"The Yawn Quality"

Snooping for Reds in Government jobs, Texas' unesthetic Representative Martin Dies lumbered smack into esthetic John Bovingdon, 53, $5,600-a-year economic analyst for the new Office of Economic Warfare. Forgetting both Reds and grammar, earthbound Martin Dies cried: "[Bovingdon's] record and career as a ballet dancer is well known."

But cat-graceful John Bovingdon is no ballet dancer; an uneasy press has generally described him as a religious, rhythmic, or "monodrama" dancer. Harvard-man Bovingdon (1915, magna cum laude), the baldest dancer since Harald Kreutzberg, toured Russia and the Orient in the 1920s and '30s, wearing a long beard, knickerbockers and sandals.

Breath is everything, says Bovingdon, who took up dancing when he was 33, and ever since has made every motion a dance movement, including shaving, dressing and eating. Said he (Paris, 1929): "Introduce into an ordinary breath the yawn quality. Let this 'yawmzed breath' through its natural partner, the stretch, animate the entire body. This is the 'stylized breath.'" Once he explained: "We are a band groping toward intuitive communication. . . . When you conceive of a community, all members of which are swayed by kindred emotions of awe and wonder, expressing themselves through plastic bodies moving rhythmically, the picture is staggering."

How John Bovingdon came to be a main economic analyst for OEW no one could quite explain; he had been recommended by Civil Service and "is doing a good job." But Martin Dies, hot on this obviously new and subtle subversion, was not to be deterred. He snorted: "If no action is taken [by OEW], I will bring the matter to the attention of Congress."

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