sarma

Connecticut College's summer faculty, like Rudy Perez, June Lewis, Margaret Beals, Walter Nicks, usually present their companies and/or their students or maybe just themselves in some kind of performance before the summer is over. You never know whether you'll find them dancing in a gym or one of the three auditoriums or the streets of New London or the lawn. On August 2, 1972, at 8:23 p.m., Don Redlich presented a group of his students, Lavina Hovinga, and his assistant Billy Siegenfeld in She Often Goes for a Walk just After Sunset, an unusually beautiful and unrepeatable event that nevertheless left an indelible track on the night, the lawn, many minds.

We waited in the dusk on the terrace of the brazenly new concrete and glass Cummings Art Center. A single long diagonal beam of light sang along the grass of the Great Lawn. Then, far, far away across the lawn, a speck of a figure in white came down the steps of one of the college's old stone buildings and strolled toward us: Lavina Hovinga, delicately punching the lawn with the tip of her parasol at each stride, sauntering into a sudden wind that blew at her long white dress and the brim of her straw hat. A thunderstorm was waiting. Suddenly a horde of figures in dark clothes (leotards, tights, blue jeans, sweaters) came leaping and whooping after her from the bushes. She paused in the center of the light beam, and by twos and threes the wild people ran and dived into a circular shoal around her. Not in pursuit? In the small space remaining between her and the fallen bodies the gentlewoman fastidiously picked out a circular path; she seemed to be nudging them gently with her feet or parasol. They rolled out in a wave, spread over the lawn-small, dark figures making hyena cries bounce off the stone buildings. Once, by hidden signal, they rocked stiffly from side to side, feet apart, arms held up squarely, looking in the deepening night like cave drawings come to life. Sometimes they ran through the light, but most of them were barely visible. I remember that Nelly Bly emerged sweetly from the taped collage of sounds and music.

When the lady continued her stroll to and along a small cliff at the edge of the lawn, the wild people leaped after her and plunged raucously over the edge. But as she started across the lawn directly in the path of the beam, they appeared single file behind her at a slight distance-a group of rambunctious pets suddenly docile and ready to heel. I loved them then. They caught up with her under a wind-whipped tree and let out with a last howl before trotting away. The lady descended a stone staircase into a square sunken courtyard with a small circle of lawn and a clump of birches set into the middle of the pavement. She looked curiously at the contemporary sculptured objects that decorate the court; she seemed now out of her own time - as if she were a figure from Connecticut College of 75 years ago. The stone buildings would have been there, so would the lawn, but not this new place. She passed on to the rectangular arch opening on the lower lawn, and stood there for a long time with her back to us, her dress billowing out. Watched from the terrace above, the scene had the clarity and the mystery of a Magritte.

Suddenly the dark people came snuffling and hopping through the arch, Billy Siegenfeld first, waggling his ass dog-like, keeping close to the ground. The courtyard seemed unfamiliar to these people too; they didn't like the look of the statues. While the lady sat calmly on a stone bench under the birches, the mob went on a binge of irrational passionrubbing themselves against the more phallic of the sculptures, screaming curses at us and each other. A boy, crucified against a long welded statue, sang an old pop tune; the woman who made a pietà with his fallen body said enthusiastically, “All my men wear English Leather." The vocal craziness turned into a running, slamming-into-walls kind of craziness. The dancers all this time were being grandly free with their bodies and their psyches, playing self-indulgence with considerable discipline and verve. The lady made a foray to a corner of the courtyard and raised her umbrella; the young people (all 32 of them) huddled close to their protectress, and together they advanced onto the circle of grass. Rain began to fall on them-not the real rain we were expecting, but water from a concealed hose. As if released from some purgatory of drought or heat, the animal-people yelped and rolled and tore off their shirts and hugged each other. During their watery bacchanal, the lady moved quickly and quietly away and up the staircase. At the top, she lifted her skirts, hoisted a shapely leg over the back of a motorcycle behind a man in a helmet and goggles, and in a blast of music and engine noise they tore off across the lawn with the others in pursuit. Hi Nelly, ho ho Nelly. And the spotlight went crazy, and the real rain didn't come, and I went weeping rather merrily out onto the black grass.