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12.
A rare poster announcing ‘Graciela Martinez - Mark Boyles Sensual Laboratory - introducing David Bowie’ at the Arts Lab, 182 Drury Lane, nd. (c. late 1967/early 1968).
Printed offset litho in black, white and lime green on white stock (the poster was printed in at least one other colourway - black, red and lime green). 50.9x76.4cm. Illustrated with an image of a pre-Columbian deity. Designer unknown.
Though its title doesn’t appear, the poster advertises ‘Studies Towards an Experiment into the Structure of Dreams’, a collaborative work by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills with the Argentinian dancer Graziella Martinez (they had recently worked together at the Edinburgh Festival with Soft Machine in a piece called ‘Lullaby for Catatonics’).
The poster credits the production to the “Arts Lab in association with Michael White”, a theatrical impresario, later film producer based in Duke Street, St. James’s who was one of Jim Haynes’s many contacts (he helped Haynes arrange Yoko Ono’s performance at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in November 1966).
The role played by David Bowie in the production is unclear. It’s well known that Jim Haynes gave Bowie permission to rehearse at the Arts Lab and that he was mentored by choreographer Lindsay Kemp, but whether or not he performed alongside Martinez, perhaps in place of her usual (female) dance partner Tony-Lee Marshall, seems to be unrecorded. Joan Hills informed David Curtis that while she didn’t remember Bowie’s participation, she “believes it could easily have happened” (London’s Arts Labs, p.41). A review appeared in IT #23 (January 5th, 1968), which praised “the last sequence in which dancer, light, sound and props leave the banal reality of the stage and takes you wherever you want to go”, and the show ran for more than 70 performances, with two each evening, six nights a week, an intense schedule which contributed to Boyle and Hills’s decision to terminate their light projection events in late 1968.
A little edge-worn, with minor handling wear; overall a Very Good plus copy of a rare poster, one of the earliest to feature David Bowie’s name. Illustrated in London’s Arts Labs, p.33.
