(A Vacation Trip to the Southland... -- continued)
The cultural highlight of the second week was a second visit to the National Gallery, to see the Diaghilev/Ballets Russes exhibition in the East Building---a sumptuous combination of costumes, sets, ballet music, and rare ballet films that characterized the world’s leading ballet company from 1909 till 1929. I came home a devoté of Léon Bakst, with two gorgeous framed prints, DVDs, and more books. I’ve asked Tony to paint a Ballets Russes-style backdrop on the wall going up to our second floor where the masks now hang, and I’m happy to say that he’s agreed (though it will look like Tony Brown, not Léon Bakst).
Léon Bakst (1866 - 1924) Ballets Russes
On the final Sunday morning we attended a sung high mass with incense at the Anglo-Catholic parish church of St Paul’s, K Street, in Washington, where I once attended. I wanted Jeffrey and Tony to experience the mystery and beauty of a high mass with incense, Gregorian and Anglican Chant, and a fully developed liturgy. It was a very beautiful and moving experience. No one converted, however. As usual, Tony made friends readily with an engaging woman eager to have him return. It always happens! I slip off to look at a chapel or visit the necessary room and come back to find he’s made a new lady friend.
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We decided to break the trip home into two segments and stop overnight in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, visit early 20th Century writer Edith Wharton’s home The Mount in Lenox, and then drive on home. That tour didn’t happen. Instead, Part Two, the Dance with Death, began.
Part Two: The Dance with Sepsis and Hematuria
Part Two can be understood in two ways. First, try to visualize it as a Greek dance. Imagine that you are seated in a hillside amphitheater in Ancient Greece looking down into a semi-darkened stage. Across the back of the stage, two wide grey backdrops hang extending outward at somewhat shallow angles toward the center of the stage, the one on your right extending somewhat in front of the other. In the center of the stage is a table like the examining tables in today’s doctors’ offices. It is angled downstage and slightly toward your left. There are four acts.
After you have read the dance, then read the narrative after it with the dance in mind.
Act I
A single figure wearing a grey robe faces toward the left side of the stage with his hands clasped down in front of him writhing and twisting in pain. He looks down and throws up his hands in horror. He rushes to the back of the stage, disappears behind the backdrops, and is then seen being pulled slowly by another figure in violet through torrential rain across the right rear third of the stage.
Act II
The figure in a grey robe lies on his back on the table, head toward the audience, twisting and grasping his throat and chest. Two female figures in black robes and veils dance seductively around the table. The figure in violet enters, waives them away, and leads the figure in grey away to the right rear of the stage.