John Cromwell | Double Harness / 1933

the business of marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery), John Cromwell (director)

Double Harness / 1933

 

Double Harness is precisely the kind of rhetorical ugly duckling which John Cromwell and his favorite screenwriter Jane Murfin loved to whip up into a passable entertainment, a badly written play with a central theme that Murfin could turn into a witty work that basically kept to home in the drawing and dining room of wealthy and refined individuals such, as in this case, Ann Harding playing Joan Colby—from a proper, well-to-do but currently down-on-its-finances family—and William Powell as John Fletcher, sophisticate heir to a wealthy but slowly-going-broke father who owns a famous cruise line. Harding’s credentials as a queen of the cool beauties are sung out as adjectives even by the sometimes cruelly cynical David Thomson: “Elegant, refined, serene, classy, superior, noble aristocratic—perhaps patrician….” And as anyone can tell you who’s seen

him in The Thin Man films, My Man Godfrey, or the later Ninotchka, Powell has the kind of indolent intelligence that women can’t resist. (It is strange, however, that while one recognizes him as wonderfully flirtatious with the opposite sex, one finds it hard to imagine him actually having sex with his female conquests.) In this film he is perfect for his role often described as a “lazy playboy,” words I find don’t truly apply to his real talents as a couch-sitting seducer.

      It doesn’t truly matter since the level-headed Joan, observing her younger spoiled sister Valerie (Lucile Browne) about to be married, is totally ready to be seduced. For all of her high-minded disinterest in the men previously paraded before her, she has determined to capture the man whom her father, Colonel Sam Colby (Henry Stephenson), most detests, and plots her strategy as if, as she describes it to Valerie, she were going about a business transaction. Long before Tina Turner wondered “what’s love gotta to do with it?” The “virginal, yet alluring” Joan—as John describes her—argues that marriage has nothing to do with love. “Marriage is a business, at least a woman’s business.” Love, in short, is just a second-hand emotion.

      Allowing herself to be seduced, she slowly pulls the playboy of the western world to the edge, and when he’s still not ready to jump, afraid that he might return to his previous playmate Monica Page (Lilian Bond), Joan manipulates the situation by bringing in the incensed conservative Colonel to demand that Fletcher do the right thing by her, that is if she will have him. And Joan most certainly will “have him,” by this time having totally fallen in love with her target.

     John almost passively agrees to the marriage only because, as he reports to her as the Fletcher-owned ship pulls out of port for their honeymoon, divorce is easier. Chastened, she forces him to agree to a sixth month waiting period during which she manages not only to send him off to his previously unused office, which he discovers he truly enjoys and actually has a talent for the work he does there. The shipping line is improving its business, and to make sure of its total rebound she invites an old family friend to dinner, the current Postmaster General Oliver Lane (Wallis Clark) who might possibly assign delivery of US overseas mail to the Fletcher line.

     While dining with a friend at a restaurant where they spot John and his past lover Monica, Joan cinches her husband’s love and respect by stopping by the table and asking Mrs. Page to join them for a weekend outing. If she has tricked him into marriage, she seems to have finally come to make him realize that she is a proper mate. That night he brings home her favorite flowers, gladiolas.

    Unfortunately, there is still a fly buzzing around those lovely blossoms. The spendthrift Valerie confides to Joan that she has made clothes purchases of $1,000 which she cannot pay and dare not tell her husband Dennis for fear of his leaving her. She begs her sister to help her out. Unfortunately, this is not the first time she has asked for such sums, and Joan, who has paid out from her own monies, refusing to take from John’s income, has nothing left. She is willing to see if they might sell her mother’s ring, but it brings in only $500. In the meantime, Valerie has gotten $1,000 from her father, and when her sister is unable to come up with the same sum, approaches John, this time claiming it is for their overdue rent, he being only too ready to write out a check.

