taking flight: Gold's ode to winged creatures inspired by dream

taking flight
Gold's ode to winged creatures inspired by dream
DATE: March 16, 1995
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman
PAGE: 64


BIRD DREAM: SONGS AND DANCES WHEN: March 16-18, 23-26
WHERE: Hyde Park Theatre
TICKETS: $6-$10
INFORMATION: 499-8497


A starling shivered under the front seat of Heloise Gold's car.

Against her better judgment, the popular Austin performer could not resist rescuing the injured bird.

``Birds are mysterious, magical creatures,'' said Gold of the avian inspirations for her upcoming Songs and Dances.

``I see them as messengers between the Earth and the spiritual realm. And they are all over the place. Once, I was in a cold, old concrete bus station outside of Boston and there they were, the only living things warming up the place with their bird energy,'' she said.

Gold's movement piece, which plays for two weeks at Hyde Park Theatre, attempts to cage bird energy, not just imitate bird movement.

For strangers to Gold's work, she is no mere nature freak. Her dance credentials are impeccable. In her native New York, Gold began training when she was ``1 foot high.'' (A typical Gold joke, since she is hardly much taller now.)

Her classical ballet started very early, and she guested with the Bolshoi and Kirov troupes during their New York stays. ``Those came from grueling, unbelievable auditions with hundreds of kids. Even then, though, I felt as if I didn't belong to that world,'' she said. When she didn't make the American Ballet Theatre troupe as a teen-ager, Gold moved on to more conceptual work with postmodern visionaries such as Robert Wilson. She performed in Wilson's infamous 12-hour, slow-motion Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1972). ``At 3 a.m., I, along with 15 other performers, got out of bed, lit a candle, took a walk and came back to bed. That took an hour,'' she said. ``At 6 a.m., I was a flamingo. I wore a huge flamingo costume.''

Gold is blessed with a sense of humor about avant-garde performance. She spent a couple of years with Lotte Gosler's Pantomime Circus, mixing classical dance with clowning.

In Austin, she has worked with musicians and storytellers such as Tina Marsh, Mike Arnold and Bill Jeffers on lighthearted pieces. Her best-known recent works were duets with Jean Fogel Zee, culminating in the funny-cute hit, Divine Lunacy.

A life-altering meeting with dance wonder-worker Deborah Hay brought Gold to Austin. For a while, Gold was a core member of Hay's Austin-based company and, even now, Hay teaches in Gold's T'ai Chi studio on Bee Caves Road, while Hay awaits her unbuilt Whole Point Space.

The idea for Gold's series of ``Bird Dances'' came in a 1980 dream. ``It was just like you'd expect. A big voice told me to spend my time creating bird dances and songs,'' she said matter- of-factly. Gold designed various solos and duets on feathery themes, and, for the coming show, Gold is joined by respected collaborators Grace Mi-He Lee and Scott Lehman.

Not all Gold's encounters with birds have been happy, though. During one of her long summer stays in New Mexico, Gold was watching television with her parents: ``A commercial with a crow came on. I started making my crow sounds - the crow is my favorite bird - and this cat leapt at me, claws out, screeching and clawing, and I thought: `Oh my god, this cat wants to kill me.' My father grabbed the cat, threw her off and I thought everything was OK, but it came at me again, right at my head. I took several stitches at the emergency room and was lucky not to lose an eye.''

Maybe Gold has grown too intimate with the bird world. As for the little starling in her car, after trying animal rescue clinics, Gold would not abandon it. ``I watched the little sweetheart take its last breath. I cried and buried it in the backyard. Its very last movement was spreading its wings like it wanted to fly,'' she later reported. Therein lies the central attraction of birds for Gold. ``They can fly. And most of us want to fly,'' she said.