A Celebration of Anna Sokolow’s Legacy
Joyce Theater, N.Y.C. Sept. 14, 2000, 8 PM
Good evening everyone. My name is James Dybas and I’m a former student and long time friend of Anna Sokolow.
Anna is a giant — all 4′ 11″ of her. An artist in every sense of the word. Opinionated, daring, stubborn, humorous, private, tough, loving, caring, generous, original and brilliant.
We met in 1967 when I was a member of Jerry Robbins American Theater Lab which was an experimental theater group of 10 hand picked actor/singer/dancers who worked with Jerry from 10 – 5 PM five days a week for about six months. Anna would come in twice a week to give a movement class and we all reveled in every moment of it. I can still hear her counting and clapping out the beats of each exercise. I told her that after her classes I felt cleansed and that it was like going to confession. Her no-nonsense and yet humorous way with us was exhilarating.
For some reason she thought I was Mexican, and being that she had spent time choreographing and teaching in Mexico City, took an immediate liking to me.
I think I was the only one who ever called her “Anna Banana” to her face. She looked at me with those blue eyes, surprised when I first said it and then she burst into laughter, telling me that it was what her elementary school mates used to call her. She knew that I said it with affection and didn’t mind. I also called her Anushka, Maestra, Carina, Sokolova and Anita.
Because of this crazy business of ours and where our work takes us, we met each other all over the map. Los Angeles, Mexico City, Pittsburgh. I remember that while in San Francisco I took her on the ferry to Sausalito and when we passed Alcatraz she asked “what’s that?” I said it was a prison that was empty but you could go in and take a tour. “What for?” She said. “Why don’t they turn it into an art museum?”
She was in Pittsburgh creating a new dance piece about Januz Korchak the Polish man who took care of and tried to save the children in the death camps. I was there with the national tour of “42nd Street” and invited her to see the show not knowing what her reaction would be to all of the glitz and tap dancing. Afterwards I brought her back stage and she said ” I loved it. That young girl having to over come all of those obstacles to be a performer”. She was referring to the character of Peggy Sawyer in the show. I chuckled to myself and I thought, only Anna would get the social implications of a girl from Allentown, PA trying to make it in show biz.
While I was living in Los Angeles she happened to be working there and I invited her to stay with me in my apt. for a week. I asked her what she wanted to see. You can bet it WASN’T Universal studios or Disneyland or the footprints in Manns Chinese Theater. She wanted to see where the poor people lived. So I took her to East L.A. where I knew we could also get some good Mexican food. I showed her the Watts Towers and she was in awe of how artistically it was constructed with broken , empty bottles and stuff. We also went to the beach in Venice and walked along the shore. I took wonderful photographs of her standing in front of what we thought was very beautiful graffiti. She loved the graffiti because it made a social statement and using graffiti for a scenic backdrop she later choreographed “Through the Culture Loop”.
I was vacationing in Mexico City Christmas of 1984 into the New Year. Anna just happened to be there and staying with an old friend who used to be more than a friend. His name was Nacho Aguirre and was a wonderful artist who she met when she was choreographing in Mexico in the 30’s. He did several portraits of her while they were “together”. Small in stature like Anna and powerful like Anna. He was about 75 at the time, and Anna said that she gave him stretching exercises in the morning so that he would be able to stand up straight and move freely. She was always generous with her time and energy.
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She loved living in Mexico City in the 30’s and got to know many of the great artists. Orozco, Rivera,Kahlo, Sequieros. They all admired and respected her work and gave her gifts of their art works. Anna got to know the Sequieros family and in the 80’s choreographed a piece called “Homaje a Seqieros” which was done in Mexico City and wonderfully received at the Bellas Artes and Polyforum. She loved Mexico and would visit and work there most every year.
She also loved Israel and told me about her very first trip there.
“In 1952 Jerry Robbins called me and said what are you doing next week?” I said “why Jerry?” “I’d like you to come to Israel with me.” “What? Israel?. He said “yes, the American Israel Culture Foundation in the U.S. is interested in bringing a dance company abroad and I’ve seen a company which I think is very interesting and I’d like your opinion.” “So I go with him. When the plane landed in Tel Aviv I couldn’t believe I was in the land of Jews. It was an amazing experience. WE live in a world of a Jew, a Christian, and Italian and this was all Jews and not that I was into Zionism but it was Zionism that made it. So then he took me to a rehearsal of this group INBAL and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I kept thinking you mean these are Jews?” Thin, dark skin, black hair, oriental, sing, dance, instruments. Jerry said “You like it?” “And I said yes.” “Will you stay?” “Yes! I was totally mesmerized so – Jerry had to go back and I stayed on.”
The Inbal company came to NYC and Anna was walking down the street in mid town Manhattan with one of the men dancers who was dark skinned with a beard. A drunk fell out of a doorway onto the street and shouted “Jesus”. Anna laughingly said that the drunk thought this guy was the savior and said “Save me, tell me what to do Jesus” and the Israeli dancer in his thick accent said “go home, go to bed”. Anna really got a kick out of the whole encounter.
