Investments
Letitia Goes to Town
A Young Texas sculptress takes the New York art and theater world by storm.
IT WAS SCARY, BUT LETITIA Eldridge knew what she had to do—head for New York. Just leave Austin in January and light out for the territory of art and theater, straight over the Mississippi, around the Appalachians, and right across the Hudson River where so many young artists had crossed before her. Let the insidious ice-rain pierce the ratty fur coat and freeze the muse-struck marrow of the bones; let the cabbies laugh and drive on when they see the jumble of paper-box luggage; let the nose forget the stench of urine in the shot-gun apartments that shored up every wave of immigrants. It had to be done.
So Letitia packed. She zipped her ceramic sculptures into the motley colored wool bags knit by her mother. Then she carefully checked the contents of her matched set of cellulose luggage—sculpture, script for her play, Moonlight/Obituary for Dreams,—grabbed her fur coat and left.
New York received her well. Last January, she wangled a private showing in the Trustee Room of the Museum of Modern Art and a June production date at La Mama Experimental Theater Club for her play. In less than a month she conquered two of the most important bastions of culture. She had done it. Gone straight to the top, Texas fashion. Straight to the top, twice. But to understand what Letitia does in ceramics and in the theater or how she managed to lay siege to those bastions you need to see Letitia on her own ground. In Texas.
Row upon row, wall upon wall of ceramics line her East Austin studio, waiting to be dried, bisqued, or glazed. Everything is miraculously in its place, the Renaissance atelier you've always imagined. Where the finished ceramics leave off, the clay takes over. Clay, everywhere, clay being modeled, clay on the floor, clay on the counters, and clay in the living quarters. It can be a shock to realize that the source of all this work is only one woman.
Until she speaks she could probably pass for a carhop from Waxahachie. Then, as she talks, sitting on the edge of her table, her hands take on a life of their own and shape clay. Her delicate porcelain-skinned face reflects the surrounding blaze of coppery hair. Suddenly she changes before you. She's making ceramic sculpture.
She's not making cut little pots or objects to hold cigar ashes. Nor is she making cups, plates, bowls, or vases. She's making masks, hundreds of masks when no one else in the country is making masks, especially out of Louisiana clay. These masks were preceded by a series of landscape balls and are complemented by a series of sculptured objects, such as divining rods, toys, and animals. Yet Letitia manages to transcend all prosaic ideas normally associated with clay. Clay in her hands is no longer a building element, like a brick, or a utilitarian object, like an ashtray, or a decorative object like a vase, or a theraputic event like occupational therapy or arts and crafts.
Every object she creates begs to be handled. You don't approach her work as a passive spectator, but as an active participant in any game you want to create. The game each spectator creates is limited only by the imagination. Her landscape balls must be picked up, held, rolled around, or held close to your eye to transport you to the meadow of your mind which matches the meadow on her ball. Watching someone don and doff her masks convinces you that a kaleidoscope of personalities has glittered before your eyes. You can no longer make the distinction between mask and face. Letitia suspends your disbelief, liberates the player in you, and enchants your imagination. Once you see and participate in the magic of her sculpture you are ready to see Letitia's play.
Her theater piece Moonlight/Obituary for Dreams, is loosely called a play, but there is no real word for its presentation of urges, movements and intuitions; it's not a conventional play with plot, characters, setting and costumes. Letitia's play evolved from her life of the past year and a half. By combining the poetry from her 2,000 page notebook, her ceramic sculpture, and her characters with their ritual movements and interactions, she creates a multimedia theater which rides the non-existent line between ritual, drama, dance, poetry, and sculpture.
Letitia uses masks in the play to localize her intuitions and to name them. The intuitions are not just stream of consciousness fobbing itself off as Theater of Clay. The sculpture, ritual, and dance are not just ornaments in a formless play about a person who makes sculpture, but a fusion of verbal and visual images in a highly structured abstract sequence. This fusion of imagery is Letitia's play begs the spectator to play along, even if only to leave the theater.
Through the interplay of characters, actions, ceramic objects, visual and verbal pictures Letitia manages to suspend disbelief, liberate the player and enchant the imagination. "There's so much information in this play that some people can go on different levels and try to figure out what's going on. Genevieve [a character in the play] loved Ploom? Big deal. People can go listening to the poetry and the metaphors and watching the visual imagery, the interplay of masks, or they can just go…sit…let it happen to them then waltz out and go uuuupp.…And just use it as propulsion."
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