SZATHMARY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-11 published
Visionary performer waged war on trivial art
Her trademark was a experimental process that embraced dance,
music, text, mime, clown, ritual and mask
By Paula CITRON
Friday,
April 11, 2003 - Page R13
Canada has lost a powerful force in experimental theatre and
dance. Director, dancer, actor, writer and choreographer Elizabeth
SZATHMARY died last month in Toronto.
While she will be remembered as a dynamic figure, her artistic
life will remain a contradiction. At the beginning of her career,
Ms. SZATHMARY was one of the gilded darlings of Toronto's burgeoning
experimental theatre. At the end, she was seen by some as a marginalized,
religious eccentric who put on plays in church basements.
To her long-time Friends and loyalists, however, Ms.
SZATHMARY's
life was a spiritual journey in which art, religion and morality
were inextricably intertwined in a nobility of purpose.
Ms. SZATHMARY was born in New York on October 12, 1937, to Jewish-Hungarian
parents. Her mother was an unhappy former opera singer and vaudeville
performer and her father was a composer and arranger who wrote
the theme for the popular television show Get Smart and who abandoned
his family. Ms.
SZATHMARY attended New York's High School of
Performing Arts and later performed with the Metropolitan Opera
Ballet under choreographer Antony
TUDOR.
A ravishing beauty with masses of long, jet-black curls and compelling
light-coloured eyes, Ms.
SZATHMARY attracted followers throughout
her career. She was, says Toronto choreographer David
EARLE,
a powerful, mysterious presence and a charismatic performer.
Another admirer was Canadian Robert
SWERDLOW.
Mr.
TUDOR's piano
accompanist, he fell in love with the beautiful young dancer
and followed her to France where Ms.
SZATHMARY danced with such
companies as Les Ballets Classique de Monte Carlo and Les Ballets
Contemporains de Paris. He was the first of many artists to be
inspired by Ms.
SZATHMARY.
"Elizabeth was a theatre philosopher who wanted to save the world
through the beauty and truth of her art," Mr.
SWERDLOW said.
The couple relocated to Montreal in the mid-sixties where Mr.
SWERDLOW got a job with the National Film Board. One assignment
brought him to Toronto, and it was Ms.
SZATHMARY who persuaded
him to settle there because of the city's "happening" dance scene.
Performing under the name Elizabeth
SWERDLOW, she first worked
with Mr. EARLE and the future co-founders of Toronto Dance Theatre.
In 1969, Mr.
SWERDLOW took an unexpected windfall of $30,000
and built his wife a performing venue of her own. In this way,
Global Village Theatre emerged from a former Royal Canadian Mounted
Police stable and the couple went on to became synonymous with
a new wave of provocative, political, issue-oriented theatre.
Mr. SWERDLOW provided the words and music, and co-wrote the shows
Elizabeth co-wrote, choreographed, directed and was the featured
performer. Importantly, she was the visionary who came up with
original concepts and her trademark, multidisciplinary theatrical
process embraced dance, music, text, mime, clown, ritual and
mask.
Among their better-known collaborations was Blue.S.A., an indictment
of the "American empire," and Justine, the story of a young
girl who gains wisdom through the vicissitudes of life. A huge
hit, Justine went to New York where it won off-Broadway awards
and enjoyed a long run.
Its success meant Global Village became a stopping place for
others. Gilda
RADNER,
John
CANDY and Salome
BEY represented just
some of the talent that passed through. Later, when Ms.
SZATHMARY
founded Inner Stage Theatre, she helped propel the early careers
of Antoni CIMOLINO and Donald
CARRIER of the Stratford Festival,
Jeannette ZINGG and Marshall
PYNKOSKI of Opera Atelier and Native
American performer Raoul
TRUJILLO.
In the mid-seventies, Ms.
SZATHMARY experienced a religious conversion
and became a devout Christian.
For Mr. SWERDLOW, it was the last straw in an already turbulent
relationship. After the couple split up, Ms.
SZATHMARY founded
Inner Stage, a name that expressed her desire to produce art
that would transform and heal through spirituality. To better
strike out on her own, she also shed the
SWERDLOW name. Until
the 1990s, the main work of Inner Stage was a series of acclaimed
morality tales -- or modern fables as Ms.
SZATHMARY called them
which toured schools from coast to coast. She also explored
the storytelling power of Native American myths and turned to
such themes as the plight of street youth or to the Holocaust
from a teenager's point of view. Her final project, No Fixed
Address, attempted to air the true voice of the homeless by both
telling their stories and casting them as actors.
By all accounts, Ms.
SZATHMARY was a true eccentric who personalized
everything. Her computer, for example, was called Daisy. Her
home was a living museum dominated by a family of cats who occupied
their own stools at the dining table, held conversations and
sent out Christmas cards to the pets of Friends. Spiritual sayings,
religious art and theatre memorabilia covered every scrap of
wall and floor space. On an even more personal level, Ms.
SZATHMARY
kept a journal of religious visions and dreams written in ornate
calligraphy and illustrated in Hungarian folk-style art. What
is more, she described ecstatic events and augurisms, including
a personal affinity with bison, as if such occurrences were as
routine as the weather.
In her work, Ms.
SZATHMARY demanded perfection, which meant she
often proved impossible to work alongside. Friends and colleagues
Robert MASON,
Julia
AMES and Peter
GUGELER all talk about Ms.
SZATHMARY's middle-of-the-night phone calls -- and the fact that
she brooked no criticism or contrary opinions. All the same,
their devotion never lessened.
"She was a queen and we were her subjects," said Mr.
GUGELER.
"Elizabeth never left you once she got ahold of you."
Guerrilla theatre, grass-roots theatre, shoe-string theatre,
theatre against all odds, a "let's-make-a-show" mentality --
that was the brave, artistic world in which Ms.
SZATHMARY waged
her war against what she saw as frivolous or commercial art.
In 1989, Inner Stage lost its operating grant and from that time
on she financed her own productions. During the last year that
she was able to work, she earned a pitiful $5,000.
Ms. SZATHMARY continued to perform in all her productions, turning
more to straight acting as her dancing powers declined. Even
so, she never gave up the stage to anyone.
Elizabeth SZATHMARY died of rectal cancer in Toronto on March
28. A memorial service will be held at the Church of the Redeemer,
162 Bloor St. W., Toronto, at 3 p.m. on April 27.
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