BY ERNESTINE STODELLE
ART TIMES
Jan/Feb 1998
As a stage personality, Charles Weidman was unforgettable. In spite of the fact that he could impersonate any other dancer of his times to perfection, Charles himself was inimitable. Each gesture, each stance of the body, once seen, remained vividly clear in one’s memory, right down to the last inflection of its intended meaning.
Charles was law unto himself. No other male dancer in his era could move with even a percentage of his fluidity. He could dance circles around all the other “hoofers.” Yet, Charles was no exhibitionist. Acrobatics were never his “thing,” nor were trick jumps or speed footwork his way of drawing the enthusiastic applause that invariably followed his performances. All that Charles had to do was to tell a story…a story without words. From then on, the audience was in the palm of his hand.
When it came to mime, sheer genius took over the stage with Charles’s first gesture. What better proof of lmmanuel Kant’s theory that genius is an inborn gift? With his mobile face and kinesthetically alive body, Charles could conjure up illusory situations that could make his audience rock with laughter…such as his hilarious dance transformations of James Thurbers’ “Fables For Our Time.” In the role of the husband who was entranced by seeing a unicorn in the garden, Charles remained calmly convinced of the truth of his imagination while his wife, convinced of her spouse’s derangement, was hysterically dragged off by the medics whom she had summoned to take her husband to the insane asylum.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska at the turn of the century, Charles Weidman had the long, lanky look of Abraham Lincoln all his life (he died in 1975 at the age of 74). His legacy is a rich one. He was equally renowned for his dramatic gifts. Particularly unforgettable was the impact of watching him portray a role that called for the most tender of gestures, such as his memorable portrait of Abraham Lincoln entitled “Letter to Mrs. Bixby,” an historic letter to the mother of five sons who were killed in the Civil War. The words were read while Charles danced…and, again, every one of Charles’s gestures proved his capacity to reach the depths of tragedy as easily as he could evoke the spontaneous response to comedy.
Pantomime is, after all, the art of making one see something that isn’t there. Like the famous French pantomimist, Marcel Marceau, Charles Weidman could make his audience clearly picture—just because he was tilting obliquely and lifting a bent elbow to shoulder height—a sturdy banister that was “supporting” his weight. With a flamboyant replay of an imaginary “drama,” Charles could take off his cap (a cap that wasn’t there), and strike a pose of disappointed surprise, and then finish off his little act by dropping into a chair (that wasn’t there) in a state of disappointed rejection while the audience, who had likewise conjured up the whole scenario, roared with laughter.
Charles called his form of mime “kinetic pantomime.” And so it was. His gestures were danced with the entire body. “Hopelessness” was total, not just a despondent drop of the shoulders, but a weighted walk, a caved-in chest, an expression of the face that either elicited your tears or made you chuckle. He could, like his namesake, Charlie Chaplin, with whom he was often compared, draw upon his audience’s deepest feelings by either playing drama to the hilt or by turning tragedy upside down into comedy.
On the same program with “Fables For Our Time” Charles would daringly present “Lynchtown,” a searing critique of social injustice. Created in 1936, “Lynchtown” was nothing less than a replay of a horrifying lynching by a ruthless crowd of insensate racists. With its music by Lehman Engle, it still lives in the repertoire of the Deborah Carr Theatre Dance Ensemble…a reminder of a dark page in American history.
To go back even further into the personal life of Weidman himself, we can foresee the beginning impulses of his wide-reaching genius when we study Charles’s own letter of his aspirations as a fourteen-year-old high school student. Reading it now is to recognize it as a prophetic declaration of the mind of a future teller of tales in dance:
“As long ago as I can remember I have cherished the vision of becoming an artist … My aims are not to become rich but are to succeed in making my thoughts and ideas come true…and that is through my hard work and efforts to build my own palace of my own thoughts and ideas so that I can live in it in peace and comfort and not be a parasite in the name of reality.”
Throughout his life, Charles Weidman remained the visionary artist who would send out messages to the world around him, calling attention to the evils as well as the beauties of reality. Were it not for the enterprising Deborah Carr Theatre Dance Ensemble, who have the aesthetic background and technical skills to perform such powerful works as “Lynchtown” and the Weidman-Bach “St. Matthew Passion” and the “Christmas” and “Easter Oratorios,” the dance world today would never experience firsthand the beauty and the still contemporary meaning of the repertoire created by one of the greatest choreographers of the twentieth century.