Excerpts from an Interview with The Legend of Maya Deren Project The Camera Obscura Collective The Legend of Maya Deren, a three-volume documentary biography of the late filmmaker, writer and ethnologist, is being published as a special series of Film Culture magazine. The first volume is due to appear this summer. The Legend examines avant-garde political and artistic forces in America during the thirties, forties and fifties, seen from inside a woman artistS life.

The Legend is collaboratively told and recorded - through Deren’s own documents (housed in the Special Collection at Boston University), the interviews conducted with her family, friends and colleagues, and the many writings about her, her work and her times. The materials have been edited by four women of the generation that followed Maya Deren - Millicent Hodson (dance), V2V6 Clark (Caribbean studies), Catrina Neiman (folklorelfrlm) and Francine Bailey (still photog- raphy). The Collaborators separately discovered the value of Deren’s work to their various fields. In 2 973 they joined forces, realizing that investigating the range and “interdisciplinary” nature of Deren’s ac- complishments would require a collective effort. Since 1975 the group has been working steadily to prepare the combination biography and collected works of Maya Deren.

In the summer of 1977 the women in The Legend project agreed to have a conversation with Camera Obscura. Both groups had formed in Berkeley in early 1973. All the women were acquainted through film studies with Professor Bertrand Augst (U.C. Berkeley) and a Politics and Film class at the Pacific Film Archive.

The Legend of Maya Deren interview responses:

V - VkVk Clark M - Millicent Hodson C - Catrina Neiman F - Francine Bailey

4 Maya Deren at the 1955 wedding of Geoffrey Holder and Carmen De Lavallade (print courtesy Ebony Magazine)

178 LEGEND - M : Our plan for this conversation was to discuss three dif- ferent aspects of The Legend: our research methods, the idea of work- ing together on a biography and what we’ve learned in the process. Maybe it would make more sense as an introduction to our methods if we flip through the portfolio of photographs that we usually take with us to interviews. I t gives a sense of the way we use photographs to get people’s visual memories working. I t also gives you an idea of the range of materials we’ve collected.

I’ve turned to one particular event in Maya Deren’s life, because it tells a lot about the way we’ve approached biography. The event happens to be the wedding (1955) of actor Geoffrey Holder to dancer Carmen DeLavallade, who were Maya’s good friends.

LEGEND - M : They had both been dancing in House of Flowers on Broadway. It was the big backstage romance of 1955!

LEGEND - v: For The Legend, the interesting point is that the couple asked Maya and Teiji* to “decorate” the grounds at the reception party planned for them in Westport, Connecticut. Maya went out early with Teiji and Roger Ohardieno, a dancer who had performed with Katherine Dunham. For most events in her life like this one we have visual documents, written documents, and the oral histories we have conducted with those who lived through the times with her.

From the Holder/DeLavallade reception, a wild, ludicrous tale emerged. The tale itself was remembered by one of the great legendizers of Maya Deren: Stan Brakhage. Maybe we should recount some of the stories we heard at the Buffalo Conference in 1973.$

LEGEND--: w e went to Buffalo hoping to see the films of Maya Deren. Since it was a conference on Autobiography in the American Independent Cinema, we assumed that her very personal films would be acknowledged. She was not mentioned - the source, the founder, the person who was at the very beginning of it. Instead, it was the genera- tion of male filmmakers who had succeded her, who had brought the idea of the New American Cinema out of the fifties, out of the whole Beat movement, that group of male avant-garde filmmakers who were identified with Ginsberg and a number of the Beat poets.

CO: Given that she was so involved, what was your analysis of that?

Teij i Ito was Maya Deren’s husband in later years. $A milestone gathering of independent filmmakers in 1973, the Conference on auto- biography in the American Independent Cinema was arranged by Gerald O’Grady, SUNY Buffalo.