      Overhearing the transaction, however, Joan angrily intrudes, demands she hand over the check, and tears it up, the truth about Valerie’s outrageous expenditures for herself finally revealed to everyone. In revenge, Valerie reveals Joan’s deceit, pointing out Joan’s call to her which has precipitated their father’s visit. Taken aback by how he has been manipulated into the relationship, John leaves Joan without even permitting her further explanation.

      In one of the very best of the drawing scenes of this film, Joan visits John at Monica’s apartment, forced in front of “the other woman” to reveal her relief that he finally knows the truth, and to tell him the real reason for her trick, that by that time she had truly come to love him. She leaves without making “a scene,” but still not knowing whether or not her comments have made any difference.

     When he doesn’t show up to the grand dinner she has planned with the US Postmaster, however, she can only imagine the worst. And in a brief series of farcical disasters approaching screwball comic proportions—a scene that might have been much funnier in the hands of a less staid and fussy director such as Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks—the dinner falls apart, despite the fact that as everyone else disappears, with only Joan and the Postmaster left all alone at the table, he tells her that he will assign the US mails to the Fletcher shipping line. Suddenly John finally appears, another box of gladiolas in hand.

      Both wife and husband have clearly learned their lesson: love is all there is.

    In the end, accordingly, it is hard to not at least come to grow fond of this ugly duckling. And excellent scenes by the supporting cast help the heart grown even fonder, particularly as performed the butler Freeman (Reginald Owen) whose character reads as if he were meant to be gay, even though Owen does not play him in that manner. When Freeman proclaims to his master, for example, that things have improved since his marriage, John asks him why, if he is so fond of the results of matrimony he himself hasn’t married, Freeman answers, “Why I’m far too selfish.” And later he and the Chinese cook get into a kitchen brawl that might have been perfect for someone like Eric Blore and Wong Chung (who performed the cook in this movie).

      The very first scene, wherein Valerie is shopping with her sister and father for her wedding dress and trousseau, moreover, features the usual pansy of the period, in which Fredric Santley plays the prissy, handkerchief flouting fairy, owner of the dress shop, Bruno spouting lines such as “You should feel the material on that one Miss Valerie, I literally tingle when I touch it.” A little later, after having run up charges for Valerie of $3,600, he warbles into her sister’s ear, “Why don’t you let me have my way with you this Spring Miss Joan?” A wardrobe, not sex is on his mind.

      Santley performs the lines just perfectly, but what is truly interesting about this scene, in this instance, is that the role was originally assigned to the sometimes drag queen, more often tuxedoed comic emcee Jean Malin who is often described as the queen and creator of the “pansy craze.” It

is hard to even imagine how “over-the-top” his performance must have been to have then RKO studio president B. B. Kahane fire him, declaring after witnessing his flamboyant act, "I do not think we ought to have this man on the lot on any picture — shorts or features.”*

       I’d love to have seen those daily rushes, resulting in such astounding homophobia over a purposely pansy scene.

 

* Brett L. Abrams, Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

 

George Cukor | Our Betters / 1933

send in the queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Murfin and Harry Wagstaff Gribble (screenplay, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham), George Cukor (director) Our Betters / 1933

 

One suspects that if there was ever one moment that George Cukor came to be defined as a “woman’s” director it was upon the release in 1933 film, Our Betters, focusing on a quartet of dominating American ex-patriot women, Lady Pearl Saunders Grayston (Constance Bennett), Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper), Princess Flora (Phebe Foster), and Bessie Saunders (Anita Louise). With its sharp-tongued dialogic put-downs, its gossipy sub-text, and its naughty female sexual goings-on you might almost describe it was a rehearsal for Cukor’s later women-dominated productions such as Sylvia Scarlett (1935), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Two-Faced Woman (1941), and Adam’s Rib (1949).

