Abstract

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.

All are welcome; refreshments will be served in the social space in the English Faculty after the seminar.

Looking forward to seeing you next Monday!