When we took our seats in the half-empty theatre on a recent Thursday evening, we did not know what to expect, and were somewhat uneasy at the prospect of an entire evening of acrobatics. But from the moment the small group of musicians began to play their instruments — some unidentifiable in both appearance and sound — and the first group of performers alighted on the unadorned stage like a flock of brightly coloured sparrows, it became apparent that this was to be an uncommon entertainment.
The company was advertised locally as an “Acrobatic Ballet” which more aptly describes the bewitching entertainment offered by the group of approximately thirty performers — the youngest thirteen and the oldest twenty-three. Two disarming young women scampered, hand-in-hand, to the front of the stage before each act to make brief introductions, first in Chinese and then in a nearly flawless Greek. The program was divided into a rapid succession of breathtaking acts which included balancing on ladders, poles, and platforms, sometimes in precarious combinations. The lithesome performers formed a variety of intricate arrangements, at times seeming to be suspended in mid-air.
A symmetrical pyramid of a dozen youngsters glided swiftly around the stage mounted on a bicycle. Bowls, parasols and plates were transformed into dazzling visual effects or incorporated into unbelievable technical feats executed with the grace and precision of a well-choreographed ballet, and a good measure of wit. Two frisky dragon-like tigers with outrageously shaggy red manes (and two pairs of feet visible under each) caroused on the stage in a charming spoof. The final act culminated with the troupe’s female magician deftly extracting large props from a small basket (the last one the inevitable
banner proclaiming friendship between Greece and China) and the entire troupe appearing for their last bows and a robust choral rendition of a Greek song, delivered with cheerful enthusiasm. The entire performance was dispatched with such uncanny ease that it was easy to overlook the extraordinary talent and artistry it involved: a virtuoso technique, unfailing grace, phenomenal agility, and a formidable physical strength in performers as delicate as butterflies.
Backstage a congenial gentleman in a Mao suit, introduced to us as the group’s “leader” and speaking through an interpreter, told us that acrobatics has a long tradition in China and is regarded as a highly-specialized art form. Most of the provinces, and some of the larger cities have at least one acrobatic troupe. The Liaoning group is considered one of China’s finest. The performers are selected primarily from two arts schools in the Liaoning province in northeast China. Students enter at the age of ten or younger, and train for five to six years. Those with exceptional talent are selected to enter the company. The routine of practicing is rigorous — four to five hours a day.
The similarities between some of the movements in the acrobatic repertoire and those of classical ballet were apparent in the performances, particularly the high leaps, the lifts, and the mimetic gestures which were the movements of pure dance. The director of the company confirmed the parallels, emphasizing that the two traditions have a great deal in common.
After leaving Athens, the troupe will continue its tour. It appeared in London and Liverpool earlier in the summer and may go on to Yugoslavia before returning home.
The Pied Piper
THOUSANDS of travellers have followed in his footsteps on and off the mainland and islands of Greece. Although most English-speaking tourists have at least heard mention of his book on Greece, almost no one has heard of him. So, when the author recently made an unofficial visit to Athens, en route to New York from a travel writing assignment in Egypt, we decided to remedy the situation. The book is Greece on $10 and $15 a Day, one of the more popular in the series of budget guides published by Arthur Frommer, the grandfather of economy travel who approximately twenty years ago revolutionized the entire travel industry with the publication of his book Europe on $5 a Day; the author is John Wilcock, a well-seasoned pied piper in the Frommer entourage, who has also guided budget travellers through Mexico and Japan, among other places.
Born in England fifty years ago, Wilcock went directly from secondary school into the world of journalism as a reporter for his hometown newspaper, the Sheffield Telegraph. London and Fleet Street were soon to follow (The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail) and then Canada, the Bahamas (where he was a gossip columnist for a Nassau newspaper), and finally New York, where he is still based today. He worked as an assistant travel editor with The New York Times for several years and was one of the five founders of the Village Voice (and a columnist on the newspaper for ten and a half years). Interspersed in the complicated chronology of his career were a variety of affiliations with the New York cultural underground: a column with the East Village Other, books on Andy Warhol and other exotic subjects including occult guides to Great Britain and South America and a Harper and Row book entitled Magical and Mystical Sites. He has just completed a guide to Venezuela commissioned by that country’s ministry of tourism and is in the process, among other projects, of launching Nowad, a new travel magazine he describes as very “unconventional” and geared to the wanderers and adventurers of the world.