LEGEND - M: What we wanted to find out was why this woman’s life and influence would be suppressed. We talked to some people; we asked questions. VltVlt and I originally had hoped to learn the state of Deren’s Haitian footage. We wanted to find out if it had been edited, or just what was going on with it. We met Stan Brakhage, who is of that generation of male filmmakers we are now describing, and we said, “Well, why isn’t Maya Deren represented? Why isn’t her presence here?’’ Rather than give us an answer, he told us tales. One of the things he told us, for example, was that you had to account for the fact that this woman had started out as a communist, that she had started out by organizing wildcat strikes of lumberjacks in the Northwest.

That’s an example of the general mythology, but there is a specific story that leads to the pictures of the 1955 wedding. According to Brakhage, the story goes that Maya once went to a wedding where something so enraged her that she became possessed by Papa Loco, who is one of the Haitian loas (gods), and she picked up a refrigerator and threw it across the kitchen. [Laughter by all.]

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LEGEND - v: The point of telling that story is simply to give you an idea of the way we dealt with this situation. Brakhage told us one story, and it’s been our exciting task to track down other versions that might possibly exist. In February of 1977, we talked to Geoffrey Holder and we got a different story from him. Later we talked to Teiji and recorded yet another story. Those three versions will likely be printed one after the other in Volume I11 so that the reader can decide what really happened - did the refrigerator actually travel across the room or not?

Millicent explains legend as “a cumulative and multiple telling,” and the more interviews we conducted, the more we realized the im- portance of collecting the several versions of outstanding life events. What we were presented with in 1973 by Brakhage was an event inter- esting enough to be chronicled in two black magazines of the period, Ebony and Our World. We just recently picked up these photographs from the Ebony offices in Chicago. The Our World article you see here in the original was the actual document Maya saved. We’ll probably reproduce the entire page that includes the photograph of Maya be- cause all the visuals have importance for understanding the period, including the advertisements, and here the bleaching cream ads on one side. That’s one way we intend to preserve the era as well.

We searched out the photgraphers who had taken some of these other shots, and from them we got a look at different styles of seeing an event. The Ebony photographers saw the wedding and reception in terms of bride photos and focused their attention on the stars. The freelancers preserved the reception differently. They looked for inter-

180 action on the periphery, among the guests. In this way, we record not only events that deal directly with Deren’s own work, but other aspects of how she lived her life, and perhaps why certain people appear in her films. We try to collect everything we can, and sift through to find those relics which are most striking for the retelling of the event.

We tend to forget that Maya was living through a very difficult time in United States history; it was the beginning of the “public” civil rights movement. In those days it may not have been so slick for her to show up at a high society affair with a Japanese and a black, having supposedly come to decorate for the wedding reception. Right away she’d be cast in the servant class. It’s an interesting story for that reason alone. But for Brakhage, the event was preserved as a Voodoo tale.

LEGEND - M: In terms of mythologizing, I think VeVk made the point that had to be made, that someone can tell you a story about Maya, some mumbo jumbo thing, and what it does is reinforce everyone’s stereotypes of her, or of anyone or anything that is occult, or left, or new, or different; that is, anything that is beyond the immediate marshmallow culture. It’s ghettoizing. It reinforces racial stereotypes, too. When we heard the plausible story about how Maya may have been mistaken for a servant, simply because she had come with a Japanese man and a black man, we realized that Brakhage filtered things down to a magical mystery tale. Often, that is what is known about Maya Deren. So, it’s like a pilgrimage for us, seeking out the life of this woman through the tales and documents.

That’s for us the process of building the biography: it isn’t a matter of tabula rasa. We don’t start fresh. She is a lost woman in some respects, but only part of her is lost. The spectacular side, the legend, remains. So our purpose is to go inside the legend to see what she actually went through, even day by day. One of the things that we have done, for instance, is to duplicate her grant applications, such as those from the Guggenheim Foundation. She wrote them really well and looking at them can teach you a lot about simplifying your proposals! They reveal her advances in theory as a thinker.

