The Washington Post - 07.03.2020

C2 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, MARCH 7 , 2020

ing idea, as does much of this

program. I can just imagine the

sales pitch: Let’s go with a fe-

male-empowerment theme!

Nothing wrong with that, except:

Why not simply focus on the very

best Graham works, actually cre-

ated by Graham?

The program’s centerpiece is

“Untitled (Souvenir),” a brisk,

witty 2019 dance by Pam Ta now-

itz, featuring chamber music by

Caroline Shaw and a building,

satisfying sense of disparate

parts slipping into place. round-

ing out the evening are three

short works prompted by Gra-

ham’s tense, drawn-in solo “Lam-

entation.” These “Lamentation

Variations” are by Aszure Barton,

Liz Gerring and michelle Dor-

rance, and they’re all beautifully

performed, with the eerie syn-

chronization of Barton’s two

dancers, Laurel Dalley Smith and

Anne o’Donnell, hinting intrigu-

ingly at sinister possession and

transformation. The overtone of

all of them was darkness. View-

ing the program as a whole, t he

moments of light left the stron-

gest impression.

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Martha Graham Dance Company

presents “the eVe project” through

saturday at the Kennedy center

eisenhower theater. $25-$69. 202-

467-4600. kennedy-center.org.

goodbye. Growing up, “Every

piece of him was special,” Scan-

lon says. “If someone told me

what his favorite food was, or a

song he liked, or a TV show he

liked — that was a piece of him.

We just made that metaphor

literally a piece of him” in the

film.

The search for answers about

the afterlife is also a quest for

meaning, says Scanlon: “Part of

the reason we as people look

toward the end is to look toward

the point — to look at why we

lived.”

So a film like “onward,” Scan-

lon says, becomes “a celebration

of life more than anything — a

reminder of why to live and

asking what do you want to put

out there” while on Earth.

Within Pixar’s walls in Em-

eryville, Calif., dramatizing

such themes sparks creative

friction. “You really get like a

therapist’s session in the story

room,” mann says. “There has

been multiple times where I’ve

had very real conversations

with Dan about life, [with] a lot

of us trying to find something

truthful.”

While wrestling with the great

beyond, though, Pixar i s still v ery

much in the business of enter-

taining children.

“Sometimes we worry about

the concepts being too much for

kids to grasp,” mann says. Ye t,

“more often than not, every time

we do a kids’ screening, it always

comes back: ‘Yeah, they got it.’

There may be a little detail here

and there that goes over their

head, but kids grasp way more

than we think.”

The approach of “onward” to

dealing with larger themes does

have its critics. The AV Club

writes of “onward”: “Even Pixar,

Disney’s hipper cousin, can’t re-

sist the instant pathos of a

croaked parent.” And Slant mag-

azine writes that although “on-

ward” begins “as a story of

bereavement, it soon turns to

celebrating the payoffs of posi-

tive thinking.”

Ye t mann says that animation,

like puppetry, provides an extra

wrinkle when dramatizing the

spark o f what it means to b e alive

and searching — a tale spun

through the illusion of a virtual

life.

“I am such a fan of the mup-

pets, and I feel like they did the

same thing: It’s just a piece of

film, but they feel like they really

have like a soul,” he says, “Honest-

ly, some of the muppets feel more

like real characters than even

some actors I’ve seen on screen —

the way that they can emote and

the level that they go to.”

“That’s what we get to do every

day at work: We get to give life to

something that’s not human,”

mann says. “They’re a dinosaur

or a car or an elf — it’s amazing

what you can get out of anima-

tion.”

