Reviewed by Muldoon Elder

Saturday, 23 October, 2004
The Koret Auditorium, Main Library, San Francisco CA

An amazingly intricate and potent performance was presented today by Kathryn Roszak's Anima Mundi Dance Company created from and inspired by Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace.
In a time of a futile war wreaking violence upon friend and foe alike and reeking of the stench of death and disaster to all involved no matter how distant, that is, whether it be the emotional and psychic violence suffered by us sitting in comfortable chairs in our homeland or the physical and mental damage inflicted on many innocent Iraqis as a result of a silicon chip placed in the head of our American President by his handlers, Kathryn Roszak's stunning, powerful yet lissome performance of The Fifth Book of Peace uses an amazing, overall elegance of style and form to slip under our usually guarded resistance to the inequities of war with a kind of kinesthetic Guernica ( for those of you too young to remember — Picasso's rendition of Generalisimo Franco's and Adolf Hitler's collaboration of the slaughter of the Basque town of Guernica), made up of a series of unforgettably beautiful, mobile tableaus conjured from classic Russian icons, Michelangelo's Piatà, and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket that linger far beyond what one would expect of any dance performance, even beyond what they should have any right to, and remind us with a clinging kind of aesthetic beauty mixed with a shudder of horror of the permanent and intensely intractable damage that always results from an unnecessary, irrational war.

Editor's note: We asked Mr. Elder for a single sentence. If one takes a long breath, here is an example of a run over sentence that actually works.

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© 2004 __Muldoon Elder