Month: May 2019

Building My Own Program in NYC

JoAnne Tucker / / Dance History, Personal Life

In the last blog I mentioned that although Martha Hill had encouraged me to re-audition for Juilliard, I never had a chance to discuss this with my parents because  my grandmother died at the same time. So … as planned, off I went to the University of Denver, my only backup school.  After only one dance class it was clear to me this was not going to work. Within a few days after informing my parents I would not be staying at the University of Denver, I had withdrawn from school and was packed and on the train heading back to Pittsburgh. I was filled with a clear determination that I wanted to study dance with the best, and the place to do that was in New York City.  There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted a career in dance.  I hoped that I would have the support of my parents and that they would financially support an independent program in NYC that wasn’t connected to a particular college.  I loved the Graham technique of modern dance and knew that would be where I would be taking modern dance classes. On my list was to find a good place to study ballet.  I valued academics and thought I would explore what kind of possibilities there would be to enroll in one or two college courses.  The long train ride from Denver to Pittsburgh gave me time to think through these different options and I found myself focused and clear on what my next steps were when I got home.

My parents were somewhat open but clearly had their own thoughts on what would be best for me, and my father in particular had a hard time with his daughter being a dancer in NYC.  My father’s stepbrother was a psychiatrist and having been consulted, he suggested that when I got home I should see a colleague of his and have someone outside of the family talk to me in  case there was something else going on.  So shortly after I got home my parents arranged an appointment for me.  I knew I needed to be cooperative because my first choice was having their financial support rather then having to support myself in NYC so I was willing to give it a few months home in Pittsburgh if I had to.  They also suggested I enroll in a typing course so I might have a skill to support myself if I needed to.  

So I enrolled in a typing course at a secretarial school and I had what turned out to be a single appointment with a woman psychiatrist.  The appointment ended up actually being lots of fun. I explained why I wanted to go to New York and how I was planning to structure my time.  She asked me quite a few questions and by the end of the appointment she was very encouraging and said that if I liked, she would have a follow up appointment with my parents and share with them that she thought my plans were very realistic and encourage them to support me.  

Following their appointment a week later, it was decided that I would move to NYC after the 1stof the year.  That would give me time to further explore options of where to live in the City and finish the typing course.  My mom and I visited New York to explore options of where I would live.  I was young and the idea of my living in an apartment was out of the question so we explored places like Y residences for women and the Barbizon Hotel for Women, where I had stayed once before. We then found a house on Madison and 68thStreet that was for women only and offered breakfast in the morning.  That would be where I stayed.  The neighborhood was great and the other women were a variety of ages. I think I even had my own room. I remember that living in the room next door was a model who was on the cover of Vogue,and another person living on the floor was studying acting. The house itself was a beautiful brownstone with a dramatic spiral staircase in the foyer where one entered. It was near the Cuban Embassy and there were often candlelight vigils and protests on our street.

I knew I would be taking classes at the Graham Studio which was located at 63rdbetween 1stand 2ndAvenue and an easy walk from where I lived. Next to explore was where I would go for ballet. I am not sure what made me decide that I wanted to go to the American School of Ballet which was pretty much for very serious young dancers but I got that in my mind and shortly after arriving in NYC I went for an audition and was placed in the beginning level class with outstanding teachers like Muriel Stuart. I actually loved the classes in spite of being surrounded by very thin “bunhead” ballerina types.  Later I would move to studying ballet with Nina Fonaroff, totally loving her class and feeling so much more at home with her.  She had danced in the Martha Graham company and also assisted Louis Horst, a composition teacher I was hoping to study with.  I continued studying with her even when I later attended Juilliard.  Her classes were fun and had a unique musical quality to them as she accompanied the class playing on the studio’s piano.  A friend I had met at Connecticut College the previous summer sometimes joined the small class too.  With the tension and competition that existed at places like The Graham Studio, School of American Ballet and later at Juilliard, it was a real delight to take class and get back in touch with the childhood joy of dancing.  Nina’s combinations were fun to do and her corrections excellent.  Ballet was fun –  something I had not really experienced before.

