Terrible Town

When Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio, he was trying, he said, to convey "a new looseness [ of ] lives flowing past each other.'' His stereopticon smalltown grotesques were translated with difficulty to me legitimate stage. But last week at the Jacob's Pillow (Mass.) Dance Festival, they took on vivid new life in a fresh medium: a "dance drama" based on the book and choreographed by 38-year-old Donald Saddler, who arranged the dances in Broadway's Wonderful Town.

For his dance version of Winesburg, Saddler focused on four of the book's most luridly contorted figures: Elizabeth Willard. whose uncontrollable love for her son feeds "the feeble blaze of life that remained in her;" the Peeping-Tom minister, the Rev. Curtis Hartman, who sees God in a naked woman; a love-starved spinster named Alice Hindman; and the local doxy, one Louise Trunnion. As Anderson had done, Choreographer Saddler used the inflamed observations of George Willard, Elizabeth's son and a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle, as the thread to stitch the incidents together.

Saddler's first sequence has Louise (Dancer Patricia Birsh) weaving about George (Thomas Hasson) in a brash, hip-flicking dance of courtship culminating in a clinch and Louise's exit in Georges arms. "Nobody saw us," he says as he returns breathless to the stage. In the second incident, Alice (Maria Karnilova) rips off her nightgown, thrusts and twists about the stage in a wonderful pantomime of alternate abandon and frustration, finally offers herself to a stranger. "I don't care who he is as long as he is alone," she says, but she is rejected. The third incident has the Rev. Mr. Hartman (Donald Saddler) jaggedly convulsed before the vision of a woman dimly seen through a window. The fourth is a tautly controlled dance between mother (Ilona Murai) and son expressing in the pushing of a palm and the brush of a shoulder her mixed longing and desire to send him into the world.

What impressed most critics at last week's performance was Saddler's economical evocation of Anderson's mordant visions through the skillful welding of Genevieve Pitot's music with dance and the spoken word. Saddler believes dialogue should be a regular part of the dance: "It's an extension of the emotions." A veteran movie choreographer (April in Paris, Young in Heart), he has danced with Manhattan's Ballet Theater, worked with his own modern dance company. His main concern is perfecting native American dance movements: "I feel that what I ought to dance about is what is different about being an American." Sherwood Anderson has just the flavor he is looking for. His next project: to add four more characters to the dancing population of Ohio's most explosively inhibited town.

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