     An “openly” gay man (open, that is, to Hollywood not to the public at large) from the 1930s on, Cukor became legendary for his Sunday gatherings of Hollywood celebrities which, at the bewitching after-brunch hour, turned into all-male pool parties with young boys and their friends whom he’d met at the gym and streets along with his close cadre of gay cinema friends, among them William Haines and his partner Jimmie Shields, writer W. Somerset Maugham (upon his play Our Betters was based), director James Vincent, screenwriter Rowland Leigh, costume designers Orry-Kelly and Robert Le Maire, and actors John Darrow, Anderson Lawler, Grady Sutton, Robert Seiter, Tom Douglas, and Cary Grant.

     Although Cukor was recognized as a homosexual within the film community, publicly, as  Joseph L. Mankiewicz put it, “he never carried it [his homosexuality] as a pin on his lapel”—although it did get him, thanks to Clark Gable’s homophobic disdain and perhaps his fear of his own youthful gay sexual activities, fired from the set of Gone with the Wind.

     Cukor also kept a low-profile in his filmmaking by focusing on women, sometimes forceful lesbians such as Katherine Hepburn, but mostly just outspoken females behind whom his male characters often lurked or, as in the examples of Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, around which the male characters carefully circumnavigated.

      Cukor seldom portrayed obviously gay males or lesbians in his films, but using sexually coded language sometimes veered toward LGBTQ expression, the most obvious cases being Sylvia Scarlett, Our Betters, Justine, and, if you stretch it a bit, My Fair Lady. When his female-centered works did not dare move into the realms of the sexual, he pushed his heroines into portraying early feminist figures as in The Women, Adam’s Rib, and Travel’s with My Aunt.

      As critics have pointed out, Our Betters might have been a far more successful work had it been directed by Noel Coward with a cast of witty British actors pretending to be Americans pretending to be British members of the upper class. Constance Bennett does a quite admirable job as the innocent young US girl corrupted by British class snobbery and the unspoken conventions of marriages of convenience. But even giving it her Bette Davis-best, Bennett tries valiantly to infuse the dialogue with sparkle, as Cukor had ordered, by speeding it up and dressing in costumes that demanded movement.

      The sparkle never quite ignites, however, into a shower of diamond-like sentences which pierce the heart with their coldness of their in-attention, but they draw sufficient blood that we get the point. These American women, spurned by their cold-hearted husbands, have learned to cope through, as Pearl puts it, “looks, wit, and a bank balance.”

     If that sounds cynical, you can hardly blame her. Just married and only five minutes into the film, she overhears her new husband whispering to the woman he truly loves that he has needed to marry Pearl for her nouveau riche US dollars. Instead, of bursting into tears and backing off into some desolate corner of the estate, Lady Pearl decides to gauchely push her way into British society by wearing black instead of white, celebrating her husband’s (Alan Mowbray) long absences with endless dinner parties and library lovers such as Arthur Fenwick (Minor Watson) who also helps  keep her financially afloat given that her husband quickly squandered the fortune for which he married her.

       Surrounding herself with US women who, like her, have survived through English marriages of convenience such as Duchess Minnie who is happy to have the money left her by the Duke to surround herself with young handsome loafers such as her current would-be gigolo Pepi D’Costa (Gilbert Roland).

       Princess Flora is precisely what Pearl refused to become, the tortured beauty who remains in love with the Prince who has since escaped from her embrace; she gives herself over to working for good causes, between her tears and nostalgia for the innocence she left behind in the USA.

       Young Bessie, now under Pearl’s tutelage, is awed by her sister’s ever shifting dinner guests, each of them, in her mind, more glorious, intellectually endowed, and well-dressed than the last. Having loved the good-looking lug, Fleming Harvey (Charles Starrett) who shows up at Pearl’s doorstep—apparently also a cousin about whose familial relationship with Bessie is never investigated—she refuses to send him away, forcing him to stay on to watch her painful transformation from a pretty US hometown girl into a wit-starved Brit. Pearl quickly arranges for Lord Harry Bleane (Hugh Sinclair) to fall in love and propose to Bessie so that she too can enter the charmed circle of revolting royals.

