The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 97

Page 5D Sunday July 16 I Jji 1 1 1 Art Books Dance Music Stage Movie Night Life THE KANSAS CITY -j-v 7 a- had Graham and Twyla Tharp that first year to show that we respected our heritage but still wanted to go Reinhart said a long time the purpose of the festival was to look inward There were two necessities for this: One was that the festival was one of the few places where dance companies could get out of New York to create new works The other was that there that much audience Thank God that has Over the last few years however the relationship between Connecticut College and organization has soured Never a moneymaker the expanding festival was running up bigger deficits each year and the college decided it could no longer afford to underwrite the enterprise Moreover it was made dear mat me festival was only part of the summer arts program and could no longer count on receiving preferential treatment Last summer when the college charged the festival $15000 rent it became apparent that something would hwe to change The New London community had never really taken the dancers to its heart anyway so the festival started looking I By Harry Haskell Music Editor DURHAM Charles Reinhart director of the American I Dance Festival calls the 30-year-old institution that moved here this summer from Connecticut holy a Mecca as one can find in the dance Certainly no other annual event has attracted so many modern-dance giants or boasts such a dazzling record of creative activity This six-week session (June 17-July 29) will bring to nearly 200 the number of dances first performed at the festival including such important works as Jose Martha of Paul and Alwin Canto the only real community of dance in die world where artists are together over a long period of time eating together working together Reinhart said is very misleading fra what we do We stress the process more than the The American Dance Festival traces its roots to 1934 when Martha Hill and Mary Josephine Shelly set up a school of modern dance at Bennington College in Vermont Those were heady years On the faculty mat first summer were Martha Graham Hanya Holm Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman Except for one summer at Mills College in California the school remained in Vermont until World War gas rationing forced it to close its doors temporarily It reopened in 1948 as the newly named American Dance Festival and took up residence at Connecticut College in New London The great choreographers who had worked at Bennington soon Of almost 50 bids the field was narrowed to three institutions: Duke University in Durham me University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Duke won out in words because of energy their enthusiasm and the breadth of their That enthusiasm comes as no surprise president Terry Sanford is the same man who as governor cajoled a recalcitrant state legislature into funding me North Carolina School of the Arts in the 1960s Since then the cultural life has blossomed As an earnest of their support the university and the Durham-based Liggett Group corporation pledged to help raise $1 million over the next three years for a festival endowment The state already has pitched in a token $25000 gotten more publicity out of this move than gotten in the last 30 Reinhart said Bennington and New London were isolated in a way not here I think important as a symbol of me change in the perception of dance In See FESTIVAL on Page 8D were joined by such younger artists as Limon Nikolais Taylor Merce Cunningham and Alvin Alley New London did indeed become a new Mecca fra dancers and dance lovers Since taking over in I960 Reinhart has broadened the scope of the festival to include styles of dance other than modern and a host of ancillary workshops in criticism videotaping dance therapy education and so on Harry Haskell The music editor is one of nine journalists from North America and Israel to win a fellowship to the American Dance Festival Signs of arrival for dance festival in Durham NC 'One Sings the Other Doesn't' At Last a Woman's Hits Home "ONE SINGS THE OTHER Opens Friday at the Bijou Theater Drama produced written and directed by Agnes Varda and released by Cinema 5 with the following Valerie Mairesse Theresa Ji Raffi Robert Dadies and Jearv friend (Ali Raffi) marries and becomes a mother But over the next five years the two women exchange letters the contents of which form the backbone of Sings And though the two are rarely on the screen at the same time the intensity of their relationship pervades every frame Their parallel progress in accepting themselves as individuals and women is described beautifully The performances of Miss Mairesse and Miss Liotard are the kind that tend to erase the line between acting and life The two young women (20 and 25 ears old when the film was shot) ek-bit an astounding naturalness on the doubly astounding because it was the first film role for each And because this is a movie that afraid to take its time and dig deep fra emotional content they have the chance to really round out their characters giving us a Pauline and Suzanne we know as lifelong friends Even the minor players are terrific Dadies is memorable as the photographer one of those born losers with an sensibilities and no cash to back them up Raffi is very attractive as the Iranian who is all gentle lover in France and male chauvinist once he hits his homeland and Jean-Pierre Pellegrin is rather lovable in a brief bit as the gentle pediatrician with whom Suzanne finally settles down ir Holding it all together is Ms subtle but unmistakably female direction Even in its most basic technical aspects Sings exhibits a decidedly point of viewy a painstaking appreciation of detail and visual effect that separates her work from the bull-in-a-china-shop brusqueness with which so many men directors try to wrestle their subject matter into submission But perhaps is the wrong word may be more accurate For Sings the Other asks us to find the best within ourselves By Robert Butler Arts and Entertainment Editor AGNES 1977 film ZA Sings the Other A manages to accomplish what a score of other recent pictures have only strived for capturing within a viable dramatic framework the major questions facing women in this day of social and sexual upheaval Other recent films have attempted as much but certainly not with the success of the French-language Sings for here is a motion picture that speaks wisely eloquently and with real spirit to the essence of womanhood ana by extension to what it means to be human It is an intelligent and loving work that confirms the place of Ms Varda a 25-year veteran of moviemaking among the top directors Not that Sings will be met with universal appreciation The film is sure to infuriate traditionalists (it has the audacity to suggest that some women make better mothers without a man to clutter up the scene) and anti-abortionists (the picture supports the of women to abortions though it certainly make the operation look easy or attractive) But even those viewers who strongly disagree with the particulars will have to admit it conveys