Word: mask
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...African visual art issues from cultures permeated by the dance. (Movement, one might say, is to tribal art what print is to Western art.) The mask one admires in the museum once had a dancer's head inside it; the carved figure embodies meanings that are entirely based on gesture and posture. Art Historian Robert Thompson, in showing these works drawn from the superb African collection owned by Katherine White in Los Angeles, demonstrates the canons of African motion across the diversity of regional cultures: Dan and Dogon, Yoruba and Ogoni, Luba and Ashanti, Benin and Ejagham...
...White collection includes a superb variety of masks, from cumbrous affairs that need an athlete to lift them to a wooden Ogoni mask from Nigeria, with its curving protrusion of lips like a bird's beak, too small to fit a human head. Thompson has included films showing how these personifications of spirit and moral forces are used in communal dances: Gaa Wree-Wre, for instance, the Dan personification of "ideal justice," with its white-rimmed eyes, worn in a dance characterized by ponderous walking and sitting...
...class Tokyo family, he had a fairly sinister childhood. He was raised as a little girl by his grandmother, who kept him much of the time in her gloomy sickroom. The fetid memories of such an upbringing formed much of the basis of his 1958 novel, Confessions of a Mask. "Something within me responded to the darkened room and the sickbed," he wrote elsewhere. He was fascinated, too, by death, which for him possessed an erotic attraction. His first sexual experience seems to have occurred while he was gazing at a portrait of St. Sebastian, body pierced with arrows. Years...
...river valleys of western Colombia from the end of the 1st millennium B.C. - Quimbaya and Tairona, Tolima and Muisca, Narino and Calima - shared, whatever their differences of society and religion, a superb instinct for the vital shape. Whether the object is a heart-shaped Calima pectoral with a fierce mask glaring from the center of its luxuriant curves, or a Muisca votive figure whose torso is compressed and flattened into a long triangular wedge of gold, or the magnificent Tairona pectoral with its three fierce birds' heads stabbing outward, the forms are so energetic in their stylization...
...Harvard Square Arts Festival continues at the Loeb Ex, though. You can pick up free tickets and more information (I guess) at 6 p.m. the day before each 7:30 performance, but tonight it's something called Stage One, tomorrow an (Om) Theater Workshop, Saturday at 2 a Mask Workshop, Saturday night Collective Movement Theater, Sunday at 2 a Forum, and Sunday night, appropriately enough, a Celebration-- which we can certainly...