      Along with the pompous gossip Thornton Clay (Grant Mitchell) these characters and Pearl all retire to her country estate to dish all the best of society who make up Pearl’s dinner lists. We never get a glimpse of those endless dinners but, given what evidence we’re given from Pearl’s coterie, it’s perhaps better that we imagine their sniggering bon mots than have to witness them.

      And I can’t say that Maugham or his screen adaptors offer us much of alternative of conversational tidbits, unless you find lines such as Minnie’s comment to Pepi who perpetually asks her to marry him—presumably so that he might better be able to share her fortune—“Marriage is so middle class. It takes away all the romance!” to be a howler. Or you think you think that lines like “If one felt about things at night as one as one felt in the morning, life would be a lot easier,” is a brilliant pensée. 

       Yet somehow Cukor convinces us that Minnie’s endless complaints about Pepi’s inattentiveness, Clay’s “chipper chatter,” Fenwick’s “girlie”-laden exultations of Pearl, and Bessie’s girlish awe of everything around her is worthy our attention. And the beautiful Pearl inexplicably seems to be happy to have them around as company.

       Unfortunately, our perfect hostess accidentally slips on the banana-peel of farce as she reluctantly agrees to meet Pepi in the teahouse. Having just made the connection between Pearl’s visit to a London museum with Pepi’s admission that he has recently visited that same institution, Minnie already suspects that the two engaged in a tryst, and on the lookout observes Pearl sneaking out of the manor to visit the nearby structure, immediately hiding her purse and asking Bessie whether she might retrieve that forgotten item from the teahouse.

      Bessie finds the door locked, but what she can see through the window apparently might be the subject of a lurid novel. The girl returns pale-faced and startled, Minnie forcing the poor thing to name the cause of her consternation, thus forcing Fenwick, Minnie, and even the generally unjudgmental Flora to reject the company of their formerly beloved friend. For the first time in this work we witness Minnie as the rapaciously self-centered and mean-spirited woman she truly is. Insisting that Pearl doesn’t have a “redeeming quality,” she declares her break with Lady Grayston and her loafing lover Pepi. Fenwick is stunned by the sexual betrayal. Clay can hardly wait to get back to London to spread the gossip. And Bessie is so deeply hurt at having lost her idol that she can hardly speak.

       Into this sour-faced former fan club Pearl comes whirling back from her unfortunate rendezvous, speechless for the first time in the movie, knowing she’s now facing a scandal which may ruin her already shady reputation, having previously, as she puts it, made love to men only front of everyone else.

       But before Minnie can even get up enough indignation to call for a car to the train station, Pearl sends one car off to London and the other to a service garage. If she can only keep her guests over the weekend she realizes there can be no scandal since outranged guests always leave in haste.

    Looking her pale and wan best, she seduces Fenwick to forgive her and continue their financially beneficial “love affair.” When she realizes that Bessie now finds her “cheap and common and sordid,” Pearl implores Lord Bleane to break their marriage engagement, leaving the innocent to return to the US with Fleming Harvey. Minnie even manages to make up with Pepi, finally telling him she’s ready to marry him and settle on an annual allowance.

      To make it up with Minnie, however, requires something special which the car returning from London brings back. She, better than anyone, knows when to send in the clowns, that car having carried Ernest (the pansy actor Tyrell Davis) to them, who, made up heavily with extraordinarily large, rouged lips, proceeds almost immediately to try to teach Minnie how to tango. Preening, scolding, and doting upon the silly old dame, Ernest promises her extensive lessons after dinner, an offer—since several times throughout the work she has expressed her desire to learn the dance—she cannot resist.

      As always, the queer saves the day as the two frenemies kiss and make up, Ernest approvingly looking on to observe: “What an exquisite spectacle of two ladies of title kissing one another.”

      This was one of the most controversial of pre-code films, and was perhaps one of the films that Joseph Breen most abhorred, declaring it an outrage, the kind of film under his tutelage, that would never again shown in the theaters.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2021).