One more piece of the puzzle to solve.  I discovered that Columbia University had a School of General Studies that was designed for students like me who didn’t want to go full time.  So I took the entrance exam, was accepted and began taking a few courses there.

While I did spend a lot of my time on NYC subways and buses going from place to place, I liked the package I had put together and enjoyed the next six months in New York very much.  

The film A Dancer’s Work (1957) features the wonderful Graham teachers I got to study with including: Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, Yuriko, Mary Hinkson and Bertram Ross. A lot of it was filmed in the big studio I remember studying in.

The following summer I returned to Connecticut College, this time focusing on composition classes and continuing to take two technique classes a day, one in Graham technique and the other in Cunningham technique which really never suited me well. The highlight for me was taking a composition class from Pearl Lang, and Louis Horst’s Pre-Classic Dance Forms.   I loved both of them. In Pearl’s class I spent the full six weeks creating a laughter study and an anger study in dance.  Louis’s class was a real challenge.  The pieces we had to create were short with an ABA form.  The theme had to be introduced in the first two measures of the A section and every movement in the A section needed to relate to something in those first two measures.  He was very demanding and would stop you in the middle of a section if you weren’t following the rules of composition that he outlined.  I immediately had great respect for him and knew I wanted to study with him more.  So at the end of the summer I asked him if I could take his next course (Modern Forms) at Juilliard, even if I wasn’t a full-time student.  He agreed and when I returned to New York in the fall I got approval to do just that.  It was a few months into the fall semester when he said I should stop this nonsense of running all around New York and just be a student at Juilliard.  And that is exactly what happened.  With permission from the dance office and individual teachers, I was allowed to sit in on the classes like Literature and Material of Music for Dancers, and Labanotation and if I passed the mid-term exams I could get credit for those classes.  I auditioned in late January, was accepted and became a full-time student at Juilliard in the winter of 1962.  By the end of the school year I had completed my first year at Juilliard.  Although the class had begun with about 40-plus students, when we started school the following fall there were only about 15 of us left. In the next blog I’ll share more reflections about my time at Juilliard.

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Juilliard

JoAnne Tucker / / Personal Life

Now a full time student at Juilliard, I stopped taking outside technique classes.  That was easy to do because some Juilliard classes were with the same teachers I had had  at the Graham Studio.  In ballet I really adored Alfredo Corvino’s classes and was glad to be studying with him consistently.  The schedule at Juilliard was so full that it left little time for anything else.  I was up early and in class at 9 in the morning and often didn’t get back until 9 at night. The program was exhausting and I can remember sometimes falling asleep in my leotard and tights.  At that time Juilliard had no dorm and I was now living at the Barbizon for Women, which was a good 45-minute subway ride from the school, which was located at 120 Claremont Ave on the upper West Side. Since Columbia University was located nearby I could continue the two academic classes I was taking. When I returned in the fall I began taking academic classes at Juilliard and did not return to Columbia University’s School of General Studies.  I don’t remember anything about the academic classes at Juilliard and don’t think they were very interesting or challenging at the time.

Besides the technique and Horst’s composition classes, two classes stand out strongly in my mind:  Literature and Materials of Music taught by Caryl Friend and Labanotation taught by Muriel Topaz. They were challenging and helped me relate to dance in new ways.  “L and M,”  as we referred to Friend’s class, introduced us to the various forms of classical music and we often had to create dance studies related to the musical form we were studying.   We had to study each piece of music carefully, as her exam consisted of her dropping the needle down on the record and our having to identify the piece and where in the piece she was playing. The second year, we began playing the piano and I remember writing short piano compositions.  In fact, during the second year, when I was dating Murray (who later became my husband), I sent him a series of themes on the tune “Happy Birthday” using my new skill at music composition.  As he was attempting to figure out what I had written, his Mom walked by and identified the piece as variations on “Happy Birthday.”

Muriel Topaz was an excellent teacher and I was fascinated with Labanotation and at one point even toyed with going further with notation.  Analyzing movement to write it down helped me understand it better and it was fun to begin to read movement scores of famous pieces.