She told me that her favorite city is Jerusalem. And said, I quote “it maintains until this day a nobility and it rises above all this “stuff”. The atmosphere makes it.”
She had Mexican and Israeli art hanging on the walls in her Christopher St. apartment. I would go to visit and she would be listening to a piece of music by Scriabin or Bach or Alban Berg or Bernstein; music that she said was her form of meditation. Her apartment was always open to friends and if she was going to be out of town and I was visiting N.Y. she would always say “mi casa es tu casa” and offer for me to stay. I took her up on it once and stayed for a month while she was out of town and I was in rehearsal for the tour of “Guys and Dolls”.
I don’t know how she dealt with not having air conditioning, the noise from the Fire Dept which is just down the street, “the rumble of the subway trains, the rattle of the taxis”, the boom boxes and hordes of people who would revel into the night just five floors below.
She was a true New Yorker. She loved for us to walk thru the village and when we did, people would always stop and say “Hello Anna”. She was always amazed that anyone recognized and knew her. For many,many years every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. she would walk from her 1 Christopher Street apartment to teach a movement for actors class at her friends Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof’s H.B. Studio on Bank Street. She did this every Sunday until she was about 88 years old. It seems like everyone in the village had studied with her at one time or another. She loved the architecture and would always find something or someone that would be a little off beat and strangely beautiful. She was always conscious of the simplicity of things, and of course movement.
Anna loved an occasional cigarette and a glass of wine. We’d go to the Greek diner (Homer’s) across the street from her apartment where all of the waiters adored her. I always expected them to go into a chorus of “Hello Anna”.
She’d usually order the fruit salad on lettuce with jello and cottage cheese, and a cup of tea . We’d talk and she would remember the challenging and wonderful times of her life.
I remember the 88th birthday party that Jason Durivou made for her in her Christopher St. apartment. She was surrounded by friends and dancers from her company who brought gifts and flowers and goodies and love. Anna and I danced a kind of Tango in her kitchen and one of the guests video taped it. A filmed moment in time that I’ll cherish forever.
She told me a story about how she met and was fired in California by Bertolt Brecht .
Anna came from Mexico to Los Angeles to do choreography for a Brecht play (whose name she couldn’t remember) directed by Joe Losey and starring Charles Laughton. She was thrilled. Laughton met her at the airport , drove her to meet Brecht who was living in a poor section of L.A. and she goes in “and…. all the walls are pasted with newspapers.” She said “This man (Brecht) looks at me and says “do you know my book” “I forget the name of the book – something to do with acting – he tells his wife to give me the book. I take the book, I read it, I don’t understand any of it – all I got from the book was – no matter what you’re saying, you say it straight front. “I love you will you go home with me”; not to the other actor but out front.
I thought my God , what am I gonna do here? I remember I had to stage a scene with a lot of movement so he came in to see the rehearsal and he said to me “How dare you come in here with your Broadway tricks” I said, ” I don’t have any tricks”. He said “Do you know who I am? I am known as the emperor of the German Theater”. I said “We don’t have Emperors here” , “OUT he shouted, and that was it and I was fired. See, with a person like that you have to obey constantly, no matter what, you have to do exactly as he tells you and that was it. You can’t be creative in your way, you have to suit his creation. I remember before Brecht came I said to the director Joe Losey Do you mind if I take a week and just work by myself? He said No, not at all. The week was over, boom, in comes Brecht. And I was out.”
A daytime nurse named Ruby was with Anna for the last several months of her life. In January of 2000 just a month before her 90th birthday she unexpectedly developed a blood clot and while in the hospital, had to have her right leg amputated from the thigh down. It was devastating. When she was recovering she didn’t say much, however, while she was lying in bed, she kept reaching down trying to touch the leg that wasn’t there.
There were a lot of visitors and friends who were with her during the last months of her life. Mostly her companion and caretaker Jason Durivou, Jim & Lori May, and Mary Anthony was always there with an encouraging word and something to eat as were so many others. Near the end, her nephew Stephen Bank (who came from his home in London to live with Anna and take care of business for the last several months of her life) monitored who was allowed to visit her at her fifth floor apartment at Number 1 Christopher Street . In the last few days of her life, Anna layed in bed not opening her eyes or responding to anyone. I was with her the night before she left the planet and brought a boom box along with several of tapes of her favorite music, (Scriabin, Alban Berg, Teo Macero) so that she might hear the music that was her sustenance. Her nephew (Stephen Bank) was at her bedside in her apartment when she peacefully left the planet.
I’d like to read a few lines from “The Prophet” by Kahil Gibran
…..For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from it’s restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered.
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing, and when you have reached the mountain top then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you dance.
Gracias, Anita.