 

 

Howard Bretherton and William Keighley | Ladies They Talk About / 1933

blind faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brown Holmes, William McGrath, and Sidney Sutherland (screenplay based on the stage play by Gangstress, or Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles), Howard Bretherton and William Keighley (directors) Ladies They Talk About / 1933

 

As one of the most noted of the numerous “girls in prison” melodramas—the film was remade as Lady Gangster in 1942—you might imagine that Howard Bretherton’s and William Keighley’s Ladies They Talk About (1933) might be filled with just those kinds of women of whom people like to gossip: lesbians. But in fact, the three writers basically have erased such figures, concentrating instead on the classy former socialite-gone gangster’s moll Nan Taylor (Barbara Stanwyck, the actress who herself has long been rumored to have been bisexual), arriving at prison with a huge hat box and a stylish gown; the mean cheerleader type, ‘Sister’ Susie (Dorothy Burgess), the kind girl in high school who’d scheme and plot to take away another girl’s boyfriend and go home to complain to her wealthy daddy if she didn’t get her way; a dotty, formerly wealthy Long Island matron who served ground-up glass to her social rival; a former Madame of a brothel Aunt Maggie (Maude Eburne); a nice, tougher but wiser girl, Linda (Lillian Roth, alcoholic for much of her life before she regained her fame in Broadway shows such as I Can Get It for You Wholesale and Funny Girl); and a strict but truly caring Prison Matron (Ruth Donnelly), all of whom who don’t so much act as perform true to their character types—which permits the film’s audience to applaud Linda and Aunt Maggie, while booing the pretend civility of ‘Sister’ Suzie.

      Stanwyck, always a watchable actress, has two contradictory parts to play as Nan in this movie, the tough and hardened gangster moll and the would-be sweet “if they’d only trust her” Deacon’s daughter who somehow lost her way. Nan works hard to keep up her tough front, arranging with her now imprisoned gangster friends for a way they can tunnel up from the men’s ward of San Quentin into her room, from they will all hope to escape.

     But at the same time the religious broadcaster David Slade (Preston Foster), who’s trying to run for the job of District Attorney, inexplicably falls in love with his former hometown acquaintance, ready to forgive almost anything she does, in part to rectify his sending her to jail in the first place after she has confessed, given his unexpected faith in her, to having helped Lefty Simons (Harold Huber) and his gang rob a bank. Now he’s not only sorry but evidently so head-over-heels in love with her that he sends her endless letters which she never answers, but arranges finally for a meeting, and mails off an illicit letter from her to Lefty with a drawn impression of the prison front door lock, and allows her to shoot him in the shoulder just to get her down the church aisle and into their matrimonial bed.

    The only one who continues to stand in her way is sweet ‘Sister’ Susie who has fallen for the religious radio megastar—the Jim Baker, Michael Pitts, or Richard Rossi of his day—and is determined to make the man hers. The only major lesbian scandal of the movie is when she plants a “love letter” in Nan’s coat—presumably written to another woman in the prison compound—which gets her sent to work in the laundry with visitation rights cancelled for a month. Susie also witnesses, predicably through the keyhole, that Nan shoots Slade believing, mistakenly, that he has betrayed her to the authorities about her involvement with the failed prison escape (Nan: [immediately after shooting Slade] “I didn’t mean to do that.” Slade: [holding his hand to his shoulder] “Why, that's all right, Nan. “It's nothing.").

      Susie’s squeal to the detective this time only hurries the couple off their honeymoon, although even the film’s audience by this time have dropped their jaws a bit in complete disbelief.

