Performance photography

Bill George ’73 surveys a laptop photograph of The Star of Bethlehem, the South Mountain sign that sends him mixed signals. The performing playwright considers it a comforting beacon that once guided him home after a long, misguided night ride. He also considers it an uncomfortable shrine to a sort of secularized religion. What do non-Christians think, he wonders, of such a prominent promotion for “The Christmas City”?

“For many people, The Star symbolizes that sense of home and family and nurturing,” says George. “For a moment it was a beautiful thing for me, too. Yet up close it’s just a bunch of light bulbs on a rickety frame. In a way, that may be what we are: a bunch of light bulbs, trying to be special.”

The Star stars in “56 Photos & an Old Man Dancing,” George’s new solo show of meditations on three centuries of photos of South Bethlehem, where he has spent most of his adulthood. He riffs on projected pictures of everyone from a boxer to identically dressed Lehigh Reunionites, everything from Bethlehem Steel’s massive, cathedral-esque, ruined No. 2 Machine Shop to the university’s Taylor Stadium, which was demolished to make way for the Zoellner Arts Center, where he will perform on Sept. 22.

“Old Man Dancing” continues George’s quest to map his identity through the South Side’s identities. Even as a Lehigh freshman, he tested his personality within a crucible of machine shops, Gothic churches, steeples, blast furnaces, side streets named for obscure 19th-century U.S. presidents and a United Nations of ethnic tribes, all bosomed by a river and a mountain. His appreciation for the area increased as he and his wife, Bridget, raised two children in a Fifth Street row home while running Touchstone Theatre, which the couple founded in 1981 to explore community experimentally.

Located in a former fire house on Fourth Street, Touchstone has been a touchstone for street plays, acting camps, storytelling sessions and original productions steeped in local lore. In 1999 the company devoted a festival to the global legacy of Bethlehem Steel’s Lehigh River plant, which closed in 1995. The centerpiece was “Steelbound,” which starred George as an unemployed, Promethean steelworker chained to a 24-ton ladle in the Steel’s long-abandoned Iron Foundry. This spring Touchstone premiered “Journey from the East,” a free-wheeling adaptation of an influential 16th-century Chinese novel. Co-written by George, a Touchstone ensemble member, the comic, cosmic play unfolded on Bethlehem’s Greenway by a Chinese pavilion designed and built by Lehigh associates.

“Old Man Dancing” is shepherded by two of George’s Touchstone-Lehigh soul brothers. Director Augustine Ripa, founding professor of the university’s theatre department, has supervised a half-dozen George projects, including solo treatments of the works and lives of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Producer Ricardo Viera, director and curator of the university’s art galleries, asked George to create a performance inspired by a Maginnes Hall exhibit of 56 photos of South Bethlehem history. Viera picked the images from the Lehigh teaching collection to celebrate the university’s sesquicentennial.

Ripa praises George for making enduring things—plays, perspectives, alliances—on the South Side, which during their lifetimes has changed dramatically from an industrial hub to an entertainment center. “Bill is an authentic living and breathing Bethlehem object—just like the objects and subjects in the photographs,” Ripa says. “He is a piece of Lehigh and Bethlehem history.”

Viera salutes George’s unorthodox conducting of personal and communal voices. “Bill is always on a journey of discovery, about his community and himself,” says Viera, who played Sancho Panza in a late ‘70s George-directed production of “Don Quixote” that played Bethlehem playgrounds. “He questions everything and everybody. He pitches totally different than anyone I know. He likes to use a spitball, although he won’t admit it.”

George researched “Old Man Dancing” by showing photos to a wide range of citizens to get a wider range of opinions. Bruce Haines ’67, a managing partner of the Hotel Bethlehem, debated the change in Lehigh’s mascot moniker from the Engineers to the Mountain Hawks. Rick Cantelmi, patriarch of a 93-year-old family hardware store on Fourth Street, recalled the defunct Bethlehem Farmers Market as a cultural beehive. He also evaluated the merits of a saw in a hardware-store window photographed in 1935 by Walker Evans as part of a federal-government program to document the merits of Depression-era America.

It takes a village to create a solo show, and George has relied heavily on his favorite villagers. His sister Joyce, a photographer, told him to make The Star of Bethlehem the piece’s climax. Ripa told him to strengthen the connections between Lehigh and Bethlehem, sound and silence, his older and younger selves. Viera told him to discuss a photo of a vaulted mural in a church by St. Michael’s Cemetery, the resting place for Hungarian parishioners.

“Old Man Dancing” allows George to choreograph three key paradoxes. One, progress is often regressive. As he points out, the building of a South Bethlehem railroad meant the expansion of Bethlehem Steel and the destruction of Calypso Island, a family recreational paradise. Two, greatness lives on after great institutions die. Dead for 20 years, Bethlehem Steel’s local plant will always be remembered for framing everything from the Chrysler Building to the Golden Gate Bridge.

And, three, photography can be simultaneously truthful and deceitful. “The problem with photographs is that they’re usually all about the past,” says George. “Who wants to spend all the time in the past? It’s dead and gone. I’m more interested in where we’re going and how we can be better and truer to ourselves. How can we change without losing who we are? Are we brave enough to really be ourselves?

“What makes photographs valuable and crucial is that they can show us the relationships between things and the greater whole. Photos are instants, grains of sand. What I’m asking here is: What can you learn about the desert from a grain of sand?”

Bill George will perform “56 Photos & an Old Man Dancing” at 7 p.m. Sept. 22 in Baker Hall, Zoellner Arts Center. Free; reception to follow. The exhibit “Revisiting South Bethlehem” continues through May 18 in DuBois Gallery, Maginnes Hall. Hours: 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-noon Saturday. 610-758-3615, www.luag.org.

Story by Geoff Gehman ’89 M.A.
 

Photo by H. Scott Heist