Unless you’re an intimate friend of hers, those of us who thought we knew Claudia Chapline will be astonished by her newest memoir (after the delightful “Falling Up the Stairs,” published in 2013). In less than 150 pages, which include a chronology and selected bibliography, “Moving Out of the Frame” reveals a life infused with and enriched by dance and art.
Until age 52, Claudia danced and taught ballet and modern, ballroom, folk and “cartoon” dance; she was also a dance therapist, a choreographer and an improvisationist. She worked and studied with some—or most—of the great names in dance. Merce Cunningham, José Limon, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Louis Horst, Lucas Hoving, Gloria Newman, Don Bondi and Carmelita Maracci are just a few of the luminaries who enlightened her performance art.
Throughout this career in dance she was also a poet, feminist, mother and wife to a husband jealous of her work. Later she found a more suitable partner, the artist Harold Schwarm, who cooked perfect eggs for breakfast, cared about her work and didn’t have a reason to compete with her art for her attention.
In 1957, Claudia, then 27, moved to Los Angeles and soon began studying improvisation with Rachel Rosenthal; her husband, King Moody; and Ron and Phyllis Patterson. Several years later, the group morphed into the Instant Theater, “the nearest thing to my dream of a poet’s theatre,” Claudia remembers.
The collaborative experience of creating improvisational theatre based on themes selected by the company or the audience was a high point of my early days in Los Angeles. We work-shopped two nights during the week and performed on weekend nights for adults. On weekend afternoons we performed Instant Fairy Tales for children….
Gradually people’s lives changed and the group dissolved. I gave birth to my second child…. King became a successful commercial actor when he created the clown character, Ronald McDonald, to sell hamburgers. Ron and Phyllis Patterson started the Renaissance Pleasure Fair… [which] became an ongoing success in Los Angeles and later in Marin County for more than 25 years.
These two paragraphs demonstrate the flow of the book, how dance slid into theater, experiences slipped into the past and new art slid into the present. Claudia soon turned to visual art: collage, abstract painting, sculpture and fiber art. In West Marin, many of us have seen her assemblages and installations, and know Claudia as a gallery owner, an art promoter and columnist and a frequent contributor to the “West Marin Review.” But these are only the surface layers of a woman who lives and breathes art.
As with many artists, making ends meet has been part of the creative process. When she has been able to afford travel, Claudia has shown her work in South America, Asia and Europe. Along with success, came the typical disasters. Once she shipped a series of circular paintings to a show in Germany via UPS. Opening the packages there, she found that customs had pasted stickers on the fronts of three of her scrolls. Three others had been damaged in shipping.
For a San Francisco-Paris Exchange Show, she created work with Styrofoam and other trash she found on the streets. “Working this way was very enjoyable,” she writes, “and it gave me confidence that I could create work inspired by a place in a very short time.” She sold one of the Styrofoam pieces to Marianne Fieremans, a well-known collector from Belgium, who couldn’t pick up the piece until after the exhibition had ended. When Fieremans came for it, she discovered that the janitor had thrown it out with the trash, even though it had been labeled as art and had her name on it. So it goes.
“Moving Out of the Frame,” published by Norfolk Press, is illustrated with art in black and white and color, along with photographs of Claudia on many stages and at all stages of her career; poetry—she has published six books of poetry—and amusing anecdotes of a truly exceptional artist’s life also enliven its pages.
Doris Ober is an independent editor and managing editor for the “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles: Our Life and Times with Sheep, Goats, Llamas, and Other Creatures,” and “The Alzheimer Years: A Mother and Daughter Reunion.” is an independent editor, author of “The Dogtown Chronicles: Our Life and Times with Sheep, Goats, Llamas, and Other Creatures,” and “The Alzheimer Years: A Mother and Daughter Reunion.”