Monday, Dec. 08, 1930
FEMALE PUCK
If the report is untrue that Angna Enters was once discovered in a shadowy Berlin museum making faces at the statuary, at least it suggests the extraordinary Pucklike character of the dancer as reflected in her work. Her repertoire of more than 50 "Episodes and Compositions in Dance Form," first undertaken five years ago, has an air of childish precocity, infantile sensuality. She dances like a brilliant little girl amusing herself before the mirror of her mother's boudoir. Like a little girl's performance, Miss Enters' dancing is not flawless. This was again apparent last week when she appeared in Manhattan in a program of 33 dances and pantomimes of which twelve numbers were new.
Two of the new numbers were hearty and Elizabethan: a macabre portrayal of those plague-ridden times done with a winding sheet, and a rollicking trio of court dances. Then there was a choreographic exercise called "Plumb Line--a composition in line of the human form's law of balance," which, though curiously sinister, did not come off. Most startling and ingenious of the new numbers was "Narcissism," in which Miss Enters swaggered out on the state, gyrated to a wheezy phonograph, became convincingly drunken with self-love, was suddently moved fiercely to kiss her reflection in a mirror.
Best new pantomine was the Victorian "Piq-Nique," illustrating a hoopskirted female terrified of spiders, fishing worms, the cold brook; awed by the imaginary male recumbent under an umbrella. In "Webs," an overintellectualized conception, Miss Enters struggled ineffectually with the jazz age, moved hysterically to a Symphony" potpourri of and Cesar "Papa Franck's Loves "D Mama," Minor ended up on one knee like Al ("Mammy") Jolson.
Angna (Anita) Enters is U.S.-born, unmarried, shy. She left Milwaukee to be a painter, studied at the Manhattan Art Students League, took up dancing to perfect her knowledge of form, cooking her meals over her boardinghouse gas jet. She conceives her own interpretations, costumes them. A sort of terpsichorean Ruth Draper, she performs on a severely bare stage to music from a piano. Probably because of her interest in form and color, painters like her. Artist John Sloan, under whom she studied, is her good friend, has etched several of her dances. At her opening performance last week were Artists John Marin, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe.
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