Felix Cherniavsky - Correspondence with Dance Collection Danse 2

Added 19th Mar 2022 by Beth Dobson (Archives and Programming Assistant, DCD) / Last update 19th Mar 2022

Maud Allan 1243b 51 2008-2-71.jpg
Maud Allan 1243b 51 2008-2-71.jpg
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Felix Cherniavsky - Correspondence with Dance Collection Danse 2

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Maud Allan Research Collection
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51.2008-2-71
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156 REVIEWS STEPHEN SEWELL 157 supplemented it with ‘ a few tunes or a duet with your prof ' . The eventual execution was an enormous public relations success , with both parents insisting on being present to watch . Years later , at the funeral of Maud's mother , the congregation were greatly taken aback when Maud , dressed in massive black veils , suddenly performed her dance interpretation of the Funeral March prior to throwing herself onto the open coffin . The Salome Dancer is a lively account of a career which is important both for the history of dance and that of pre - World War I European culture . Cherniavsky writes from a privileged position with regard to information from older members of his family who had accompanied Maud on her Indian and Australian tours and through having access to her private papers , but has not tried in any way to romanticise her or to gloss over her often appalling behaviour to friends and lovers . If he has left a number of pressing interpretative questions unresolved , that should at least ensure continuing interest in a remarkable artist . HAROLD LOVE Harold Love is Reader in English at Monash University . He is the author of biographies of the opera entrepreneur , William Saurin Lyster , and the Melbourne critic , James Edward Neild , and is editor of The Australian Stage : a Documentary History . Peter Fitzpatrick , Stephen Sewell : The Playwright as Revolutionary ( Sydney : Currency , 1991 ) My only encounter with Stephen Sewell was at a SPACLALS conference in Christchurch in 1981. I sat down next to him at what was admittedly the kind of lunch that doesn't inspire eloquence . His opening gambit was to ask the whereabouts of the local branch of the Communist Party . After a brief pause I managed to remember that the New Zealand equivalent was called the Socialist Unity Party ( something to do with the Sino - Soviet rift , I thought ) . But I couldn't point him in the direction of the local branch , and I didn't like his chances of finding it in the phonebook . Thereafter the conversation lapsed . This was very largely my fault , since , having neither seen nor read any of his plays , I was unable to talk about them . Well , perhaps not entirely my fault ; none of the plays had then ( or has yet ) been performed professionally in New Zealand . Which is odd really , when you consider that Sewell is generally considered the least parochial of contemporary Australian playwrights . In retrospect I drew from this episode four conclusions . First , the Tasman Theatre Exchange obviously hasn't worked as well as it should have . ( Indeed at the moment it doesn't seem to be working at all . ) Secondly , if I wasn't going to see Sewell's plays I'd better read some of them ( and I duly did ) . Thirdly , Sewell's demeanour doesn't inspire confidence in his ability to write dialogue ( and my reading of him hasn't entirely dissolved my scepticism ) . And fourthly , as I suppose everybody else in that cafeteria knew , Sewell is - or was ( I shall return to this point ) a dedicated Marxist . The first two of these points aren't Peter Fitzpatrick's business , though it would be nice if somebody of his stature would start agitating on that side of the Tasman for Closer Aesthetic Relations . Nice too if his book would get more people reading and appreciating Sewell - and on the whole I think it will . Sewell's dialogue is Fitzpatrick's business , of course . He too recognizes that it is certainly not production proof ' , that the emotional temperature of [ Louise and Allen's ) exchanges ( in The Blind Giant is Dancing ) involves a language that can sound dangerously close to Days of Our Lives ' , that ‘ at ( certain ) moments Dreams in an Empty City comes perilously close to Man of La Mancha . ' Fitzpatrick notes that these moments are generally characterised by a plethora of abstractions and exclamation marks . They also feature a high density of vocatives ; the way Sewell's characters continually refer to each other by name when they get warmed up sounds like Dale Carnegie on a bad day . But Fitzpatrick is prepared to give Sewell the benefit of the doubt on this score . He does so for two reasons . First , while he recognizes that ‘ ambition is probably as critically ambiguous a quality in the theatre as it is morally ambiguous in life ' , he is basically sympathetic to Sewell's ' readiness to go for broke ' and prepared to forgive most of his excesses . Fair enough . ( Greg McGee poses similar problems on this side of the Tasman , and I can forgive him almost everything except the last line of Tooth and Claw . ) More important , Fitzpatrick shows that many of Sewell's purpler passages fit within an overall rhetorical scheme , which , in The Father We Loved on a Beach by the Sea , for example , ' involves ... a juxtaposition of two distinct performance modes ... the scenes centred on Joe the father mix a basic kitchen - sink realism with elements of satiric caricature , while the sections involving Dan ... have a savage and lurid quality that suggests the world of nightmare . ' Similarly , in Dreams in an Empty City , the ... problem of performing the three scenes between Chris and Karen is the product of a quite deliberate decision about the mode of those parts of the action ; it requires the kind of imaginative interpretation which does not seek to deny their stylisation , and which can develop meaning from that premise . Exchanges ( like the one in Act 2 Scene 5 ) are impossible to make credible in naturalistic terms , but there are other modes of reality ; the presence , actual or implied , of a kitchen sink need not pre - empt the possibility that this is another kind of dream , in a crowded suburb . That this subtle account of the interlocking styles of the plays is not mere fantasy on Fitzpatrick's part is suggested by the fact that the different styles often relate to different time - schemes . In The Father We Loved on a Beach by the Sea Joe inhabits the relatively distant past ' while Dan lives in a hypothetical future . ( Aren't all futures hypothetical , by the way ? ) And in The Blind Giant is Dancing the five dialogues between Jane and Louise are conceived as fragments of a single conversation , though they are dispersed throughout a play whose other action covers a considerable time - span . This subtle account of Sewell's various ' performance modes ' is matched by the subtlety with which Fitzpatrick analyses the ' multiple realities ' ( psychological as well as social ) which accrue from Sewell's determination to ‘ appropriate the world dramatically ' . Personal factors which bear on the plays ( notably religious and family matters ) are succinctly sketched , and there is an ambitious attempt - involving some rather far - flung parallels with nineteenth - century fiction — to define a set of devices ( myth , metaphor , history , etc ) by which Sewell attempts to contain his diffuse material . -

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