucker, her son-in-law Josh Goren, her three grandsons Moses Goren, Abram Goren and Judah Goren, her mother Ruth Wolkstein, her brothers Martin Wolkstein and Gary Wolkstein, her sister-in-law Elizabeth Borsodi, nieces and nephews and a grandniece. She also leaves behind many dearly loved friends in New York and around the world.

In lieu of flowers please consider making a donation in Diane’s name to Partners in Health, or Tzu Chi Foundation.

A public memorial service will be held this Sunday, February 3rd, at 3PM at the New York Insight Meditation Center, located at 28 West 27th Street, 10th floor (b/w 5th and 6th Avenue). (A second memorial, celebrating Diane's life is being planned for the summer/fall).

Anabella Lenzu premieres "Sangre & Arena"

In Sangre & Arena (Blood & Sand), Argentine-born choreographer Anabella Lenzu proudly works from an aesthetic associated more with the "classical" modern dance of Humphrey, Limón and Graham than with the intents and strategies of New York's contemporary dance makers. And Lenzu's 40-minute trio, given its world premiere last evening at Duo Multicultural Arts Center, looks backward even farther than those pioneering antecedents. Inspired by Roman Mithraic myth and ritual, the work evokes ancient, cathartic rites employing masks of fearsome animal gods; arresting movement gestures; heightened sounds of swirling wind, hypnotic chimes and terrifying gongs; nature-emulating cycles of repetition; and a profusion of blood--or what frightened initiates might easily take for real blood--used to effect lasting transformation.

Fellow dancers Lauren Ohmer and Julia Lindpaintner join Lenzu--disclaimer: she is currently one of my writing students at New York Live Arts--on Duo's little stage in the intimate theater. Ohmer and Lindpaintner's bodies get wildly smeared with paint as their behavior becomes more abandoned. Lighting (by Stephen Petrilli) and the dancers' thrashing in vivid tempera create three-dimensional art come to life. Lindpaintner's robust sturdiness is impressive, but Ohmer's precise, electric shapes make her the most watchable of the three.

Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama continues at Duo tonight at 8pm and with a 2pm matinee tomorrow. For information and tickets, click here.

Duo Multicultural Arts Center
62 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Marina Warner's ‘Stranger Magic’

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

Go, team! Indian classical dance at Rutgers

Indian Classical Dance Team at Rutgers Prepares for Contest
by Vijai Singh, The New York Times, February 10, 2012

Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

Every now and then, an announcement comes along that is way too good to not share. Here's the latest!

A Call for Contributions
Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

archivists: Tanya Rubbak and Adam Overton
at The Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park (Los Angeles)
in April 2011

dear friends,

do you ever feel like you see things that are invisible to others? 

do you ever intuit the presence of other possible realities?

do you ever sense a thickness of energies swirling within the materials around you?

do you ever look at plants and animals and think, “I know what you’re thinking.”

perhaps you’re interested in age-old traditions, but tired of age-old religions?

perhaps you hanker for sacred acts that history has forgotten,

or better yet, perhaps you’ve discovered NEW ways to gently channel the magic in your life?

sceptic or saint, believer or apostate, we’d like to talk to YOU …

about being a part of something very, very SPECIAL ...

The Library of Sacred Technologies

we would like to invite you to participate in our library/reading room in April as part of a residency at the Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park. the space will feature several artists and groups from February through April 2011 as it transforms itself into a church and spiritual center.

our library aims to intercept and illuminate a relationship between contemporary religious and artistic pursuit. we are interested in overlapping the sisterly processes of signification and sanctification, which we view as being innately creative and living in spirit.

with a mixture of found and invented ephemera in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, and articles of faith, the library will capture a communal voice as we celebrate a tradition of religious experimentation in the city of Los Angeles.