      The original play on which this film was based was written by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles, Broadway actress Mackaye having had her husband beaten to death by her lover when her husband suggested she stop seeing him. And the character of Nan is clearly based on the writer herself, who, as the Pittsburgh Press described it, “showed up at prison with silk stockings and a modish dress,” spending ten months in San Quentin State Prison for her crime. So you’d think she might have been able to come up with some far juicer lesbian scenes. Maybe there are some in her play, but nothing much shows up in this movie. Other than the planted letter all screenwriters Brown Holmes, William McGrath, and Sidney Sutherland are able to provide is the female equivalent of the male pansy, a bull dyke whose cigar butt Nan finds on a prison cell floor, Suzie nodding her head to a woman who throughout the film does not nothing but exercise, Linda cautioning her new friend: “Be careful about her. She likes to wrestle.”

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

 

Jacob Burkhardt | Andy Dances, a Memorial for Andy de Groat, at Judson Church September 17, 2019 / 2019

expanding time: centers of a whirling world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Burkhardt (director) Andy Dances, a Memorial for Andy de Groat, at Judson Church September 17, 2019 / 2019

 

During the night of September 20th, 2019, I dreamt a long dream in which I was dancing—at first making miraculous leaps in the manner of Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, but gradually setting into amazing spins, something that I might have associated more with an ice skating dance than with ballet. The spins were startling tight an intense, a bit like a balletic version of the Turkish whirling dervishes, but without their flowing, whirling skirts; I seemed dressed in a more traditional male ballet outfit that represented more a continuously spinning top instead of the mesmerizing, trance-like movements of the Turkish dancers.

    I have long loved dance, and when I was young I studied briefly with the Joffrey Ballet, as I’ve written elsewhere, after being encouraged to take up dance by Paul Taylor, who I met briefly in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1960s. In New York, I signed up with the Joffrey company as a student, and after weeks and weeks at the barre doing the traditional dance exercise, the males were called to do a pirouette, my strict dance teacher commenting that I had done it quite well, a comment that thrilled me, even if I soon after began to realize that I would never be a significant dancer given the structure of my body and my late-coming to the art.

     While dance, accordingly, continues to thrill me and I attempt to review it as often as I can, I have never since—particularly given the fact that I am now a 72-year-old with a knee replacement—dreamt about me dancing as brilliant as in the images of my dream.

      Perhaps the dance-opera, The Want, directed by Adam Linder, which I’d seen earlier, stimulated something in my brain. In any event, I was delighted, even if more than a little amused, by my sleeping terpsichorean pleasures. By early morning I was comparing my dance moves, in my mind, with my memories of the hero of Paul Auster’s fiction, Mr. Vertigo, wherein the character Walt learns how to fly. I have certainly had many so-called “flying dreams” throughout my life, which simply evince the grace and will-power in which one can remain vertically in the air for very long periods of time. Sometimes in these dreams I just barely hover over the landscape—without flying off into the sky—proving only to myself that I can maintain a slight spin across the long paths home, probably based on a childhood memory of my long walks home each evening from my high school, from the southern end of town to the north where we lived.

     Every morning, after coffee and toilet, in those days, I perused Facebook and then YouTube, first checking the responses to my own postings and then visiting those of others. On this particular morning I suddenly was greeted by what appeared to be a short film on the choreographer and dancer Andy de Groat. I vaguely remembered his name—I had seen Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, choreographed by Lucinda Childs and de Groat—but otherwise I knew nothing at all about him and his career. If I try to write on dance, I admit I am no dance critic or expert in the field. Literature, film, these are my specialties and wherein my major contributions lie, along with

a long history of art through my husband, art curator Howard N. Fox.

      In those days, before my work of queer film, I rarely clicked on Facebook offerings, but this morning the video on de Groat called out to me, and the synchronicity and coincidence that have long haunted my life as astounded me yet again as I quickly perceived he had died in January 1, 2019 in France, and what I was now witnessing was his memorial at Judson Church that took me down a rabbit hole that I might never have imagined.

      In fact, the very first figure who appeared to welcome the audience was my dear friend from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Mel Andringa. I momentarily blinked my eyes in disbelief. What was he doing, hosting an event for the dancer in honor of de Groat at Judson Church.