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realm, trying to reconnect with
his own spirit.
“What happened before and
after our lives on Earth is
something we’ve all thought
about at one point in our lives,
and the subject definitely gives
us a lot of intriguing, meaty
themes to explore,” Docter says.
“The challenge, of course, is
that no one knows without a
doubt what all that entails —
and some people have definite
beliefs which we don’t want to
accost, never mind the design
challenge!”
The narrative twist is that by
looking toward the unknown
without, these characters learn
to look within. “The interesting
thing about both ‘onward’ and
‘Soul,’ ” Docter says, “is how
much exploring ‘the great be-
yond’ has informed us about
the ‘here and now’ — which is
really what these films are
about.”
for Scanlon, “onward” began
as a deeply personal movie. In a
world inspired by fantasy role-
playing, teenage elf brothers try
to meet the deceased father they
never got to know — embarking
on a hero’s quest in a campaign
full of enchanted challenges and
supernatural mysteries. Grow-
ing up in michigan, Scanlon lost
his own father when he was a
year old and his brother, Bill,
was 3.
“much like the characters in
the movie, we have no memories
of him,” Scanlon says. So he
decided to create a coming-of-
age adventure that sprang from
his own lingering questions:
“Who was he — and how are we
like him?”
In “onward,” Ian (voiced by
To m Holland), upon his 16th
birthday, has a chance to be with
his father for one day, but when
the gem-powered spell goes
awry, Ian and elder brother Bar-
ley (Chris Pratt) spend hours
with only half their physical dad,
who is represented as a light-
emitting pair of khaki pants and
leather shoes.
To assemble a sense of his own
father, Scanlon has clung to
whatever others can share, in-
cluding an audiotape — found
when he was a teenager — on
which his dad says only two
cherished words: Hello. And

pIxar from c1

In ‘Onward,’ a grasp for life’s meaning

pHotos by deborAH colemAn/pIxAr

“onward” director dan

Scanlon, top, and head of story

Kelsey Mann. The two set out to

understand what it means to be

alive — and entertain kids.

“Ekstasis” is a curious, fasci-

nating solo of broken glamour, as

if Audrey Hepburn got stuck in a

phone booth with Graham. The

dancer, Anne Souder, thrust her

arms overhead and shifted a hip,

ready to strut the red carpet. The

next instant she’s doubled over,

squatting, reaching toward an

infinite beyond.

I believe in her complicated

personality and whatever dark

forces she’s tangling with much

more than I believe in “Chroni-

cle.” T his all-female work in three

parts responded to the rise of

fascism and arose in the wake of

Graham’s refusal to perform at

the 1936 olympics in Hitler’s

Berlin. A noble history, and yet

we are left with a production that

is long, slow and repetitive. It

contains Graham’s ideas, if not

her brilliance — the formal

groupings, the percussive

rhythms, the sculptural preci-

sion. How precise? We’ll never

know. It faded from the reper-

toire, then was “reconstructed” —

always a sketchy process — from

archival films.

“Chronicle” looks like Graham

2.0, with the dancers’ 21st-centu-

ry aerobic bounces and extreme

flexibility. It feels like a market-

reography, by Graham and oth-

ers.

I’m not sure you’ll walk away

from “The EVE Project” in awe of

female power, though there are

some good works here and the

dancers are excellent — i ncluding

the men. But does this program

make bold statements about Gra-

ham’s power? Yes and no.

The three Graham works are a

mixed bag: the exhilarating, ca-

sually virtuosic “Diversion of

Angels” p lus two lost works from

the 1930s — “Ekstasis” and

“Chronicle” — pieced together

with the help of photos and

films. The delights in “Diversion

of Angels” are innumerable —

the way the dancers spin around

and plunge to the floor like a

heap of laundry; how Charlotte

Landreau leaps lightly onto

Lloyd mayor’s shoulder, where

he catches her with one arm. It’s

all breathtaking nonchalance. Is

this the treatise on love that

Graham intended? That isn’t

one’s first impression. But if the

emotional and thematic content

has dissipated (this piece is from

1948), it is danced with devotion

and swift, rolling energy.

dance reVIew from c1

A muddled message

brIgId pIerce/Kennedy center

anne o’donnell a nd the Martha Graham dance company in “ diversion of angels.” while “The eVe

project’s” message is mixed, the dancers — particularly in this piece — are marvelous.

over these health-related books,

an Amazon spokesperson said:

“A mazon maintains content

guidelines for the books it sells,

and we continue to evaluate our

catalogue, listening to customer

feedback. We have always re-

quired sellers, authors, and pub-

lishers to provide accurate infor-

mation on product detail pages,

and we remove those that violate

our policies. In addition, at the

top of relevant search results

pages we are linking to CDC

advice where customers can

le arn more about the virus and

protective measures.”

If you really want to stay safe

but feel you’ve got to buy some-

thing , try one of several corona-

virus coloring books, “for reliev-

ing stress during the 2020 out-

break.”

But wash your hands often —

and don’t share your crayons.

[email protected]

Ron Charles writes about books

for the Washington post and hosts

totallyHipVideobookreview.com.

covid-19 rely on websites main-

tained by the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention and the

World Health organization.