We’ve also collected some of her recipes and her shopping lists, things that make up her daily life as a woman as well as her daily working life. So that’s essentially where we’re coming from in terms of the legend and demythologizing, but also in terms of the ledger of her life.

CO: But in terms of the legend, do you see yourselves as demythologiz- ing the stereotypes people have? In another way, it’s almost like you’re keeping a legend but making it more complex. That approach presents

complicated problems for feminists in that - among other problems - it 1 8 1 can reinforce the notion that the productive contributions of women are due to certain “exceptionat” women.

LEGEND-v: A friend of mine told us, “You’re creating a cultural heroine.’’ We are. We have assembled enough material around and about the woman so that people can go off now and begin some exhaustive research on Maya Deren. Our intention was that The Legend become another starting point, bringing many forgotten or legendized “facts” together in one place. And, as Leo Lerman* told us, “You’re creating another legend in the process.”

We feel we’ve been apprenticed to Maya Deren in a very profound way. Her Guggenheim application in the forties was so outrageous that filmmakers today would want to use it as a model. It’s really helpful and crucial to have models, and the more we read of Maya’s work, the more we realized that she was a model for us in many ways. We write better letters now, having studied Deren’s style over a forty year period. We are creating another legend. There is a person, Maya Deren, who is a cultural heroine, from whom you can learn. We’re demythologizing but helping to build her legend as well.

LEGEND-M: We demythologize some images of her and unearth others. Part of what we hope will happen with the documentary biography form is this balance: that although we’re extending the legend, we provide the missing parts for which there is the proof of day-by-day documents. We’re doing it on the basis of bricking - laying brick after brick to show what the reality was, what it really meant for a woman to be working like Deren did in the forties and fifties.

CO: So, the documentation that you’ve done of her life permits other interpretations?

LEGEND - M: It’s a tool. The reader can weigh alternative points of view. It’s not an interpretive biography in the way most biography is done.

LEGEND - C: The story about the refrigerator represents one rather “colorful” extreme of the kind of mythologizing that has grown up around Deren’s life. But everyone we’ve talked with has his or her own version of her personality, her motives, or of what she meant to them, depending on how they felt about themselves at the time and on what *Editor of Vogue magazine, and previously at Mademoiselle, where Deren published several articles on cats, women, myth and dance.

182 they’ve learned since. They will often qualify how they felt about her thirty years ago by saying in retrospect that they perhaps feel differ- ently. The legend takes place in “transfigured time.’’

So if you print three or four stories that all relate the same in- cident - some of which are straight storytellings, some are reflective and transformed by the thirty intervening years, and some contradict each other outright-it’s like Rashomon. What is the reality of the woman’s life? The stories cancel each other out and substantiate each other at the same time. We try to record from as many perspectives as we can, realizing that our information is somewhat arbitrary, in that certain people are available, or willing, to talk, and some aren’t. All of these factors determine how The Legend takes shape.

LEGEND-v: In a literate society like ours, it’s also enlightening to observe how people deal with the Word. It’s so easy for people to say things on tape that they know they would never put in print. In inter- view situations, it is not that we try to control what goes on, but we do try to go to the core of what a person remembers. In one conversation someone may swing all the way from saying, “She was a witch” to “She really did know what she was doing.” You can see it happen in Anais Nin’s life, for instance. In the forties she’s downgrading Maya, but in the seventies she has radically changed. It takes a while to arrive at a positive memory, and often only negativity surfaces. A documentor will generally start with the gossip. When we transcribe the tapes, we record every utterance, so that if someone later wants to do conversational analysis of the tapes, it’s possible. Someone could also see the kinds of sexual politics that go on when three women, for example, interview one man. Finally, if we work at it during the interview, we can get to that constructive nodule in each person’s remembrances. It takes a while; sometimes it means going to see someone two or three times. But any good oral historian could tell you this. Interviewing for biographies is a little different. Our conversations with Maya Deren’s friends and acquaintances have been very therapeutic for all concerned. This may have to do with her strong personality and her early, unexpected death. They often tell us what they might have wanted to share with Maya and never could for a variety of reasons.

