High Vaudevillian

In the last fortnight a chic, puckish young woman with bright black eyes and thick black bangs who practices several arts with ability and calls herself a "mime" (she pronounces it "meem") had a show of gouaches and drawings in Manhattan's Newhouse Galleries, gave her first Manhattan's theatre performances of the season and published her first book.* Pretty well shot by this triple demonstration was a ten-year-old, popular suspicion that Angna Enters is merely highbrow.

Taken either as independent creations or as spadework for her miming, her new paintings and drawings of archaic Greek and Oriental forms, Spanish bullfighters, imagined figures from history, were fresh, economical, expert. Her evening of pantomime to music was a reassuring exhibition for devotees and newcomers alike in a large, light-hearted audience. And in her briskly written account of Mediterranean travel, study and U. S. trouping, critics found a key to the pleasures of mime that many of them, had long fumbled for in vain. This key was, simply, vaudeville.

"I have never had proved to my satisfaction." says Angna Enters, "that working in tragedy and 'high comedy' requires anything greater than performing on the variety stage. . . . At least, these ordinary vaudeville performers do not get across by special pleading that they are 'pure spirits.' " One thing Mime Enters found in performers like Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson. Jimmy Savo, Moran & Mack and the Fratellinis was timing raised to a high art. She raised it, in some instances, higher. Her use of castanets in a dance-pantomime called Boy Cardinal, composed in 1932, was something Bojangles or even the late great La Argentina might have envied.

Angna Enters' tourist observations are sometimes so accurate as to be childlike, as when she remarks that all Spaniards spit. Far from childlike, however, are the rich and strange characters she has imagined, costumed and made live in pantomime: a sultry, majestic Spanish girl of the 16th Century dancing the slow Pavana; a tragically refined pre-War young woman at a party in Vienna Provincial; and Queen of Heaven, for which Miss Enters recently got into the bad books of the Roman Catholic bishop of Montana. having quoted, as a program note, Henry Adams' remark that in the 12th Century the Virgin Mary was more popular than her Son.

To critical spectators at her latest performance, these old acts still seemed Angna Enters' best. Though the audience was gleeful the judicious grieved at the cheaper symbolism of a new piece called A Modern-Totalitarian Hero, or "The glory of living dangerously," in which Miss Enters appeared in a heavily bemedaled uniform and gas mask, went into mock ecstasies over a rose, then tore its petals off in rage at being pricked by a thorn.

Mime Enters is only chilled by what is commonly known as "interpretive dancing." One thing that prompted her to write about her own work was the feeling that "this Pure Dance had been getting away with esthetic murder long enough." But the strongest impulse to express herself otherwise than in painting and pantomime came after she saw the outbreak of the Spanish revolution last year. Back in the U. S. she found herself writing magazine articles, speaking on the radio "as a person about persons," finally eager to speak, as a person, about herself.

*FIRST PERSON PLURAL--Stackpole ($4).

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