The Coach With the Six Insides

Here's Jean Erdman, the choreographer and dancer, dancing the role of Biddy the Hen in The Coach With the Six Insides, her 1962 musical comic stage adaptation of Finnegans Wake.

Erdman, who died in May 2020, at the age of 104, was the wife of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, co-author of The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.  A great dancer and choreographer, she began in 1938 as the soloist of the Martha Graham company. After forming her own company in 1944, she collaborated with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Maya Deren. As a choreographer, she created total theatre, mixing spoken words, music, dance and visual art.  The Jean Erdman company continues today, and its website has filmed recreations of her dances.

Here she is as Medusa, from an unfinished film by Maya Deren. This reminds me of James Joyce dancing 'like a satyr on a Greek vase'.

 

An extract from The Coach With the Six Insides was filmed for television in 1964, and here it is, from YouTube, posted by Repetition compulsion. It begins with an interview, in which Erdman explains why dance and Finnegans Wake were made for each other.

'All the language is rhythmic and poetic, it has many layers of meaning....The language of movement, which can carry images quickly...doesn't bind you down to defining things.'

I love the dances, by Jean Erdman, in which she performs all the various aspects of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Her guiding belief was that 'a choreographer should create for each new dance a style of movement intrinsic to its subject'. You can see this in the different ways she dances the lively bouncing hen and Kate the weighed-down crone. The four actors speak the text extracted from various parts of the book, and also use mime. I like the way they arrive on stage, driving their coach.  

 

Joyce, who was himself a celebrated dancer, would have approved (See my post James Joyce: The Dancing Years).

 

There are similarities with Mary Manning's play and Mary Ellen Bute's film, also based on The Skeleton Key, and also creating a new plot by selecting passages from across the Wake. The main difference is that Earwicker doesn't appear in The Coach With the Six Insides – perhaps because it's all taking place inside his dreaming mind.

This is where the title comes from:
 

'You have jest (a ham) beamed listening through (a ham pig) his haulted excerpt from John Whiston’s fiveaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides, from the Tales of Yore of the times gone by before there was a hofdking or a hoovthing or a pinginapoke in Oreland, all sould'  359.22

There's a record of the show, with Teiji Ito's wonderful music, which you can listen to on Jean Erdman's bandcamp page. Ito is better known for his scores for Maya Deren. See 'Teiji Ito on Maya Deren' on YouTube.

Campbell wrote an explanation of the story for a 1964 theatre programme (which you can download from the University of Hawaii here). Here he goes even further than The Skeleton Key in finding a daytime existence for the dreamer. So he says that The Coach With the Six Insides was 'the title of a television drama seen on the tavern bar a few hours before the dream.'

 

See my post The Dream of H.C. Earwicker? for the background to this dreamer theory, which dominated early readings of Finnegans Wake.

 

I've also found a New York Times interview with Campbell and Erdman, by David Sears, from 1982, when the piece was being revived for Joyce's centenary.
 

Campbell: 'I was working on the 'Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake' years before. And I suppose that's what got into her system. But it was her idea to make it a dance, really. It was originally going to be a solo, you know. Then she seemed to get so excited about the language and the fun of what Joyce was doing with language that she couldn't think of just having a dance. So the next step was to bring in actors.'

'But the dance was never dropped,' Miss Erdman adds. 'Originally it was the dance of Anna Livia Plurabelle. She's Finnegan's wife, but she really embodies all women of every kind. And it was going to be an evening of those images: the young girl, the daughter, the old crone, the seductive Maggies, the wife, the river and the rain, Belinda the hen. Those were the main ideas, anyway - all Anna Livia. And in each one I was searching for movement themes that would shape the body. These were abstract themes all coming together in one feminine principle, but they were also independent characters. Then I showed them to Teiji Ito, our composer, and he decided on what wonderful sounds to use -such instruments as Japanese flutes, bells, shells, marimbala, accordion and violin.'

From adding music and dialogue, characters and mime passages, the 'Coach' turned into a series of vignettes through which the dance sequences were strung like Joyce's 'perils before swain.'
 

'Anna Livia is the River Liffey,' explains Mr. Campbell. 'When you're south of Dublin, it starts out like a little dancing girl. Then it flows north a little bit and starts turning eastwards, running through the suburbs of the city. She's now a mother of a family near Phoenix Park. When it turns and goes through the city, it sweeps off all of the filth like a scrubwoman taking it out to the sea. The River Liffey is all of those stages at once, all of the time, so that when she's a little girl she's also the old woman. And when she's the old woman the dancing girl is still there.'

'And that's why I wanted to dance her,' adds Miss Erdman. 'Joyce makes that river his female principle. She activates the book, urges her hero-husband on to greater deeds, tempts him to do too much and then fall. She puts him together again, like Humpty Dumpty, and starts him out. And when she dies, she just flows out into the ocean and up into the rainfall.'

Rising and falling, crucifixion and ascension, motifs occuring throughout the mythologies of the world, have here been translated in dance terms through Mr. Campbell's guidance.

'All dance is based on the truths of gravity, so we have to recognize a world dance from that point of view,' his wife continues. 'In East Indian dance, the body stands on the ground, articulating with the arms around a center. But it's not asking to conquer gravity at all. This is in direct opposition to European dance, which has an entirely different mythology. There you find the impulse to jump, the rebound, the constant yearning toward an infinite point. It is a relationship to an outside deity, not from within.'

'That's where Joyce comes in,' says Mr. Campbell, developing her theme. 'He accepts man in all his nastiness, brutality and everything. He takes you into the abyssal nightmare of time in the 'Wake,' only to show you mercy afterwards. And that saves mankind. It's the resurrection, or if you wish, reincarnation. Romans, Chapter 11, Verse 32, you know, and that's a number occurring throughout the book over and over again - 1132.
 

'And at the end the river meets the ocean to come back as the rain,' his wife exclaims. 'The old crone is so wonderful to dance, because she's so full of her weight. But then she becomes possessed with the spirit of this whole thing, that crazy 'I'm out on the town now' kind of thing! And she's suddenly doing wild jigs. She becomes a totally different person.

''You know I have to laugh when I think it's really the people who don't know the book at all, or the language or anything like that, who usually end up having the most fun with this show.' Miss Erdman says. 'They don't feel responsibility for understanding it, so they are then free to totally understand.'
 

'I think you're right there, Jean,' Mr. Campbell admits. 'But we're all like that, really, because you can't get to the bottom of Joyce after all. You just have to have fun with him and float along with that wonderful river.'

'In that wonderful 'Coach,' ' she adds, with a wink and a knowing smile.

 

 

 
 

Happy New Year Wakeans!