LEGEND - c: As to your question about creating a cultural heroine - in the beginning, we often did approach our task as one of demythologiz- ing Maya Deren’s life, trying to penetrate the person she seemed to project and get to the “real” woman. But the more information we collected, the more we realized that much of what has been legend about her was reality. Throughout the interviews, and her own docu-

ments, the fact emerges that she really was the “indefatigable mother” and “pioneer” of the avant-garde, as she is always cast in film histories. She was not always a “one-woman cast and crew”; and so we focus on the contributions her friends and mentors made to her work as well. But she did work alone much of the time, initiating and carrying through a tremendous number of projects, many of which were firsts in her day. And the documents reveal the amount of work behind those projects. They are proof that her energy and efficiency were extraordinary, as was her way of presenting herself, creating her public image. She was extremely conscious of the historical value of her work, and of herself as a central figure, whether she was at a party or being featured in a film program. Even as much as her closest friends try to demythologize Maya, e v p to them she was “larger than life.” So we don’t have to demystify or mystify her. We are simply recording a legendary life.

I think it’s important to realize that what most people know of Maya Deren is really only a four-year period of her life. They know the image of her that you see in her films. It was from 1943 to about 1946 that those films were made, and these are the only images that people who don’t know her have had all this time. Those are her best-known works, and since almost no other pictures have even been published of her, the world sees a beautiful, dynamic young woman in her late twenties. When we started finding photographs of her taken much earlier, or much later, when she was in her forties, each photograph opened up a new dimension to Maya: how she felt about herself, her self-image, how she dressed and danced, what her different moods were. So these visual images have very much guided the kinds of questions we ask about her personally as well.

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LEGEND - M: It’s really the “Botticelli” photo, the one of her at the window in Meshes, that is in everyone’s mind. It’s become an icon of Maya. She was partly responsible for that, too. For her film showings, at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York, for example, it was that picture that she submitted to the Village Voice, even in the late fifties.

What becomes really clear in the photographs is how Deren’s persona is changing. You can see that it changes when she is in her thirties, the decade she spent going back and forth to Haiti. She doesn’t appear in the films that she made during those years.

She moved away from an intense self-exploration, from a kind of psychological to a mythological reading of the world. In regard to the films, she ceases to be the central figure and becomes more purely the medium. Part of the reason is biographical; she took more responsi- bility for the technical execution of the films once she and Hammid separated. But it’s more than simple circumstance. Haiti really did

transform her. The question of Deren’s persona and her changing relationship to her films involves both the religious and community experience she had in Haiti and the shock of return.

Maya always made a point of calling her films “classicist,” in that, unlike those who succeeded her in the fifties, she wasn’t interested in just putting raw experience straight into art. She really did believe that you transfigure your reality, whether you are a filmmaker, a photog- rapher, or a painter. You’re constantly regenerating your life: you bring along this ghost from relationship to relationship, whether in art or in daily experience. And it seems to me that that’s the way to look at her films, because they are personal films, within certain limits that we just now talked about.

For example, Ritual in Transfigured Time, the film that culminates her early Village period, said a lot - just before she went to Haiti - about the relationships in her life that were transformed in her work. So, in The Legend, we try to provide the personal information sur- rounding the people who were involved with her then as a basis for understanding that aspect of the film.

