A Memorial Celebration for Francis Mason
Joyce Theater
New York
October 30, 2009 at 2 PM
A Celebration for Clive Barnes, CBE
Walter Reade Cinema at Lincoln Center
New York
November 2, 2009 at 3 PM
by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by George Jackson
Memorials are performances too. Although the style of these two differed, both celebrated the life force of the man being remembered. Mason and Barnes were important dance writers, yet neither made that calling his sole pursuit. Mason's memorial included dance and music (even premieres) and 5 talks. Barnes's was all talk - 13 speakers plus a recent PBS video interview of him. Just before these occasions, the memorial for dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham was, reportedly, even more like a performance. Apparently it resembled one of Cunningham's "Events". What is spoken, danced and sounded at a memorial can have more significance than a regular performance even when the latter has a "post-performance discussion".
Issues as well as Clive Barnes the man were recalled by playwright Edward Albee, dean of dancers Frederic Franklin CBE, dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, theater producer Bernard Gersten, newspaper editor Barbara Hoffman, dancer and company director Arthur Mitchell, magazine editor Wendy Perron, dance critic Alastair Macaulay, cultural critic John Simon, dancer choreographer Paul Taylor, newspaper man Michael Riedel, dancer and festival director Damian Woetzel and dancer Valerie Taylor (Mrs. Barnes). Among the issues were Black ballet dancers, homosexual dance critics and even the critic's "eye" and "voice". Barnes (1927-2008) was brought from London by the New York Times to be its dance critic because he was young, "a family man" and had an eye for ballet whereas his predecessor, Allen Hughes, had an eye for the experimental (he put Judson Church dance, "postmodernism", on the map) which his editors and certain prominent dance people (like Lincoln Kirstein, Katherine Dunham and Arlene Croce), did not appreciate. At the NY Times, Barnes supported Mitchell's Black classical Dance Theater of Harlem and became so popular with his personable, chatty style of writing that he was also made drama critic. Barnes had his opponents, too, as Kisselgoff recalled. Eventually, when he joined the NY Post, he reviewed drama, dance and opera. Barnes was theater's consummate newspaper man.
In terms of performances at this memorial, my favorites were by Simon, who had written a rhyming verse about Barnes and read it with panache, and Clive himself on the video. He still had, towards the end of his life and after decades in New York, his singular version of London lip. I'd first heard it in 1965, soon after he'd arrived to settle in New York, when the late dance critic Hope Sheridan, who had gotten to know him in Britain, suggested that we three meet. Hope was the grandchild on her mother's side of a Maryinsky conductor and Glazunov pupil named Besobrasov, and she was very much into Russian ballet. I got us supper reservations in the Abby Aldrich room at Rockefeller University and we talked, talked, drank, ate and talked some more that first time. Our topics were the future of classical ballet and Judson Church dance. Clive was very curious about Judson.
Francis Scarlett Mason, Jr. (1921 - 2009) relished his life which had as many leaves as a catalpa. Whether working as a dance writer and editor or as an official for the US Information Agency at home and abroad (Yugoslavia, Britain), Mason focused on what he felt was among the world's best - the ballets of George Balanchine and the modern dance pieces of Martha Graham. He also was ardent about Wagnerian opera, gardening and his family. He held important posts - at the Morgan Library, with Steuben Glass and on the Graham company's board - dispatching them with grace. In all his dealings, whether fending for the USA overseas or editing Ballet Review's ornery writers, he was a gentleman diplomat. Speaking about him were his son Spencer Mason - an opera singer, a longtime friend from publishing Lawrence Sherman, Judith Schlosser of the Graham company, his longtime European friend Robert Higgins, and Marvin Hoshino from Ballet Review's editorial staff. Hoshino, in particular, captured Mason's wit and individual ways.
There was Balanchine and Graham to be seen. The "Walking" pas de deux of Balanchine's "Emeralds" shone with a clear, calm, contemplative light as the pair of dancers from NYC Ballet, Rebecca Krohn and Ask la Cour, sized it to fit the modest Joyce stage (Gabriel Faure's music was recorded). The Joyce's stage is ample for anyone who has seen the Martha Graham / Aaron Copland "Appalachian Spring" on its tiny birth stage at the Library of Congress. Blakeley White-McGuire and Samuel M. Pott of the Graham company absolutely sparkled in an excerpt, a duet for the Bride and Groom.
The new dance was "Wehmut (Sadness)" by Peter Quanz. Mason had found both the innovation and tradition he admired in dance to be part and parcel of Quanz's choreography and became fond of this Canadian dancemaker. "Wehmut" would have pleased him. It is a man's solo which unwinds - from inside the dancer into space and along Robert Schumann's melodic line of Heinrich Heine's text (almost in a single sweep the poet speaks of being glad, of tears, of being outside in spring, and of a depth). Quanz's sequence suggests steps as contrasting as some of Heine's words and Schumann's chords yet they never break their link with each other. The impetus of motion becomes one with the driving force launched by the poet and composer. Jared Matthews, of American Ballet Theatre, danced with a mellow air but, like Heine, I'll complain that he could have, at the end, shown more of the song's pain. Spencer Mason was the baritone and Jari Heikkapelto the pianist.
Music (the "Ave Verum Corpus" of Tchaikovsky's "Mozartiana") had opened the memorial and the closing, too, was music - a new composition by Brad Crane, performed by him at the piano. Its agitations and consolations were in memory of Francis Mason. I think it was at a Dance Magazine party hosted by Lydia Joel on the occasion of Hughes becoming the NY Times' dance critic that I first spoke with Mason but I'd tackled him long before. He was in his 20s and had written somewhat dismissively of Frederick Ashton's choreography when the Sadler's Wells showed it in America in 1949. I was in my teens and wrote him a disagreeing letter. He replied diplomatically and eruditely. Eventually, Francis would edit my Washington reports for Ballet Review.
The writing of both Mason and Barnes will continue to be quoted and cited. I hope more of it will be collected in book form. The current issue of Ballet Review has just appeared; presumably it isn't the last, only the last under Mason's editorship. Valerie Taylor-Barnes announced the formation of a Clive Barnes Foundation in support of performing art and its criticism. There was no memorial for another dance writer recently deceased, Perry Alva Bialor (1931 - 2009). He was better known as an anthropologist and archaeologist but on occasion wrote about dance, particularly forms whose cultures he had studied. Not that I'm looking for more memorials, valuable though they are. How about some dance weddings?