 

     I quickly recognized that their relationship might have harkened back to one of de Groat’s ealy collaborations with Wilson, Deafman Glance (1970), first presented at the University of Iowa where Andriga was then a student/artist/performer. I later brought Andringa and his companion F. John Herbert to perform at Temple University when I was an Assistant Professor there.

     I knew he had long been involved in experimental performance and theater, but now he was discussing personal relationships with so many figures I knew of and whose works I had seen such as Jerome Robbins, Wilson, Christopher Knowles, Deborah Jowitt, and numerous others.  

     The program was more than fascinating:

 

Welcome: Mel Andringa

Andy Dances, excerpt from “Syracuse Sequence” (1975)

with Andy de Groat and Julia Busto; film by Robyn Brentano,

“Get Dancing Poem” and reading by Christopher Knowles, 1975

“Rope Dance,” choreography by Andy de Groat, 1974

Translations Performed by Ritty Ann Burchfield, Charles Dennis, and Buck Wanner,

Reading Text by Deborah Jowitt; read by Sheryl Sutton

Tribute Molissa Fenley

Remarks Robert Wilson on video by Jacob Burckhardt

Tribute Makram Hamdan,

Reading Texts by Andy de Groat; read by Cindy Lubar Bishop, and Robyn Brentano,

“Fan Dance,” choreography by Andy de Groat, (1978) Performed by Martita Abril, Patricia Beaman,

Ritty Ann Burchfield, Satya Celeste, Molissa Fenley, Catherine Galasso,

Patrick Gallagher, John Gutierrez, Makram Hamdan, Meg Harper, K.J. Holmes,

Benjamin Kimitch, Michael O’Rourke, Kathryn Ray, Austin Selden, Viviane Serry,

Vicky Shick, Buck Wanner, and Emily Wassyng.

Remarks by Viviane Serry,

Tribute by Catherine Galasso,

“Willows/Angie’s Waltz” (2018), music: Alan Lloyd; voice: Julius Eastman; playback:

Dizzy Daisy May Schube’t-mahn a.k.a. Andy de Groat; Chamane Simone: Stephanie Bargues; Film: Do Brunet,

Tribute by Frank Conversano,

“Swan Lac,” choreography by Andy de Groat

    Of particular interest were the videos of his “Waiting for Godot Fan Dance,” and his famed “Rope Dance.”

   I hadn’t known previously that de Groat had a romantic relationship with Wilson. Or had I known, moreover, that de Groat was best known for his “spinning” dances, which he did in his own work and in pieces he choregraphed for Wilson and others.

    De Groat himself wrote: “I think of spinning as the base for my dance. There’s something about spinning which just seems kind of present. I can’t explain it.” He goes on to explain it, quite specifically, as the natural movement of dance, tracing it back to several ancient cultures.

     Suddenly this celebration of de Groat’s life seemed to have been recorded particularly for me, and I was slightly frightened by the coincidence of it. I hadn’t even known much about de Groat, let alone that he had recently died. How could I have dancing before I’d truly comprehended it? And why I had come upon this very video the morning after my dream?

    The commentary, videos, and dances were so very stunning, and I suddenly felt I was reliving a world I was never quite involved in previously. In a strange way, it seemed like a slightly out-of-body experience. It was as if my dream called into reality the existence of a figure whom I had been just waiting to meet.

    In my entire life to date (as I revise this essay, now at 79 years of age), I have never once experienced déjà vu, which nearly everyone I know has encountered numerous times. Perhaps my life of synchronicities and coincidence are my version of that experience.

    Finally, I should mention that in 2002, some years previous to this remarkable video, I received a substantial grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, established by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and numerous other artists deeply connected to the Judson Church. In the year I received a grant for poetry, one of my very favorite composers David Lang received a grant, as did Robert Ashley, both icons of avant-garde music and opera for me. I surely met them at that event, but was so in awe I never got to express my appreciation for their art. I never visited the Judson Church, but I remember how furious I was with my beloved friend David Antin when, in one of his more or less unscripted talk pieces he mocked their activities to a class of students at CalArts, and I told him so in no uncertain terms how I felt he was wrong and actually delimiting the imagination of the students.. But then David was a remarkable poet, who despite his wife Eleanor’s fantasies of being a member of the long past world of ballet, knew very little about dance.