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LEGEND - V: Our approach has been not to focus so much on the films that Maya Deren made, but on the people who helped her make them, how they made them together, their motivations. And Deren herself provides a lot of information about the filmmaking process itself. Focusing on this kind of information, I think reflects the way women look at the world. We are much more process-oriented. Women will tell you how to do it; they exchange recipes, while men make laws. I don’t think any other set of people would have devoted this amount of time to a biography without receiving any compensation. Women are the ones who make quilts traditionally, and I’m not sure that any other group would have taken all this time to collectively piece these remnants of a life together in this manner. The Legend reflects the processing we’ve all gone through, just to be able to work together, first of all, and secondly, to be able to understand how Maya Deren worked with others. In this maze of hundreds of documents, Maya emerges and sometimes gets lost, as we all do day-to-day. As Jonas Mekas says, she comes alive very slowly in the first chapter, Signatures, which covers her first 24 years, as though you were sculpting her out of some kind of material. We didn’t realize at first that the documents would have that effect on the reader, but we were aware that the biography as a whole reflects the very slow process of forming an individual. Very often we say that we’re not doing an interpretive biography. We are and we aren’t, I mean, it’s a fine line. As Millie said, we’re trying our best to give guides, not only to the life, but to the work as well, whether it’s her written work or her visual

4 Maya Deren

186 creations. We’ve made an effort, as much as we can, to give the reader who doesn’t know anything about Maya Deren, or the one who knows a lot, all of the materials in one place so they can take the documents and do the kind of criticism of a life that interests them. Cecile Starr pointed out to us that most of the scholarly work being done on Deren now is written from third and fourth sources, because many critics do not have access to primary sources. So we’ve seen The Legend as an arche- ology - digging up artifacts and trying not to over-interpret them. In many ways, we’re giving the reader a guided tour of Maya Deren’s life. One text I included in Signatures is a piece she wrote early, in 1941, called “Religious Possession in Dancing”; she wrote it after she had worked with Katherine Dunham. It’s obvious that Maya had discussed a lot of these ideas with Dunham, but there’s no mention of Dunham at all. So, in the introduction to the piece, I make reference to this omission and also point out that the article is badly written if you compare it to The Divine Horsemen (1953). Without interpreting the whole thing, we set the piece in context and then move on with her life leaving the document there as a marker. If someone wants to come back to the article from research he or she has been doing on hysteria and write something on religious possession, then they can go to Maya’s article fresh, but in context.

C O : Another interesting aspect of this project is that itS you four women who, with your own particular interests, are coming together to work on it. It’s documentation, but itS also your reflection on Deren’s life and work, what it meant at her time and what it means to us now.

LEGEND - V: There are many reasons why we’re all working on it, and one in particular which we always forget. It emerged when we began thinking about Maya’s films being made during the war years. Almost everyone we talk with remembers how Anais Nin describes being in Ritual in Transfigured Time in her diaries (1945-46). And, as Catrina pointed out, Nin sandwiches her story of meeting Maya Deren between her accounts of the two bombings of Japan. How does it go?

LEGEND - C : Essentially she says: “An atom bomb dropped on Hiro- shima. A horror to stun the world. Met Maya Deren yesterday on the beach at Amagansett . . . ” [Laughter] Then she tells the whole story of meeting Maya and ends by saying, “Second bomb dropped on Nagasaki .” *

“The Diary ofAnais Nin, vol. 4.

LEGEND - V: It didn’t dawn on us until we were well into the research that we were chronicling the history of our mothers’ generation. My mother, for instance, was born one year after Maya Deren. So we started asking each other in the group what our own mothers were doing when Maya was running around making her films. In 1944, my mother was riveting at Grummins while she was carrying me. For seven months after I was born, leading into the Nagasaki bombing, my mother was going through a very heavy post-partum depression. When I asked her about the 1944 to 1945 period that Nin recorded, my mother was unaware of world consequences. . . .A question like that was prompted by the Maya Deren project. The NinDeren meeting became a vehicle for preserving what our mother’s generation was experiencing in crisis.

