| Remy Charlip | |
| Birth Date: | 10 January 1929 |
| Birth Place: | New York City, US |
| Death Place: | San Francisco, California, US |
| Education: | Cooper Union, Black Mountain College |
Abraham Remy Charlip (January 10, 1929 – August 14, 2012) was an American artist, writer, choreographer, theatre director, theatrical designer, and teacher. He wrote or illustrated more than 40 children's books.[1]
Charlip was raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn by Lithuanian Jewish parents.[2]
He studied textile design at Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan, and fine arts at Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 1949. In 1951, he began attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina at the encouragement of Lou Harrison, arriving on Thanksgiving 1951 together with composer David Tudor and writer and potter M.C. Richards.[3] At Black Mountain College, he collaborated with composer John Cage, participated in Theatre Piece No. 1, and became a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, for which he also designed sets and costumes. He remained a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 11 years.[4] He also met others with whom he would later collaborate, including Robert Rauschenberg, Nicholas Cernovich, and Vera Baker Williams.
In the 1960s Charlip created a unique form of choreography, which he called "Air Mail Dances." He would send a set of drawings to a dance company, and the dancers would then order the positions and create transitions and context, without Charlip's further participation.[5]
He directed plays for the Judson Poets Theatre, co-founded the Paper Bag Players children's theater company, and served as head of the Children's Theater and Literature Department at Sarah Lawrence College. Off-Broadway, he was the "Stage Director" of a 1962 production of Bertolt Brecht's Man Is Man for Julian Beck's Living Theatre, for which he received his first of two Obie Awards,[6] and designed the set for the American Place Theatre production of Paul Goodman's Jonah in 1966.[7]
As a children's book illustrator and author, he became known for his unique use of line and color, fanciful prose, and postmodern use of narrative sequence and continuity. He won three New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year citations, and was awarded a six-month residency in Kyoto, Japan from the Japan/U.S. Commission on the Arts.
Charlip was the model for illustrations of Georges Méliès in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written and illustrated by Brian Selznick.[8]
He moved to San Francisco in 1989, and worked with local arts groups, including the Oakland Ballet. He died in San Francisco in 2012.[9] [10] [11]
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