Of course a highlight continued to be having the opportunity to study composition with Louis Horst. Modern Forms was great fun and I enjoyed not only the course material and assignments but other students in the class, particularly Martha Clarke and Diane Gray.  There was even a time when the three of us put together a dance study which I seem to remember we titled “Minding your P’s and Q’s” that related to an assignment we had. Behind our back each of us held in one hand a cupcake in honor of Louis’s birthday and the end of the piece we presented him with the cupcakes.  In my second year at Juilliard I was able to take Louis’s third-year course Group Forms.  The class consisted of students who were seriously interested in composition and each of us progressed from doing a trio to a quartet and then a quintet.  You had the option to continue with the course as long as you were a student … so it gave me an opportunity to get to know some juniors and seniors.  I spent the first semester developing a trio based on the book Green Mansions and was pleased that it was included in a concert of student works.  The next semester I focused on a quartet about people looking at a painting.  It was inspired by the long lines I would see winding around the Metropolitan Museum of Art when the painting Mona Lisa was on view.  I never finished the piece but did have fun beginning to find my sense of humor in dance.

While I had enjoyed taking technique classes at The Martha Graham School they were even better at Juilliard as over the year and a half at Juilliard I consistently got to study with Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, Bertram Ross, and (when the Graham Company was on tour) Donald McKayle.  Each of the teachers had their own style and favorite combinations, and they were excellent teachers and outstanding performers. 

Helen McGehee was my favorite. She had a fierceness as a teacher that I found I responded to.  I was curious if she was still alive.  She is and is in her late 90’s.  There is a wonderful interview of her done around 2010 by Doug Hamby that is mainly a sharing of the piece The Lady and the Unicorn, which she choreographed in 1945 and which was filmed in 1957.  I highly recommend the first 7 or 8 minutes, which include excerpts from the piece and her interview. She talks about creating one section in Louis Horst’s class.  Her descriptions of Horst is quite wonderful. Here’s the link.

Ethel Winter had a much gentler style of teaching.  I found her combinations to be much more lyrical and she was a good balance to McGehee.  She died at the age of 87 in 2012.  Anna Kisselgoff wrote a beautiful obituary that perfectly captures what I remember. 

Bertram was simply Bertram. He had a fun sense of humor and would often join students at a table in the cafeteria.  I think I enjoyed him more as a performer than a teacher. Bertram died in 2003 and here is a link to the obituary that Jennifer Dunning wrote about him. 

Classes with Donald McKayle were extraordinary. An outstanding teacher, he put together combinations that I loved. He died in August 2018 at the age of 87.  I found particularly meaningful the obituary in Dance Magazine which included video of Rainbow Round My Shoulder, performed by the Alvin Ailey Company.  Here’s a link to it.

The time I spent at Juilliard was demanding and after two years I left, which I will write about in the next blog.  The time in NYC and then at Juilliard shaped me as a choreographer, giving me a discipline and a structured way of working and approaching things that I am very grateful for.  This also carried over to other areas of my life, particularly how I approach painting and filmmaking.  

I researched to find a picture of The Juilliard School on Claremont Avenue but couldn’t find one that looked like I remember it.  I did find this picture of Louis Horst as I pretty much remember him in class. The only thing missing is a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, but if you look closely,  he is holding it in his hand. No credit is given for this photo.

Photograph of Louis Horst found on the Internet.
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Leaving Juilliard

JoAnne Tucker / / Dance History, Personal Life

Sometimes events surprise you and life takes a turn you hadn’t expected.  That happened in late May of 1962 when I was flying home having completed my first year at Juilliard.  About half way through the short flight from NYC to Pittsburgh, I got a tap on my shoulder.  A male voice said, “I think we know each other.”  I was aware I was wearing a scoop-neck dress and I thought hmm… he must be getting an interesting sight…  Anyway it turned out we indeed did know each other.  Murray Tucker and I had gone out on a date a few years back when I had directed a water ballet at the country club both of our parents belonged to.  His sister Lynne had been one of the youth I directed.  That year’s water ballet was a bit humorous, making fun of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team.  Their dad was Joe Tucker, the Voice of the Pittsburgh Steelers.  Lynne had introduced Murray and me, and I had asked if he could do a takeoff on his father and announce the water ballet.