Do you hear the call? Will you heed it?

we invite you to temporarily become a best-selling self-published self-helper, a charismatic guru or spiritual leader, a religious anthropologist, or any other type of sincerely mystical dabbler from the past, present or future. we primarily desire text(s) and images to include in printed ephemera, but will consider video and sound documents as well. to whet your appetite, we’ve posted below a list of possible technologies we might be looking to collect. you’re welcome to contribute as much or as little as you’d like, and it can be as [in]comprehensive and [in]comprehensible as you please.

we plan to compile, design, and display these materials for visitors of our Library of Sacred Technologies opening in April 2011. meanwhile, artist-led sermons, services, and workshops based around the temporary observance of [semi-]fictional religious practices will be taking place throughout the month that, with your permission, may or may not incorporate some of these documents. (if you’re interested in leading one of these, please let us know and we’ll contact you as soon as we finish developing a separate call for that portion of the residency.)

here are some starting points for religious invention that we pray you’ll contemplate and contribute:

a religion of the hour

a religion of the day

a religion of the month

a religion of the year

alternative horoscope systems and charts

dance instructions that direct the kundalini or the schizophrenic flow

shaman seances to commune with animal spirit helpers

guided meditations for sudden reality shifts

cures for tardiness

recipes for honesty

maps, formulae and visualizations for time travel

guides to local vortex and portal areas

exorcisms of deep heteronormative conditioning

automatic writing to channel the language of light-beings

alternate creation myths

incantations for accessing the transverbal space of the semiotic chora

harmonic science scores of the ancients that modifies DNA

visualizations for clearing debt

scriptures on radical responsibility

ceremonies that deal with water, driving or synaesthesia

rituals for loss, or lost rituals

prayers and hymns for making new friends

resurrections, fortune-telling, channeling, oracles, predictions and sooth-sayings on the matter of anything you please

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ...

please send your submissions to: sacredtechnologies@plus1plus1plus.org

deadline for text and image submissions is January 15, 2011

deadline for audio and video submissions is February 1, 2011

also: stay tuned, as we hope to convene a couple sacred technology group writing sessions in late December and early January

Topiary's "Landscape"

I wasn't sure where the evening was headed when C. Ryder Cooley sat high atop a platform, strumming a ukulele and singing, in a twee folkie's voice, an elegy to the spirit of a slain goat. (The head of a Pyrenean ibex lay under her platform.) And I wasn't totally sure when writer/video artist/performer Samuael Topiary, dressed to suggest the Renaissance Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, climbed down a ladder situated at the rear of the audience rows and started picking out potential models. Something about that seemed a little ordinary, a little...done. But trust quickly kicked in because, with Topiary, it soon became clear that we were in the hands of a multi-talented artist who knows what she's doing and why she's doing it.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, presented at Abrons Arts Center, is named for the Bruegel painting in which the mythic flyboy's disastrous splashdown is totally marginalized by the luminous environment dwarfing it. A consideration of this famous painting becomes Topiary's starting point for a deep, flowing meditation on the state of an America pitching towards 9/11 and economic turmoil.

In the course of guiding this Big Myth journey, Topiary assumes not only the role of Bruegel but also doomed high-flyers including explorer Henry Hudson, a bull she calls the Wall Street Minotaur, Amelia Earhart, David Rockefeller (who envisioned the World Trade Center) and, of course, Icarus, weaving connections among them that are both informed and intuitive. "It's pretty fucking meaty," as Miguel Gutierrez, Topiary's director, said during the post-performance Q&A, adding, "It's a show where you can really learn something." Indeed, and yet the learning comes through a fair amount of seduction. Most powerful in this regard are Jocelyn Davis's graceful, minimalist costumes, the eerie atmosphere created by Cooley's musicianship and Peter Kerlin's electronic soundscore and the gifted Topiary's vocal talents and physical authority.

Nothing's forced. It's as if Topiary is not only instructing us but excavating our memories and feelings with all the great care of a seasoned archeologist. No sudden moves. No aggressive jabs. Not right away, at least. Just steady work until, finally, something valuable emerges. Okay, now let's calmly, rationally examine it.

It's interesting to hear that she first conceived this work not terribly long after 9/11, when she was still in grad school and bore a skeptical attitude towards the imperial American overreaching that those two rather graceless buildings stood for. In the Breugel painting, she said, disaster is rendered as a fairly tiny detail in a larger context, whereas after 9/11, America had become obsessed with disaster and could not, would not, look at context.

