Not long ago, I took a walk to clear my mind, but instead of listening to my own thoughts, I listened to Ali Smith’s. Smith is a brilliant contemporary author who, as one New York Times critic put it, “has a beautiful mind,” so I was in good company. On my walk, Smith talked about art and how it provokes and “unfixes” us, that “art opens a hole in that fixity” and creates space for us to question things we think we know. Smith believes curiosity fuels connection, engagement, and aliveness. This idea — that art has the power to radically alter fixed forms — immediately made me think of one of my favorite artists: Remy Charlip.
Remy Charlip via Remy Charlip Estate (text by me)
Remy Charlip was a dancer, choreographer, designer, and teacher, but I know him best for his work writing and illustrating children’s books. I can’t remember when Charlip’s books first entered my world, but I remember the feeling I had when I first read what is now his most famous book, Fortunately (1964). It was exhilaration, not only for its silly humor but in anticipation of what wild surprise would come next. The story is about a boy named Ned, who receives an invitation to a surprise birthday party in Florida, but he’s miles away in New York; fortunately, he has an airplane; unfortunately, the motor explodes; fortunately, he has a parachute — and so begins a series of chaotic mishaps for Ned. The use of repetition and contrasting spreads in vibrant color and back and white propel the reader in every direction as Ned’s luck continues to change.''It is a flying, falling in space, diving in water, swimming, running, digging himself in and out of a cave and into a ballroom dance,'' Charlip told The New York Times in 1999.
Fortunately (1964)
It was while reading Fortunately that I recognized the power of the page turn. With each turn of the page, the anticipation builds: Will poor Ned be eaten by a ferocious tiger? Knowing it’s a book for children, it’s unlikely, but there’s still a chance—and you can’t wait to flip the page over to find out. Turning a page in a Charlip book is like opening a door, not to some fantastical far-off land, but to new experiences where pictures and words dance together unexpectedly.
Listen to “A Page Is a Door,” by Remy Charlip, read aloud by me.
Remy Charlip’s approach to art was democratic and experiential. To him, there were no boundaries between things like choreography, dance, and picture books. He recognized the fluidity and suppleness between the forms. Both dance and picture books speak in visual narratives, and both can be interpreted in various ways depending on the audience. As a choreographer, Charlip challenged his pupils to think outside the box, often encouraging them to transform limitations into opportunities. He believed any body could dance. In “Remy Charlip’s Imaginary Dances,” for MOCA-LA’s 1984 radio series The Territory of Art, Charlip recalls that when he first decided to become a dancer, he thought it meant he had to dedicate his entire life to the practice, but as he got older, he realized that every moment in our ordinary lives could be considered a dance: sleeping, reading, eating, winking — life’s one big dance! Once he recognized this, his entire approach to art changed.
“Flowering Trees” — Air Mail Dance
One afternoon, on an extended visit to Paris in 1971, Remy ran into a friend who, by coincidence, reminded Remy that he’d promised Nancy Lewis—a fellow dancer and choreographer—that he’d contribute to a dance program she was due to perform in New York City. Considering he was thousands of miles across the Atlantic, Remy had to get creative. He began sending Lewis a series of hand-drawn “Air Mail Dances” on postcards with a sequence of movements and gestures for her to perform. Always one to defy expectations, Remy kept his notations abstract, allowing Lewis to choose her own transitions, music, and meaning. Before Charlip, notations were tools to reconstruct a dance after the fact, but Remy used notations the same way a playwright writes a script: before the fact, essentially revolutionizing the form. It was so successful that he began to get requests for his dance postcards from all over the world.
I would like to do a {book} collection of the “Air Mail” dances. It would be called “Dances Any Body Can Do,” and they would be mostly household dances like “Dance in a Doorway,” “Dance on the Stairs,” “The Dance in the Bed,” and other dances that you can do that are very simple. And I’d like to do a second book which would be called “Advanced Danes,” and those would require a little more technical proficiency. And then I’d like to do a third book which would be called “More Advanced Dances,” which would be very difficult to do, that is, like “Dancing on the Tip of a Candle Flame,” or “Dancing on a Cloud.” — Remy Charlip, “Remy Charlip’s Imaginary Dances,” 1984.
In 1987 at the Joyce Theather in New York City, Charlip staged a production called “Remy Charlip Dances,” a performance with no dances and no music. Instead, the performers stood on stage reading aloud titles of imaginary dances and tiny vignettes of dance notations — allowing the audience to envision the dance entirely in their minds. There’s a dance with a dog ballerina, another where kids are packed sardines covered in olive oil, there’s a dance told entirely in sign language, and there’s even a dance with people just standing around waiting for something (or nothing; it’s unclear). Charlip’s clever interplay between words and images, whether viewed in your head or on the page, helped break down barriers between high art and popular culture.
Dress Up and Let’s Have a Party (1956)
Though unconventional, Charlip’s dance notations and his books for children maintain accessibility. They’re invitations to join in, engage, and experiment. In his first book as an author/illustrator, Dress Up and Let’s Have a Party (1956), a mother bakes a cake while her son, John, plays dress-up with pots and pans. Feeling inspired by his creative costume, John invites his friends over for a dress-up party, the only catch: they must come wearing a disguise using everyday household items. There’s a lampshade ballerina, a blanket mountain, and a potato bug in a potato bag. Transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary was Charlip’s specialty.