Anyway that was how we met and then we had gone out on an actual date to see the Ice Capades. Neither one of us was interested in the other at that time.  We hadn’t seen each other since then.  We chatted for a few minutes on the plane and when we walked off the plane we noticed that our parents were talking to each other.  We saw each other a few times before I took off for a summer job teaching dance at a camp.  We saw each other again at the end of the summer and continued corresponding and seeing each other at school breaks.  Definitely the romance was building and I could see a future with Murray.

At the same time, while I loved my classes and study at Juilliard I was becoming aware of several other things.  I was surrounded by many talented dancers and I saw my limitations particularly as a performer.  The company I aspired to be a part of was The Martha Graham Company.  I loved the technique and her choreography. I was also realistic that my chances were not great to get into the Company.  And even more important was that the more I hung around the Graham studio and began to meet some of the newest members of the company the more disappointed I became.  Sometimes I would help sew costumes late in the evening at the Graham studio to earn some money and would see Martha wandering around fairly intoxicated, looking for where she might find a bottle with some more liquor in it. That was shattering my illusion of a very talented creative person.  I knew this was a challenging time for her as she was still performing her lead roles but not with the same energy or technique that she had earlier. She must have been wrestling with how to retire from performing.  As has been documented in biographies and articles about her, this was very difficult for her.  

In her autobiography Blood Memory she wrote: “[When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded.  My face was ruined, and people say I looked odd, which I agreed with. Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma.” (Quote is from Wikipedia; no page number is given. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Graham)

Anna Kisselgoff, in an excellent article for The New York Times writes about this period, “To give up dancing, Graham felt, meant to give up her life.”  Kisselgoff continues “After a severe depression and a two-year illness in the early 1970’s, Graham actively resumed working with her company.” Here’s the link to the article, which gives an excellent picture of Martha and her company up to 1984, the time the article was written.  https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/19/magazine/martha-graham.html

While my time at the studio was seven or eight years before Martha’s severe depression, clearly the seeds were apparent to all around her and gave me much to think about.  But I was very inspired by her choreography, her technique and her wonderful way of expressing a philosophy of life.  Just Google “Martha Graham quotes” and links to a number of websites are listed. Here’s one “Top 25 Quotes of Martha Graham.”  And they are not just about dance. They are about a philosophy of life.  https://www.azquotes.com/author/5783-Martha_Graham

Her classes were sprinkled with inspiration on how to be a dancer, a creative person and how to reach your full potential.  I was so disappointed to see such a person – who inspired and was such an innovator – not happy.  Of course, I was a young 20-year old not mature enough or able to understand the challenges that life brings and also the challenges that a very passionate and creative genius deals with.  

I also sensed the strong competition among the younger company members and the lack of kindness that they showed each other.  Was this an environment I wanted to be part of?  I was no longer sure.  I was also aware that I had completed one important goal… I had made it through all three levels of Louis Horst’s Composition Program, and to be a choreographer remained a key desire of mine.

At the end of my second year I went home to Pittsburgh filled with these thoughts and beginning to consider returning to Pittsburgh and maybe building a life with Murray. The summer went well and I made the decision not to return to Juilliard and to attend academic classes at the University of Pittsburgh.  I have never for one moment regretted that choice.  We were married a year later and what a rich, loving, sometimes challenging and amazing journey we have been on since then.

A favorite wedding picture, August 1964
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Synchronicity at Play – Spring Trip to NYC (Part One: Juilliard)

JoAnne Tucker / / Personal Life

Clearly Juilliard and The Martha Graham Company have been on my mind recently and I have been writing about them in recent blogs.  They both played an important part in a recent trip to New York City.  I usually go at least once a year to NYC and sometimes twice.  Of course, part of that is to see family and friends.  It is also just to enjoy the energy of the city, the museums, theatre and dance.  This year’s trip began with a Homecoming for dancers at Juilliard and ended with a performance of The Martha Graham Company. This blog, spread over two weeks, will focus on these two events. 