It was in 1960 that Wilcock was invited by Frommer to write a budget guide to Mexico in the neophyte series which had been spawned by the success of Europe on $5 a Day. Frommer guides were then slowly covering the globe — from Ireland to Israel, Hawaii to India — and establishing a devoted readership. As Frommer had correctly suspected when he first set out to collect for his book the lowest rates in eating, sleeping, entertainment, and culture on the continent, there was an untapped reservoir of modest-income travellers willing to foresake the luxury of a private bath and eager to discover adventure in exotic lands — alone, without the benefit of organized touring. He thus created a travel empire which he presides over today from his headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York. A staff of roughly one hundred and sixty coordinates a worldwide network of travel, ranging from charter flights to hotels and group trips, through a bank of computers, the books and editorial staff having taken a back seat to the more lucrative tour business.
The first Frommer book on Greece, then titled Greece on $5 a Day, was published in 1965. When Wilcock set out to write the original edition, it was his first visit to the country and he now unabashedly confesses that he barely knew where it was on the map. Basing himself in a small house in the Plaka (which today, he laments, is a noisy taverna), he began gathering the bits and pieces that would emerge, eleven weeks later, as the first budget guide to Greece. As a pioneer in uncharted seas, he was to encounter not only confusion but reluctance on the part of officials who had little desire to make the country accessible to indigent wayfarers. He worked then as he does today — in the manner of an undercover agent searching for the elusive clue rather than the privileged travel writer ushered about by eager officials.
The premise of his book, which reflects that of the entire series, is to convey information, from the mundane to the esoteric. Brief digests of entire millennia thus share equal space with bus routes and where to do your laundry, directions for getting to the beach are treated as thoroughly as tours of ancient sites. The prevailing style of the book is a freewheeling informality infused with a steady flow of personal anecdotes, friendly advice, the occasional rapturous description and quotes from a variety of eminent sages — from Pythagoras to Lawrence Durrell.
Now in its ninth edition, the book has undergone various physical alterations: in size (it has become gradually smaller, less paper being more economical), in title (from $5 per day to the current $10-15) and content. Yugoslavia and Turkey at various times were appended in brief chapters, but Yugoslavia has been dropped and it was decided that Turkey merited an entire book. Wilcock believes that Greece is not likely to suffer the fate of Japan, which was recently dropped from the series because of rising costs, since Greece is likely to remain less expensive than other travel playgrounds of the world.
From the first edition and through each successive updating (which takes one month to complete) Wilcock has roamed Greece collecting his raw materials — menus, bus schedules, telephone numbers — and haunted more scholarly settings and libraries to collect historical data which he condenses into painless capsules for a popular readership.
His working method has been pared down to a model of efficiency. He travels lightly, and works quickly, immersing himself in a location with unwavering curiosity. Working with the aid of a collection of large envelopes (into which he deposits the day’s collection of material), and occasionally a tape recorder, he writes his material immediately and produces his final copy before moving on to his next destination, ruthlessly discarding his original notes and the contents of the envelopes.
Anonymity still forms an integral part of his working method. He rarely identifies himself, assuming instead the pose of the innocent traveller, unobtrusively gathering information and cultivating a widespread network of unsuspecting contacts. It is his contacts, in fact, who eventually gain unexpected exposure. With each new edition of his book, hotel managers, restaurant owners and other anonymous locals are elevated to celebrity status when they are referred to by name in the book and suddenly a steady stream of strangers come into town asking for them.
He also draws information from the readers’ letters which accumulate at the Frommer headquarters. Since readers are enthusiastically invited in the book to convey their experiences, a respectable number respond and those selected are referred to by name in the book. According to Wilcock his mail produces nothing kooky — mostly “helpful corrections and indignant denials”.
Wilcock makes no apologies for popularizing the undiscovered retreats of the world (someone else has already been there, he theorizes, and there are many left) and for not speaking any foreign languages. He knows a few random words in several but cannot put together a complete sentence in anything but his native tongue. This deficiency, he feels, is an asset, enabling him to fully empathize with the foreigner who can rely on nothing but sign language to get around.
In May of next year, Wilcock will return to update the new version of his Greek book. He will stay, as he has on more than a dozen trips to Greece, at the Carolina Hotel, a small centrally-located establishment that is, of course, mentioned in his book (it receives an affectionate recommendation and is described as “friendly”). From there he will coordinate a squad of “assistants” who will check out various areas that he himself cannot visit. He reserves most of Athens, Mykonos, the hydrofoil route. and Crete for himself and is constantly on the look-out for new territory. Lesbos and Skiathos were the major additions to the current edition as well as further inroads into Crete which he feels has the greatest potential, at least for the purposes of his book. We did not dare ask about another revision we feared might occur in the next edition: the title. Hopefully, Wilcock’s investigations in 1979 will not necessitate yet another dollar-notch upward.
