Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Carol Mavor
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
Imprint:   Fordham University Press
Edition:   New edition
Weight:   0.435kg
ISBN:  

9781531509538

ISBN 10:   1531509533
Pages:   192
Publication Date:   03 June 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

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

Reviews

While there's been ample scholarly documentation of the lives and work of some of the most significant (non-fictional) figures in postmodern dance, this fictional biography, written in a fully lyrical mode, 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 Information

Carol Mavor is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her books include Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object (Reaktion Books, 2024) and Like a Lake: A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography (Fordham University Press, 2020).

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