Like the Sea

An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass–her art, her life, and her times

Mary Glass (1946-2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and 70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”

Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy and her life-long love with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.

In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers – just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class – “What areyoutakingwithyoufromthenaturalworld?”

Halprin’swordswill resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.

In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass — with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers – Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.

There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us – like the ocean’s music in our ear – we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.