Sunday afternoon, April 7th, was billed as a homecoming for dancers at Juilliard.  It was an opportunity to mingle, to take class (they offered a Gaga Class and a Meditation Class), to see student compositions and to meet and hear Alicia Graf Mack, the new director of the Dance Department.  Indeed it was a really full afternoon, starting at noon and ending at six.  I decided that classes weren’t for me so I went at 3 in time to see student choreography, hear Alicia Graf and enjoy networking.  

Part of my closeness to Juilliard is not only the impact the school had on me when I attended but also a deep appreciation for dancers in Avodah who had studied there and how much I benefited from their excellent training and professional attitude. Linda Kent, Juilliard faculty member and very good friend, had encouraged me to come and said she would definitely be there.  So I flew in on April 6th, to attend the next day.

My only disappointment was that none of the classmates I was close to back in the 60’s attended nor did any of the many dancers that I had worked with in Avodah.  I did see quite a few acquaintances and that was pleasant.  And of course it is always fun to hang out with Linda Kent who knows just about everyone there.

The highlight for me was hearing Alicia Graf Mack speak. For an hour she shared her background in dance and her ideas for the department, and answered questions.  Her warm, friendly and very open style is appealing.  The fact that she performed in both Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gives her an excellent professional background.  The March issue of Dance Magazine sums it up well:

As a former leading dancer for both DTH – under the exacting eye of Arthur Mitchell – and Ailey, she effortlessly embodies Juilliard’s ethos: an equal focus on ballet and modern dance.  She also holds a degree in history from Columbia University and an MA in nonprofit management from Washington University in St. Louis.  She is an overachiever in every sense. 

She is also the first African American and, at 39, the youngest person to direct the Dance Department.

Among the things she shared, I found particularly interesting one of the projects she did while at Columbia – reviewing and writing about the financial records of Dance Theatre of Harlem.  She also experienced illness that forced her to stop dancing with DTH, and she talked openly about how that impacted her and how she was able to go back.  She became involved with a “Praise” dance group at Columbia University that led her to choreograph and go back to classes, this time taking Milton Myers’s classes in Horton technique, which eventually led her to the Ailey Company.

From l to r: Linda Kent, Alicia Graf Mack, and JoAnne
at the Juilliard Homecoming on April 7th.

I left Juilliard with a very good feeling that the dance department was in good hands.  And off I went to meet my grandson for dinner.  My trip to NYC was off to a good start.

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Synchronicity at Play – Spring Trip to NYC (Part Two: Martha Graham Company)

JoAnne Tucker / / Dance History, Personal Life

In my last blog, I began to write about my recent trip to New York City.  In a later blog I’ll share more about the trip, in particular about a workshop that longtime friend and collaborator Regina Ress and I did at New York University’s Forum on Theater and Health.  For now, keeping with this blog’s title of synchronicity with my  recently published blogs,  I now jump to my last night in NYC and attending the closing night of the Martha Graham Company’s April 2–14, 2019 performances at the Joyce.  I had debated about even getting tickets for the performance, but finally, a few days before I left home I went online and purchased a ticket for Program C.  I mainly selected this program because I had Sunday evening free and there was a piece by Pam Tanowitz in the program. I had never seen any of Tanowitz’s work and I was aware that she was getting lots of rave reviews.

Write-ups about her, as well as her biography, interested me, particularly reports  that she was known “for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary” (http://pamtanowitzdance.org/bio). This spring she was not only creating a work for the Martha Graham Company but also for The New York City Ballet. That is indeed impressive and so I made sure to select a program that included the New York Premiere of her piece Untitled (Souvenir) for the Graham Company. Also on the program were two Graham classics, Errand into the Maze (created in 1947) and Chronicle(1936). Another world premiere by two choreographers who were totally new to me, Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith, completed the program.

When I bought the ticket I felt disappointed that one of my very favorite Graham pieces, Diversion of Angels, was not being performed that evening.  But I made my decision based on seeing the Tanowitz piece, as very few choreographers are able to cross over from ballet to modern commissions as she does.