Where Is Everybody? (1957)
His book, Where Is Everybody? (1957) opens to a blank page, “Here is an empty sky,” it reads. From there, the scene builds sequentially. Turn the page, and “A bird flies up into the sky.” Turn the page again, and “The sun shines in the sky,” with a simple line drawing of the golden sun and a delicate bird. With each page turn, there are new dynamic opportunities. Through layered textures, contrasting tones, punchy verbs, and hidden pictures, Charlip turns this picture book into a kinetic piece of art.
There are famous picture book authors whose art feels distinct and constant throughout their work; Maurice Sendak comes to mind. But that’s not the case with Remy Charlip. There’s less ego in his books. His work isn’t about him, at least not overtly; it’s for the reader. Not only does he want you to participate, but he also wants you to orchestrate and manipulate. He wants to alter your perception of the form but also of yourself. He’s not concerned with plot or conventional narrative structures. His best books are the ones that feel free from constraint. In his short manifesto-like essay, “A Page Is a Door,” he mentions the burden of a book’s physicality, “While reading a book, I sometimes wish I didn’t have to hold it up, it gets so heavy, and I fantasize a sea of type automatically unrolling, one word in focus at a time, at just the right speed, on a moving screen or scroll.” But a book, like all art forms, has its unique limitations, and while that’s probably a good thing, Charlip does his best to push up against them. And there’s no better example of this than in his picture books Arm & Arm (1969) and Thirteen (1975).
Arm & Arm (1969)
Like picture book authors Ruth Krauss and Margaret Wise Brown, both of which collaborated with Charlip on books such as A Moon or a Button (Krauss/Charlip, 1959) and A Dead Bird (Brown/Charlip, 1958), Charlip deeply understood and connected with the mind of a child. As its title suggests, Arm & Arm: A Collection of Connections, Endless Tales, Reiterations, and Other Echolalia (1969), is filled with circular stories, puns, riddles, and games with no beginning or end. You can read the book in a circular motion: front to back, back to front, even on its side. While researching for this article, I found one of my daughter’s doodle notebooks from when she was six. It felt as if I was looking at Arm & Arm — they were strikingly similar in their lack of self-consciousness and creative freedom.
Thirteen (1975)
But Charlip’s 1975 picture book Thirteen is his most unorthodox and imaginative. Written over the course of nine years, in collaboration with his friend and fellow artist and picture book author Jerry Joyner, Thirteen is unlike any other book I’ve seen. It’s a book of illusions and metamorphoses, told in thirteen stories that unfold over thirteen stunning spreads starting on page 13 and ending on page 1. “The Sinking Ship” and “The Perfect Day: A Play” are told in more traditional narratives, but others like “Swan Becoming Water” and “Paper Magic” are dazzling transmogrifications. But one of the most surprising details (and there are many) is the “Preview of Coming Attractions,” a miniature image of the exact spread that will appear next. It’s incredibly unusual and yet makes perfect sense.
This unconventional picture book was also made unconventionally. As the back of the book states, “Remy Charlip & Jerry Joyner shared the writing and painting of this book in unusual ways & in many different places.” For nine years, they met and corresponded and sometimes worked separately, “discovering and developing their individual stories & the overall form of the book.” While some of the stories are Charlip’s and other Joyner’s, “Paper Magic” was the evolution of paintings they passed back and forth. This collaborative and improvisational approach resulted in a picture book that can be read forward, backward, in the middle, in one sitting, or over the course of a lifetime. People throw around the word “magical” a lot when describing picture books when so few actually are, but Thirteen is a testament to the magical possibilities of the form.
Arm & Arm endpaper + author Ali Smith (image via NYRB)
It’s not surprising that Ali Smith (unintentionally) got me thinking about Remy Charlip. The two share a similar artistic philosophy and style. Both use art to disrupt and displace: to break down walls. They’re not interested in boundaries, in distinctions between forms, and the separation of art and politics. But their approach is never heavy-handed; it’s light and playful. Smith, like Charlip, cleverly layers a patchwork of art, music, film, and books into her writing — often through wordplay, puns, and puzzles. Her novel, Autumn (2016), is written in a nonlinear narrative, and there’s hardly a plot, but like in Arm & Arm and Thirteen, the story explores the connectivity of the past and present, art and life. It’s as if everything is happening at once, in a circular motion, with no beginning or end. In Autumn, Daniel, an elderly aesthete, forms a friendship and mentorship with his eleven-year-old neighbor Elisabeth. They take long walks on hot summer afternoons, talking about the dazzling connections between art and language. Daniel appreciates Elisabeth’s vivacious spirit and her love of words. “Every picture tells a story. Every story tells a picture,” he says to her on one of their first visits. Then they both close their eyes as he describes a painting entirely from memory— spinning a story through fragmented details and clues — an imaginary dance, if you will. ⋒
OBsessEDdddd with this!!!! I'm inspired! <3
Taylor….that poem at the end is perfect….love what you are creating with the Moonbow community. 😍