Like the Sea: Dancing with Mary Glass. A very visual seminar with Carol Mavor
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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. 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 affair with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.
Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Mavor is one of them.
There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.
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 ‘reflects on the magical power of writing itself’.
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Image: Like the Sea (cover), courtesy Carol Mavo