美国国家公共电台 NPR Illustrator Maira Kalman Moving To The Stage With Choreographer John Heginbotham（打印版）

美国国家公共电台 NPR Illustrator Maira Kalman Moving To The Stage With Choreographer John Heginbotham（在线收听）

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Perhaps you've seen Maira Kalman's illustrations on the cover of The New Yorker magazine or in nearly 20 children's books that she also wrote. Or maybe you read her illustrated New York Times blog, "The Principles Of Uncertainty," which became an acclaimed book.

Well, this year, she stepped onto the stage for an ongoing collaboration with choreographer John Heginbotham based on her blog. New England Public Radio's Jill Kaufman reports that's all about living while knowing you're going to die.

JILL KAUFMAN, BYLINE: "The Principles Of Uncertainty" - the show - part dance, part theater - gets its inspiration from the highly-detailed intimate scenes in Maira Kalman's illustrations, and the inherent message comes from what she wrote to accompany them.

MAIRA KALMAN: That life is precious, precarious, funny, tragic and yet, we keep going on. And how do you live, basically.

KAUFMAN: The show premiered this summer at Jacob's Pillow. It features seven members of Dance Heginbotham, a quartet of musicians and Kalman herself is onstage, not for the first time.

JOHN HEGINBOTHAM: You know what? I encountered Maira as a performer when Isaac Mizrahi cast Maira as the duck in his production of "Peter And The Wolf," which I choreographed.

KAUFMAN: John Heginbotham first met Kalman when she was designing sets for the Mark Morris Dance Group. Heginbotham danced for more than a decade with the troupe. In her own work, Kalman paints and writes about strangers, loved ones, dogs, couches, doughnuts. She uses gouache - a watercolor - for her painting.

KALMAN: It's colorful and there's a lot of movement. I think it's actually something that I've always wanted to see come to life, and to have music and dancing, words, costumes. So all of it is really taking the pages and realizing them in the real world.

KAUFMAN: What Kalman and Heginbotham bring to life is a lot like what she portrays on the page, which is not necessarily linear. It's also very different from where they began, says the choreographer.

HEGINBOTHAM: We organically started creating vignettes. We were doing these little experiments. And quite well into our process, Maira suggested, what if this is "The Principles Of Uncertainty?"

And suddenly, everything clicked into place. All of these little experiments suddenly found a home because the structure of that book is so strong in which each chapter begins with a weather report - sometimes an absurd weather report.