So off I went to spend my last night in NYC at the Graham concert.  The opening piece, Errand into the Maze, was one that I remembered seeing years ago (on one of my return trips to NYC) performed by one of my favorite teachers and Graham performers, Helen McGehee, in the leading female role.  I don’t remember who performed the male role with her. I do remember her fierceness and passion in dancing.  It appears that the piece had not been in the Graham repertory for 15 years when it was brought back in 1968 and Clive Barnes wrote a review:

The choreography – it dates from 1947 and has not been seen in New York for 15 years – wonderfully mixes the swift and angular lightness of the female with the heavy solemnity of the male.  Set against the bones of Isamu Noguchi’s skeletal setting, and the sonorities of Gian Carlo Menotti’s score, the work powerfully conveys the archaic mythical pattern of despair, hope and achievement.

As the female, danced first of course, by Graham herself, Helen McGehee, as intense as a flickering flame, possesses just the sense of nervousness despair and faith this view of Ariadne demands and Clive Thompson’s Minotaur-Thesus, both ponderous yet buoyant, is the perfect stolid partner to her impetuous neuroticism.  (The New York Times,October 26, 1968) 

Errand Into The Maze opened the concert and I was pleasantly surprised at the performance it was given by Charlotte Landreau and Lloyd Mayor.   A rush of positive emotion filled me as a dance vocabulary and approach I so love was beautifully performed.  I have always loved how Graham turned to classical mythology for inspiration for her choreography and I remember writing a fairly long paper for an English class in High School on Graham’s use of mythology.  It received an A and I held onto it for a long time but at some point, along with programs that I had kept for years, it got thrown out when we were cleaning out our papers for one of our many moves.

The second piece on the program was Deo by guest choreographers Doyle and Smith and frankly I don’t remember anything about it. Following intermission came the Tanowitz piece.  I could clearly see how she was manipulating the Graham technique in a new way and found that rather interesting but that was really all I got from the piece.  Disappointment was my overall reaction.  I can see why critics like what she is doing and from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating but it didn’t emotionally move me in any way. 

The last piece, Chronicles took my breath away.  It is in three parts and I was familiar with the piece because Deborah Hanna, a dancer who worked with Avodah for 7 years and with whom I continue to keep in contact, had danced in one of the sections of the piece when she was in the Martha Graham Ensemble (a junior company of Graham in the 1980’s and early 90’s).  I don’t remember getting to see Deborah in it but did know that it was being revived.  The original program notes were included in the Joyce program:

Chronicle does not attempt to show the actualities of war; rather does it, by evoking war’s images, set forth the fateful prelude to war, portray the devastation of spirit which it leaves in its wake, and suggest an answer.

The first Part, titled “Spectre – 1914,” was powerfully danced by Xin Ying.  She managed the huge black and red shroud with power and was a good start to what followed. Section II is entitled “Steps in the Street (Devastation – Homelessness – Exile)” and is a powerful group dance that along with Section III, “Prelude to Action (Unity – Pledge to the Future),” shows the female members of the company in an excellent light.  

A review by Joanne DiVito for the LA Dance Chronicle of a performance just a month before the one I saw describes the second section wonderfully:

The second movement Steps in the Street begins with one soul, played by the incredible Anne Souder dressed in black.  She backs onto the stage; step, drag, hesitate, step drag, hesitate, all in silence.  This remarkable section, comments on the devastation of people caught in war. The stunning use of tiny runs, continuous jumps, and reconfigurations, static against kinetic, calls for the dancers to defy gravity and rise to all manner of challenges which this piece demands.  Their sudden heroic prowess surprises and adds to the tension and release of this remarkable piece.   (https://www.ladancechronicle.com/grahams-brilliant-legacy-lives-today-with-eilbers-leadership/)

But it is the last section that totally took my breath away.  The women’s leaping and repetition of strong Graham phrases became heroic and so powerful that it was no surprise that the audience (a wonderful mix of young and old) rose to its feet shouting and applauding loudly, to acknowledge the beautiful performance.  That kind of energy we rarely see in dance anymore – and what a treat!

Afterwards, as I ran into several contemporary fellow dancers in the lobby, one remarked, “That lady [referring to Graham] certainly had talent.”  And indeed she did, for it was Graham’s two pieces, not the newly commissioned ones, that stood out.  And it was a wonderful way for me to finish my trip to NYC!!

The Program from the Graham concert.  
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