Like the Sea
Dancing with Mary Glass
This book can be opened with
An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times
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. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—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. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.
In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—“What are you taking with you from the natural world?”
Halprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.
In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers— Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.
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.
It's tempting to say that I ‘inhaled’ Like the Sea, except that metaphor seems wrong regarding a work that's so fluid, so amniotic. And while there's been ample documentation of the lives and work of some of the most significant figures in postmodern dance, this ‘biography’ expands the possibilities for exploring the ways in which an aesthetic practice is grounded in both political and personal histories. Mavor's Mary Glass is an uncannily convincing participant in this sphere, and the places where her life and those of 'real people' intersect are both illuminating and enthralling.—Barbara Browning, author of The Gift.
Author Website
Preface | xiii
I Like Mary Glass | 1
Dance Is Our First Art Form | 2
Under a Nearly Cloudless Sky | 4
A Caul Should Be Kept for Life | 9
The Defeated Owl Spirit | 12
Lake Tahoe Never Blinks | 13
Alone in the Shell | 15
Taking Three Hundred Years to Grow into an Oak Tree | 19
A Desire to Steal | 21
Like Anything That Feels Really, Really Good | 25
Until They Are Lost | 28
The Pacific Is Made of the Blues of Mary’s Dream of a Glass House | 34
Like the Jellyfish That Wash Up on the Beach That She Sometimes Accidentally Steps On | 35
Fairytale Modernism | 38
Appetite | 43
We’ve Danced with Ruth and Merce on Anna’s Redwood Deck | 44
At Last, They Come Out—Explosively but Gently | 45
Heart Beating under Bark | 50
Mary Does Not Love Aaron | 54
I Could See That They Were Running and Skipping and To Me It Was Dancing | 56
Her Voice Is Voluptuous, Almost Masculine |58
Even Though She Is a Vegetarian | 62
My Excited Pupils Enlarged / M. XXX | 64
The Secret That Was Melody’s Alone | 67
In You | 69
Honey from Mr. Larkin’s Bees | 70
Like the Noses of Rabbits | 71
The Stars Are Aligned | 72
Eyes Washed in Tears | 73
Girlfriends Who Traveled to the Other Side | 75
Mary Cannot Imagine That It Is Anything Serious | 80
Imagination Is a Killer | 82
The Nature of Grief | 84
The Same Thing | 85
Mary’s Companion Lover | 88
He Will Lose Nico | 89
Into Her Skirt Pocket | 90
To Wait Is to Love | 92
Like a Drug in Eliza’s Veins | 94
Pulled Out by Coda’s Hot Light | 99
To Eat Is to Steal | 101
To Love Is to Wait | 104
Dance That Is All | 105
Time to Dance | 106
A Scale Model of Vietnam | 108
To Nourish | 109
The Halprins Are Friends of Godunova | 110
And No Birds Sing | 111
A Big Newfoundland Dog Named Carlo | 112
Mother of Black Dance | 114
Big, Drooling, Shedding Beast | 115
The Same Deep Thought | 117
The Knitting Is So Tender | 120
Down Haight Street | 121
No Strings | 122
Yucatecos Like Me Speak Maya | 127
Visible Stars, Even When the Sun Is Up | 132
Something Begins | 133
Mary Sees a Baby’s Face in the Waves | 136
Curved as a Dolphin Bone Held in the Sea | 138
Eliza Says Her Sorrow Is So Great That the Mountains Changed Places and Began to Leak Milk | 139
Ocean’s Time | 141
Blood Everywhere | 144
Nothing Inside of Mary | 145
No Song | 146
Is This What You Wanted? | 147
That Dark Involvement with Blood and Birth and Death | 148
That White Feather Floating on Top of the Sea | 149
What Happened? | 150
Would Something Else Have Happened? | 153
Until It Dissolves in One’s Mouth | 154
The Heart Is a Safe Place / Especially if It Belongs to a Beloved Sister | 156
As She Fingers the Breath Holes of the Abalone Shell Again | 160
And Someone Turned the Moon Off | 162
To Disappear | 163
Like the Sea | 164
Afterwor(l)d | 167
Acknowledgments | 173
Illustration Credits | 175
Notes | 179
