Like the Sea: Dancing with Mary Glass

The Department of Performance Studies is excited to welcome Carol Mavor, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Manchester and writer to give a lecture in celebration of her new publication, Like the Sea: Dancing with Mary Glass. This event is cosponsored by the Department of Art History. The lecture will be followed by a reception. 

Lecture Description: 

A very visual lecture with images and film clips 

When I was studying dance, I wanted to be Yvonne Rainer. I wanted to be Trisha Brown.  I deeply wanted to be Mary Glass (even if, at that time, I had never heard of her). 

Mary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and 70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”

Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy and her life-long love with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. I am one of them. 

It's tempting to say that I ‘inhaled’ Like the Sea, except that metaphor seems wrong regarding a work that's so fluid, so amniotic. And while there's been ample documentation of the lives and work of some of the most significant figures in postmodern dance, this ‘biography’ expands the possibilities for exploring the ways in which an aesthetic practice is grounded in both political and personal histories. Mavor's Mary Glass is an uncannily convincing participant in this sphere, and the places where her life and those of 'real people' intersect are both illuminating and enthralling. — Barbara Browning

BIO:

Carol Mavor is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Manchester. As a writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, race in America, child-loving and the maternal), she has published widely.

Her Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott was named by Grayson Perry in the Observer as his 2008 “Book of the Year.” 

Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Colour “coaxes us into having a less complacent attitude…even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color” (Los Angeles Review of Books). 

For Maggie Nelson, Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Eyes and Mouth of the Fairy Tale is “enigmatic and as full of magic as its subjects.”

Max Porter sees Like a Lake as “a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book.”

For Geoffrey Batchen Serendipity: The Afterlife of Objects is “reflects on the magical power of writing itself.”