a compelling sense of purpose and hope The key to Ms success however is not polemics but personality Sings The Other is PETER HANDKE something like Beckett Compassion For Women Astonishing Liotard and Mairesse the talker and the singer dren by this sad is nearly starving and has another child on the way Her friend 17-year-old Pauline a strong-willed girl with a tough independent streak takes control of the situation conning her middle-class Parisian parents out of the cash needed for an abortion and tending to the two children while Suzanne is away Upon her return Suzanne is greeted by the suicide and the friends part Suzanne to live on a farm with her heartless parents Pauline to join a trio of girls who sing backup fra pop records (thus the title) After this prologue a decade passes before the two friends meet again ironically enough at a pro-abortion rally Pauline has had a lover and an abortion (in a hauntingly affecting flashback scene set in Amsterdam) and is more politicized than ever singing rather tactless protest songs guaranteed to raise the hackles of the pious and conservative Suzanne has fought her way up leaving her vicious parents and finally launching a successful family planning clinic The meeting is Suzanne must return to her clinic two children and asexual life while Pauline weary of the trials of a traveling minstrel leaves fra Iran with her Arab boy types one a rebel given to outrageous statements and actions the other a shy misused victim of her own femininity Over the 110 minutes of this film both develop a deep understanding of themselves and each other Both move toward a a point of moderation where need not mean and independence be at odds with responsibility At the in Suzanne lives with a scruffy penniless photographer (Robert Dadies) who specializes in portraits of unhappy portraits that mirror his own hopelessness She has had two chil THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN by Peter Handle (88 pag Farrar Straus and Giroux 795) By Mary Reefer THEN Marianne whom Peter IJ Handke generally refers to as woman" has an intuition that her successful husband will desert her if not now certainly at some time in the she makes a sudden decision to leave him first She remains in the bungalow colony with ho- 8-year-old son above the fumes of a big in West Germany She gets a job as a translator makes the stray of two women whose friend-p and mutual concern span a dec- ade and a half of change in the way women view themselves Pauline (Valerie Mairesse) and Suzanne (Therese Liotard) are two different trips to the supermarket rearranges the furniture in her tiny house walks with her son in the mountains has a few friends in This is about all that happens in Left-Handed But a great deal more is suggest- It is perhaps not valid to compare a novel with a film but the subject matter of book is so similar to that of Unmarried that the comparison is inevitable I would suggest that Handke understands a lot more about what happens to a woman alone than does Paul Mazursky (Most of us know that what really happens is exactly nothing: She goes on doing the i things riie has always done go- In the Prisons of Russia: Whether to Resist or Not? sTW' i Vi ppf fjmm $2 'i't THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO Voi Ill by Al-xandf Solzhenitsyn (558 pages Harper Row $1695) By Harold Cordry LEXANDER Solzhenitsyn whose passion fra principal motivating force in his truth is the life considers most important work the fulfillment of a deeply felt moral obligation to the many millions who suffered and died in the great holocaust of our century His purpose in this massive work which he began to write about 20 years ago has been to document the horrors at the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union to explore the origins of the camp system and to explain why it has survived so many years after the death of Stalin to whom the blame for its existence had generally been attributed Described as an experiment in literary investigation Gulag is a masterly presentation of history in the language of literature a major historical achievement by one of the great novelists of our time It is true that tells us little that we did not already know at least in a generalized way Most of our information has come from the memoirs of camp Anatoly Marchenko fra example whose book was published in 1988 and from a few scholars who have on interviews with full range of horrors And achievement is all the more remarkable in that we do so without being so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tragedy that we lose touch with the individuals involved in it In the reader followed scores of hapless victims from arrest to interrogation to sentencing then across the vast archipelago to the camps in which they would serve out their terms picked up at that point taking us inside the camps revealing the reality of what Solzhenitsyn calls What we saw was almost as harrowing as what Virgil revealed to Dante in the lower regions of the How we asked ourselves could the damned accept their fate with such docile submissiveness? answer in is that in fact they did not At last they began to resist even to rebel They killed the camp stool pigeons They refused to work They went on hunger strikes In one instance at Kengir in 1954 they actually took control of the camp der the ci prisoners of the most thin the camp reprehensible elements jif the system developed on the outside by Stalin But except fra a few early pioneering studies such as Labor in Soviet Russia7 by Dallin and Nicolaevsky (1917) and Concen-trationnaire an by Barton there has bean nothing on a scale comparable with that of were appointed and their principal targets wore the informers and collaborators But there was nothing resembling a trial Denunciations were unanswerable A whispered accusation was reason enough to slit the throat of the accused while he slept The situation was such that rs feared Solzhenitsyn tower of defiance Gulag Harold Cordry is a free-lance wrftar specializing prisoners their comrades as much as they reared the camp authorities They would refuse to be interrogated without witnesses to testify that they betrayed no ing to the market watching television cooking in short getting through the day Loneliness is very boring It is hard to make it entertaining) For woman there is no supportive psychiatrist no encounter group no cocktail parties no Alan Bates The days are endless repetitions of the day before the nights are empty and meaningless Often she listens to the same record over and over sometimes she sleeps If we are to accept the Mazursky version of what it means to be an unmarried woman it certainly be too bad We have been taken in by the the fashionable Upper Side apartment the cocktail parties Jill beauty and style Her decision to make it alone seems rather than brave the final of her struggling up the street mous painting with an enormous and altogether winning Peter Handke knows it this way Instead he captures the reality of loneliness in prose so skeletal that the must flesh it out There are no See LIFE on Page 10D efer teaches English at and regularly reviews new fic- Mary mion A.