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Trisha Brown

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:02:36 -0700

Review by Elizabeth Rees

There was a time when modern dance consisted of delightfully womanly figured women twirling and bouncing about in scarves or fairy wings or yards and yards of sheer cloth. Since those whimsical days, modern dance has gone on to challenge all ideas of what dance—or, indeed, what movement and bodies—could be. One of the most influential dancers and choreographers to contribute to this evolution has been Trisha Brown.

The high priestess of postmodern dance hails from Washington state but moved to New York after graduating from Mills College in 1958. Once there, she became an early member of the Judson Dance Theater, the first group to define a postmodern dance method. In 1970, Brown took on a more independent role by establishing her own company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company. With her early works, she dramatically transformed the art of performance by incorporating mechanical devices, pulleys, walls, alleys, and rooftops into her choreography. The combination of her exquisite movement and attention to the environment resulted in pieces such as Glacial Decoy (1979), which were appropriate for the proscenium stage. Brown has fearlessly created her own seditious approach to modern dance performance, rejuvenating the concept of modern movement with fresh, inventive approaches to gender and form. Brown breaks the rules by kinetically eliminating the idea of assumption. She endlessly plays with different textures, gestures, feelings, everyday movements, phrases, and patterns in ways viewers never expect to encounter in dance performance. Some exemplifying works include Set and Reset (1983) and Astral Convertible (1989). Uniform bright colors, wide blue skies, massive black strokes on a wall, and the audience laughing as dancers elegantly run into a tree are all examples of what make Brown’s work so unique and full of delight.

Brown continues to break through choreographic barriers in her work, generating demand from audiences around the globe.

CHICAGO JOE

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:23:56 -0700

By Whore! staff

Chicago Joe Hensley was born Mary Welch in 1844. By age 14, she had emigrated from Ireland to the United States and became Josephine Airey, a name she found more stylish and suitable to her ambitions. She worked as a prostitute in Chicago for a number of years, but she wanted better opportunities. She found her way to Helena, Montana, a muddy frontier gold-mining town that offered a girl with her talents an entrepreneurial chance. She soon married, leaving her active role in “The Profession” behind and opened up her own brothel/dance hall, where she earned the title “Chicago Joe.” She had a sharp vision and creative business solutions, and her “house” was so successful that she became the largest landowner in the red-light district. Wealth, fame, opulence (at least by local standards), and respect were all hers for a time. She died quietly of pneumonia at age fifty-five, and the citizens of Helena honored her with glowing eulogies and an elaborate funeral.

EDITH PIAF

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:38:37 -0700

Review by Whore! staff

Edith Piaf, the “Sparrow” of Paris, the heroine of the French Underground, and a woman who in death was denied a church burial because the Pope didn’t approve of her, might never have been able to sing La Vie en Rose if it weren’t for a small group of French prostitutes.

According to the stories, at twelve, Edith was struck either deaf or blind (sources differ) by fever. Abandoned by her parents, she lived with her grandmother in a bordello on the edge of Place Pigalle. Those now nameless women saved enough money to send her on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Therese. She recovered her health in a “miracle” and went on to become one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century.

Struggling with abandonment and illness was only the beginning of a life that would be marked by relentless tragedy. Piaf’s only child died of meningitis, her mentor was murdered, her great love was killed in a car crash, and she eventually lost the battle against morphine addiction. A crippling illness culminated her woes and it killed her at the age of forty-seven. Despite her hardships, she composed music, sponsored many careers, and smuggled passports to stranded French soldiers.

While there was recently an award-winning movie in her honor, Piaf remains elusive. Like all biopics, the film focused on her tragedies and an actress’s interpretation of the individual—ultimately a poor method for revealing the truth of an artist. It is not what she suffered that compels us. It is her fearlessness. Fearless enough to survive a brutal childhood, to sing through a wrecked body, to fall in love again and again, and to keep seeking joy in every way that she could.

Tremulous and strong, her voice quivers with pain-tinted transcendence. It is a voice that has reminded thousand of émigrés and refugees of home. Her songs still tug at the souls of those who have never seen a conquered Paris or breathed the Gallois-filled air of a café. Thousands mourned her death by filling the streets and crying out their love for the woman who has come to be known as “the Voice of France.” To know of her is to be awed, to hear her is to be moved, and to wonder at her story is to honor the rare beauty of her life and the strength of her resolve.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Brontë, 1847

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:09:15 -0700

Review by Whore! staff

First published in 1847 under the nom de plume of Ellis Bell, this is one of the great works of world literature and, as such, tends to be pushed heavily by high school English teachers. If you first encountered it in this context, don’t be put off. If you’ve only seen the film versions or heard the Kate Bush song, pick up the book immediately and experience the richness of the original. It is a gripping read that translates seamlessly into a contemporary context and is arguably the ultimate tale of passion, emotional manipulation, obsession, necrophilia, and patient and ruthless vengeance.

To this day, it remains something of a mystery to scholars how not only Emily but her two sisters (Charlotte, who wrote Jane Eyre, and Anne, who is best known for Agnes Grey) produced such remarkable works of literature living virtually in isolation in the small village of Haworth on the moors of western Yorkshire. Emily died at age thirty, Anne at twenty-nine, and Charlotte at thirty-eight, the first two from tuberculosis and the third probably from complications associated with pregnancy, although her death certificate also lists tuberculosis. Their remarkable contributions and premature deaths have shrouded their lives in an ethereal romanticism, but their works—Emily’s in particular—remain powerful, provocative, and timeless.

Available in innumerable print editions and in full-text documents online.

Alice Guy Blanche

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:57:29 -0700

Review by Whore! staff

Who is Alice Guy Blaché? She was the mother (and, some argue, the father) of modern cinema. Though her name isn’t as widely known as it should be, she was the first female film director and the first person of either gender to make a narrative film.

Alice Guy (1873–1968) worked as a secretary at L. Gaumont et Cie, the Paris company owned by inventor Léon Gaumont. During a hot summer in 1895, Gaumont was occupied with marketing his new motion picture projector, which was one of several that came onto the scene around then. Guy asked her boss if she “might write one or two little scenes and have a few friends perform in them.” She was told to go ahead as long as it wouldn’t interfere with her secretarial duties.

So she did. Her first film, La Fée Aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy), ran about one minute and was intended to be an instructional film to show how Gaumont’s new camera worked. This small movie launched her extraordinary career, which encompassed the making of about one thousand films. Of these, only about one hundred have survived. She was also instrumental in the development of film as a creative medium. Soon after her directorial debut, she became the head of Gaumont’s film production company. For eleven years she ran the show until, in 1907, she met and married Herbert Blaché, an English cameraman in charge of Gaumont’s London affiliate. They moved to New York and started a family. Before long, they and a partner founded a studio in New Jersey called the Solax Company. To date, she remains the only woman to have owned her own studio.

A few notable titles in her extensive repertoire included Shadows of the Moulin Rouge (1913), Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913), and The Woman of Mystery (1914). Her films are notable not just for being among the first but also for their style and the strength of their story-telling. Dialog was all but unnecessary in many of her pictures, as she was skilled in drawing out the gestures and expressions of her actors. At a time when many filmmakers were trying to explore the great sweeping themes of humanity, Guy found pathos and richness in the small moments between an immigrant man and his wife, or in the wicked delight of a woman eating a peach.

When she was seventy-eight, Guy was honored in France as the world’s first woman filmmaker and received the Legion of Honor. Recently, some of her films were recovered and made available to the twenty-first-century public on a DVD.