Amazon is not the only

source of questionable books

related to the current epidemic.

They can be found on other

online bookseller sites, too. for

instance, Barnes & Noble’s web-

site offers an e-book by moxie

reader called “How to fight

Coronavirus with 4 Herbs”

($17.99).

But Amazon’s extraordinary

dominance of the e-book market

means that its website is the

place consumers are most likely

to find these titles. Its policies

exercise a disproportionate in-

fluence on the self-publishing

industry.

Amazon’s guidelines for au-

thors and publishers state: “We

reserve the right to determine

whether content provides a poor

customer experience and remove

that content from sale.”

Asked whether the company

exercises any editorial control

rus has also attracted the atten-

tion of “preppers” — people in a

state of constant preparation

for various potential disasters.

In 2015, Cat Ellis published

“Prepper’s Natural medicine:

Life-Saving Herbs, Essential

oils and Natural remedies for

When There Is No Doctor.” Last

month, she released “The Wu-

han Coronavirus Survival man-

ual,” which promises to explain

“the current research in simple

terms.”

The challenge, of course, is

that the current research on the

novel coronavirus is rapidly de-

veloping. The National Institute

of Allergy and Infectious Diseas-

es recommends that people seek-

ing credible information about

author,” who is “very selective

about the sources he gathers

information from.” (If you sur-

vive the coronavirus, you’ll want

to check out morrison’s insta-bi-

ography on Pete Buttigieg.)

Among the strangest — but

certainly not the most question-

able — coronavirus books of-

fered for sale are the diaries

infected with a macabre sense of

humor. There are several ver-

sions of “my resilience Journal”

subtitled, “I ordered a mask for

Protection Against Coronavirus

and realised It Is Shipping

from China.” Inside are about

100 pages to help you “express

yourself.”

fear of potentially wide-

spread disruption from the vi-

tion (finance), from the Univer-

sity of Louisiana, and Hofstra

Universities (in the USA), re-

spectively.”

Gupta’s “Coronavirus and

me” (99 cents) is a 21-page

e-book whose superficial chap-

ters offer little more than last

month’s stats on the disease and

such garbled advice as this:

“obviously hands or anything

that has the droplets may then

serve as fomites (infection

source) may serves to propagate

the spread.”

When the subject has poten-

tially life-threatening implica-

tions and people are fearful, the

problems of authority and reli-

ability are magnified exponen-

tially on the World Wild Web. for

instance, on Tuesday the “#1 Best

Seller in Communicable Diseas-

es” on Amazon was Tyler J.

morrison’s “Wuhan Coronavirus:

A Concise & rational Guide to

the 2020 outbreak” ($4.99). A

note explains that “Tyler J. mor-

rison is the pen name of an

Amazon #1 bestselling fiction

“Coronavirus and me” and “Cor-
onavirus Is In/Near my Country.”
Both titles are described as “part
of a ‘Super-Simplified’ series in
response to the ‘informational
overload,’ that the web has inad-
vertently provided us.”
But this author is not the
Sanjay Gupta, the Emmy-
w inning neurosurgeon whom
readers have come to trust from
his years of reporting on CNN
and CBS. This Gupta is de-
scribed, voluminously, as “an
mD (with family medicine resi-
dency training), having 18 years
of medical Educational Consult-
ing experience, with additional
masters degrees (placing near
the top of the class in them) in
Epidemiology/Biostatistics (the
‘study of diseases, and epidem-
ics... ’), from Case Western
reserve University (Cleveland,
ohio, USA) and Health Policy,
from Yale University, along with
one in General Psychology, as
well as in Business Administra-

booK world from c1

Self-publishing (and little vetting) fuel quick turnaround for coronavirus books

Among the strangest — but certainly not the most

questionable — coronavirus books out there a re the

diaries infected with a macabre sense of humor.

OPERA

Ticket sales online

and at the door.

See website for

details.

Gen Adm $40

Seniors $35

Students $15

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4010 Randolph Rd.

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http://www.belcantanti.com

240-230-7372

Bel Cantanti Opera presentsaworld premiereofanew

opera by Frances Pollock and Bob Misbin, inspired by

Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician", about the rise

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Briscula the

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COMEDY

Discounts available

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Call 202-312-1427

$36

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Amusical, political satire.

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