    It was a bit confusing to me when I told a straight friend about the piece I had just written and he looked blankly at me, wondering why it might be of gay interest. Beyond the fact that almost all of the figures about which I had written were statedly gay, I was momentarily taken aback. I answered: "Straight people—unless perhaps they are in some religious elevated or drugged-out state of mind—generally do not spin." 

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2019

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2019).

 

 

Sai Kiran K(odcherwar) | Come Out / 2022

an early meeting of love and dove

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sai Kiran K(odcherwar) (screenwriter and director) Come Out / 2022 [13 minutes]

 

In this comedy of coincidence from India, a young closeted gay man has been partying and drinking heavily at his friend Ritesh’s apartment.

    The young man (Arhaan) awakens, hung over, in the filthy, food and bottle-strewn apartment, the sound of his cellphone signaling him; the phone notifies him that he has an important appointment this very morning with a man with whom he’s been texting for some time now, nicknamed “Love,” who, himself long closeted, he perceives might be the man of his dreams and just possibly a way to “come out.”

     He quickly calls Ritesh, explaining that he will lock up the apartment and bring him his keys at the office later in the day, and once he has washed his face, found his shoes, and other articles, he is ready to escape.

     But just as he is about to go out the door, he hears a yawn and clinking of more beer bottles, as under a deep pile of covers another young man, also obviously a straggler from the last night’s party, emerges.

    Frustrated, he attempts to query the slow-moving and unresponsive wreck as he (Vamshidhar Goud) enters the bathroom, pees, and faces himself in the mirror, finally asking if the hurried other man is also a friend of Ritesh.

    Busy with his cellphone, checking on possible messages from his brunch date, he at first doesn’t respond; but finally asked if the two of them had met the night before, the first young man suggests that they didn’t meet, that he drank separately. But again checking his phone he discovers that he is now running late and calls into the bathroom: “Make it fast. I have to go to Madhapur urgently.”

     The second man vaguely recalls that he also has to go to Madhapur and insists that the other drive him there, since he also has an appointment in Madhapur.

      Now frustrated more than ever, the first young man, is forced to wait yet longer for the slow-moving second party-goer, who when he finally seems ready to depart, discovers that he has left his phone somewhere in the chaos of the party.

      Slowly re-tracing his steps, he finally finds it in a nearby bed. But upon checking his messages, he realizes that appointment is private, and suggests that we will get an Ola (India’s largest ride-hailing system consisting of autos, attached rickshaws or bike taxis) or Uber.

     Now, truly angry for having waiting all this time, the first young man insists he will take the other to Madhapur. But by this time both are madly on their phones attempting to explain to their appointments why they are late and reassure them that they will be there soon. In doing so, however, they note that as each of them texts, the other’s cellphone beeps with the message.

     While the first is attempting to contact his “Love,” the second is busy reassuring his “Dove” that he will soon be there.

     After several of these observed beeps, they each try out a further message, reconfirming, that they are, in fact, “Love and Dove.”

     They look up at one another and smile, as the first young man switches on the music, the two ready to dance among the chaos of the night before in which they slept near one another without having yet met.

     If the coincidence of it all seems a bit far-fetched, I would remind readers that in the gay world, not nearly as vast as the heterosexual one, there are far more coincidences possible. And gay men and women often each serve as a kind of network of interrelating connections. Often one finds one living in a parallel universe, where mutual friends unexpectedly meet up. And there is something always charming in the recognition that we share a smaller and more communal world.

     The only question left to ask is, does this mean Ritesh is gay?

 

Los Angeles, May 31, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).