Document text
- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us July 21, 2005 Painting the dancers Dancers, painted by Shoshanah Dubiner will be on display at Pangea through Aug. 15. Submitted photo As a young child, spontaneously, like many young children, Shoshanah Dubiner danced and painted pictures. Later she took dance classes — first ballet and then modern dance with Anna Halprin and Sunni Bloland. The group danced on Anna’s big deck among trees in Marin County, Northern California, young and free, encouraged to imagine themselves as wild animals or as dancers in an Egyptian wall fresco. Later, when Shoshanah was not dancing barefoot or stamping hard-heeled shoes to Balkan folk music, she was drawing dancers like Margaret Jenkins and Merce Cunningham in New York and Elsa Piperno in Rome. By 1966, Shoshanah was a stressed out and out-of-place grad student in comparative literature at Harvard. She longed to be a visual artist, but had accepted a scholarship to Harvard in part because it was too prestigious for the daughter of Jewish immigrants to decline. That year her eyes began to act strange: They would not focus on the printed page. They simply “swam” over the words. The doctor she consulted found nothing wrong with her eyes, and yet for weeks she could not read books without a great struggle. One evening, while doing figure drawing, she noticed that she could see the most minute details of the model’s body — the shape of the earlobe, bend of the knuckles, arch of the eyebrow — everything, quite clearly. When she was drawing, her vision was perfect. That night she dreamed she was in a dance class with other young women who had come to ask the teacher, The Great Dancer, how to become successful dancers. The teacher told them only, “To dance is to live.” He took her to a large hall where myriad people jumped and twirled about, arrayed in colorful costumes. The Great Dancer lifted her by her ankles, spun her around, then tossed her into the crowd. She awoke ecstatic. Shortly after The Dream, she decided to leave Harvard and follow her heart’s desire. She started her career as a costume designer in the world of theater and movies, and later expanded her work to include computer graphics and illustration. In 1999 she began to paint imaginary dancers as a simple expression of joy. The dancers came dressed in striped or polka-dotted leotards that showed off the shape of their limbs. Appearing in pairs or small groups, the dancers often balanced on one another, poised in an instant of fragile equilibrium. Most recently, her dancers have begun to move through landscapes inspired by images from photomicroscopy or tassels from spring trees. The world her dancers inhabit may be ordinary — hills, grass, trees — or somewhere seemingly fantastical, like landscapes of neurons or other human cells. DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Online Pharmacy Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations Hammocks Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams