I remember Don's Lenin pen, his sardonic wit, his queries about scale theory and intrapolitics, his intense interest in French surrealism yet his overt disdain for francophilia, and his intriguing description of Hélène Vanel's frenetic dance for the opening night of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme on January 17, 1928:
"With her long, thick brown hair loose and her glazed eyes bulging, she gestured wildly with jerky stop-action motions and posed in exaggerated contortions before bouncing up off of the dirt floor onto one of the beds, all the while howling and grunting. Vanel furiously writhed on the sheets, gnashing her teeth and gibbering as she tore at her already ragged costume. With her torso exposed, she twitched, twisted, shouted and rolled off of the bed and plowed into the mud and decaying vegetation covering the gallery floor. By the end of the performance, her breath sawing in and out of her lungs as she lurched, Vanel splashed her way through the reeds and cattails of the swamp to disappear again into the darkness, splattering and soaking the dumbfounded spectators."
(Don LaCoss, "Hysterical Freedom: Surrealist Dance & Hélène Vanel’s Faulty Functions
Women & Performance June 2005, special issue on "Performing Excess")
Rest in peace, Don.
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