I am a true believer that sometimes books/music/movies find you and not the other way around.
For instance, I have been having trouble adjusting to this whole moving to Las Vegas thing. Serious lack of culture, serious lack of brains being utilized outside of counting cards, serious lack of really anything I consider an important part of my personality. But, the other day, I was in my local library (I know- I just go from one library to another like they are safehouses and I am a spy) and I ran across this book on the new arrivals shelf.
From the title, I wouldn’t have guessed I wanted to read it, but I grabbed it and saw that it was on Cage and Cunningham. I spontaneously thought, “oh, I wonder if there is a picture of Viola (my dance teacher at Sarah Lawrence), in here?” And I turned to the index and there were several pages referenced. So, I checked it out.
Thinking it was far too long for me to actually read, I casually opened it to look at the gorgeous photos and was immediately sucked in. Did you know that Carolyn Brown worked at the Kent school in Denver? (I played field hockey on the fields at Kent in Denver in high school-though I was a lowly public school kid). Then she went to live in New York City (where I lived after college). And she was part of a group of crazy, eccentric artists that not only influenced the course of art in America, but eventually led her to her calling (if only my NYC cohorts had been so ambitious!)
This is fascinating reading for dancers and anyone interested in the work of Cage and Cunningham, (and Brown of course)! Not only do I feel reconnected to Viola Farber, who was one of the most amazing humans I have ever met, but I have renewed faith that life works in mysterious ways. Viola encouraged me to graduate early to thru-hike the Appalchian Trail and we had a really neat talk once about Black Mountain College in North Carolina and my fieldwork at the Colorado dance Festival in Boulder.
Somewhere deep in my love of librarianship, backpacking, dancing, bluegrass, and biographies this book conjured up a little piece of all those touchstones and memories. It truly is art that helps make life worth it (even when you are in art-less Vegas); and if you believe the philosophy from Black Mountain, “We are all artists”, said John Andrew Rice, “everyone of us: we are free to create the kind of world in which we choose to live, and we’re equal in that freedom.”
Okay, so the guy in Hummer trying to pass me on the right may not be feeling the love from that philosophy, but stumbling on this book has reinvigorated my resolve to survive whatever my Vegas life throws at me.