"People got mad at me and thought I was blaming the victims." Not hard to imagine the flak she got. People were scared and pissed and having these human, understandable feelings worked up and manipulated to the max. Some of the "sacredness" associated with the site of the fallen towers--now complicating the building of an Islamic community center two blocks away--is as much about the supposed "sacredness" of the preeminent icon of corporate America as about reverence for a place where thousands of innocent people perished. With those two things--American power and American vulnerability--so firmly interlocked, will we ever be able to see clearly?

It's still not popular to bring this up, although Topiary's beautiful and intelligent Landscape probably reads differently to an audience of "downtown" artists and arts junkies like most of us and will (and should) be received well in its run at Abrons.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now through November 20, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm 

Information and ticketing

Abrons Arts Center

Henry Street Settlement

466 Grand Street, Manhattan

(directions)

Get responsible with Justin Bond

Justin Bond Will Hold You Responsible
by Aaron Mattocks, Culturebot, October 20, 2010

The artist as Pandora

Pandora's Box
by Anne Bogart, Anne's Blog, SEE, August 2010

Christopher Williams descends the roots

The prospect of seeing a new Christopher Williams piece fills me with childlike eagerness. I’m jazzed by his imagination, which seems to belong to not just one wildly intelligent man but to a multitude. I’m dazzled by his productions which always seem much larger than the space they inhabit and definitely not of this era. Watching his work feels like falling into a big storybook with gilt-edged pages, embroidered satin bookmarks, fanciful characters whose heightened strangeness only partly masks their more elusive familiarity.

Like a Joseph Campbell with all of theater’s tools and magical possibilities at his command, Williams divines and opens portals between cultures, bidding us follow wherever curiosity has led him. In Hen’s Teeth—given its world premiere last night at Dance New Amsterdam--that curious terrain is the intersection of old Brittany, ancient Greece and the medieval Roman Catholic church. Heads should swim but, oddly, I managed to keep mine firmly in balance. I wondered what was preventing me from being swept away this time.

This work has Williams’s signature richness of imagination and his polish, complete with lighting by Amanda K. Ringger, costumes by Andy Jordan and Gregory Spears’s appealing original score, a requiem played and sung live in Breton, Middle French and Latin. For the Breton tale’s ensemble of mysterious bird-women—Storme Sundberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Kira Blazek, Hope Davis, Emily Stone, Ursula Eagly—Williams has provided old-fashioned dancey-dance architecture. That’s rare as hen’s teeth in New York’s “downtown dance” venues but fits this choreographer's mythic, ritualistic purposes just fine. The bird-womens's opening number is performed with enchanting physical presence and convincing vocal skill. Their delicate costumes—filmy, feathery skins that eventually “molt” from bare shoulders and bosoms—are totally lovely.

The actual Breton narrative remains vague—on purpose, most likely—but there is a lone male character (Adam H. Weinert) who woos one of the bird-women. The avian ladies lift him and his love high, swirling them around in the air so they appear to be flying. These swoony passages resemble a romantic ballet rendered in animation—artificial with a sincere underpinning, sincere with an overlay of the artificial. I think, for Williams, this is the very essence of doing ritual, of doing theater.

At some point, though, you might begin to wonder what all of this has to do with the Holy Roman lux aeterna and Agnus Dei. I believe that Williams must know but, as a watcher, not having some clue can be a barrier. The entrance of three bulbous, grotesquely-costumed characters--played by Alison Granucci, Joan Arnold and Grazia Dell-Terza—compound the confusion. It’s possible that these beings are introducing an apocalyptic note, but neither their existence nor their movement effectively connects to what came before or advances the narrative.

So, we have a dreamy opening ensemble that enjoys the work’s only distinctive movement; a soaring love fantasia; and finally, the arrival of a depressed and depressing trio of ugly trolls. Rather than a coherent accomplishment, Hen’s Teeth feels like patches out of a much larger ballet where potent ancestral motifs might speak to us of the perennial challenges of the human journey.

Christopher Williams’s Hen’s Teeth and Gobbledygook (a work in progress featuring Weinert and Eikazu Nakamura) continue tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm.

Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway (entrance on Chambers Street). Information and tickets

Deconstructing Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies
by Larry Rohter, The New York Times, November 8, 2009