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LEGEND - M : Throughout all three volumes, Maya’s life is seen in terms of the historical, sociological framework that makes her seem outstanding: how did it come to be that Maya was able after college, for instance, to be so free as to go out and start a literary career? A lot of our mothers couldn’t or wouldn’t. So in that sense, her life is a measure. We’re also looking at the history of our time. It’s very true what you’re saying - it’s all through a screen of who we are now. And that’s what’s most interesting to her friends. They want to know how we see it; we want to know how they see it. [Laughter]

LEGEND-v: We forget that Legend is also that word that’s at the bottom of a map, that tells you how to measure things. And then the Latin, legenda means “things that ought to be read.’’

CO: Have you found a lot more theoretical writing that Deren had done besides what was published in Film Culture?

LEGEND - M: The things that she wrote on film tend to be better known than most of what she wrote. There is a lot that was published in magazines that are now out-of-print, such as articles on filmmaking as well as many on Haiti and dance. I think probably in terms of real contribution, much of it is her personal reflection, in her correspond- ence, in her notes, her writings to herself. But Maya is theory. Her mind is so well ordered that even in letters to friends there’ll be a paragraph that will contain a major breakthrough in her thinking; she just hap- pened to write it down.

CO: This morning I was looking in Film Culture Reader at that presen- tation Deren did with Arthur Miller and Willard Maas. I hadn’t read any of her writing for a while and was really struck by how clear and, as

188 you were saying, bow inherently theoretical she was. But Arthur Miller was putting her down; the men were all laughing and saying, “We don’t know i f we understand this vertical, horizontal stuff!” [Laughter] *

LEGEND - C: Almost everyone we’ve talked to, particularly women, mention that event. It really stands out in people’s minds. It’s like an emblem of not being taken seriously, which is a theme running throughout her life, from her childhood, and in her political years as well. Many people did not take a woman speaking in public seriously. That’s what she was up against in presenting the ideas that she had labored over, taking the time out to prepare them for the public.

CO: From what you’ve said, the project sounds like a good mixture of documentation yet recognition of your different views.

LEGEND - C: It’s also more than just recognition in that by working together we really force one another to go beyond individual barriers that would normally limit our understanding. Each of us has a different way of reverberating off of a visual image, a document, or an idea. I’m sure you must do the same thing: bouncing back and forth off one another in trying to come up with a synthesis. If one of you is stopped at a certain point whether it’s lack of experience, or you’re out of your “field,” or it’s just plain fatigue, then somebody else can take off from there and move the work in a different direction.

LEGEND - M: Also, it finally became very clear to us that we had to take more of a shaping role, for instance, with the interviews we were using, because we were weaving together so much material. The problem came to be; how much do you include, what is falsifying, what is true to the person’s style of communicating and what is adjusting it for the classicist goals we have of making it have this nice shape of its own? All these things. And it’s a crisis that any one of us would have gone through alone. What is distortion? What is courtesy to your reader? What is your attitude toward people? That’s really what it comes down to. Are you expecting your audience to have an enormous amount of commitment and patience so that they will go through every detail, or are you assuming that people like stories and you’re going to simplify it all. You can go too far in either direction. I think that’s a case where it’s really valuable to work as a group, so you have reality checks.

*Refers to the Poetry and Film Symposium, organized by Amos Vogel of Cinema 16, held on October 28, 1953 in New York. Participants were Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller and Willard Maas (chairman). The transcript of the first session is reprinted in Film Culture Reader, Praeger Publishers, 1970, pp. 171 -86.

LEGEND - C: As far as our working process is concerned, one of the things we’ve done is to divide the labor along fairly clear-cut lines because there is so much. We realized only gradually how much com- mitment it was going to involve, that it really involved four people working almost full-time. So we decided that three of us would rotate as general editor on each of the three volumes-one editor and two writers, while Francine and Hollis Melton covered the photography needs.

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LEGEND - M: But there are points, like on the second volume, where VkVC is editor but she’s also writing. So we have to constantly revise our own system. Essentially, though, the idea of the revolving editor is the cornerstone.

LEGEND - V: When we say editor, it actually means administrator, general manager, coach, and cook as well.

LEGEND - F: Kind of like a black family [Laughter]. From a certain perspective they call it a “matriarchy,” when in fact it’s the flexibility that keeps it going. And we’ve had to be very flexible. We have been a family; we are like an extended family.

CO: But do you find yourselves playing out all those little family dramas, too?

LEGEND - M: I think we have grown on that level, finally. We crossed a line last summer when we really determined the correct form of the work. When we got to a clear division of labor, I was amazed because I’ve always had difficulty in working with groups to find that point where you really are working together but where the responsibilities of the individuals are clear. Usually when you establish responsibilities, it becomes very rigid because people are used to authoritarian working situations and they will not break out of a pre-determined structure. But yet if you don’t have the structure, it’s all just nerves. We finally realized that it was this documentary biography that we were trying to do, instead of our original plan which was to publish it as a three-volume anthology of writings about different topics. We were going to do it in terms of ideas and not in terms of years. We had then these huge sheets of Maya’s life, which we called the Chronology, with all these cate- gories delineated such as her love life, what was going on in the world, was there a war, her education, what books she was reading. Finally, we understood that the real drama of her life was this linear motion, her development. When we began supplementing the year-by-year facts we

190 had collected with the interview material, then we could make the breakthrough and do it as a sequential biography. When we got to that point, we decided on the idea of the revolving editorship and the division of writing tasks. For the first time, then, we got into a kind of professional relationship.

I think it’s typical of the late sixties and early seventies that all of us were trying to get into extended family situations. To me, that’s the core of the Berkeley experience: seeking a tribe, reformulating personal relationships in groups, beyond couples, beyond families, that sort of thing. Part of our problems were hung up in the myth that we have a collective. If you look at it historically, collectives always do have lines of authority and responsibility, very serious lines. I think that at the turn of the decade, the libertarian counter-culture view of collectivity got confused. A lot of us approached the idea of a collective, the idea of working together, with this sort of all-or-nothing attitude. Either you had a charismatic leader or you had a loose group with a free structure.

CO: I’m really interested in knowing bow you’ve managed to work together when you’re in different parts of the world.

LEGEND - M: That’s true, you also have that problem! We have an in-house organ, a newspaper [Laughter]. Yes, we do! It’s called the Legend Times Monthly. We also use it as a way of communicating some of our problems to our publisher.

CO: Logistically, bow do you do it? Does one person take responsi- bility for it one month, o r . . . ?

LEGEND - M: There is a tendency toward anchor situations. Last sum- mer when Catrina, VkVi and I were in New York we were the anchor and Francine was our person in the wilderness.

LEGEND - F: A stringer for the Legend Times!

LEGEND - V: We haven’t mentioned that we started out with six people in 1973, two of whom left after the first year. I think what has kept the four of us together is that we were working on other projects together. We produced a musical together in Berkeley, all of us have been to Haiti, mostly by hook and crook. And just recently we’ve been studying how Haitians work together.

LEGEND - C: I do have to say that I feel just as much devoted to the idea of working with these three women - that is, to the idea of collabora-

tion on one hand, but also to these three special people - as I am devoted to working on Maya Deren’s life. It’s been the work-a-day reality of collaboration that has been just as valuable -what we have learned from the Haitians, what we have learned from each other - that has really motivated me, pushed me beyond what I would have been able to do on my own.

23 August 1977

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The Editors of The Legend of Maya Deren:

VtVt Clark is a medievalist who has taught African Literature and Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Millicent Hodson works as a choreographer and graphic artist. She has taught dance history and technique at the University of California, Berkeley and at colleges in New York City.

Catrina Neiman is currently on leave from the UCLA Center for Com- parative Folklore and Mythology. She studies visual narrative structure in film, television, myth and dream. She also works in documentary video.

Francine Bailey is a professional still photographer. She specializes in portraiture, musical performance and black film events.