Professor Emeritus Allen Kuharski's Remarks on the Passing of Dito Van Reigersberg '94

It took more than a village to raise the child we remember today as both Dito van Reigersberg and Martha Graham Cracker

I am partial to the word incubation, and I want to share a few words on the incubation in Philadelphia of that very unique egg and chick originally named Fernando (you know, like the Abba song…)

I first met Dito when he was 17 years-old in my intro to theater class at Swarthmore College in 1990.  In that class, and many classes since, to the dismay of some students, I have insisted on showing the classic film of Martha Graham’s Night Journey.  

I have now seen this film at least 40 times, and I always lean forward at every viewing, and it always makes me cry.  

Dito at 17 had, if anything, an even more intense response, which started the 36-year bond between us.   (Sharon Friedler in Swarthmore’s Dance Program also deserves a shout-out here)

That video in class at Swarthmore was also the seed that planted the divine madness in Dito that later led him to study at the Martha Graham School in New York and eventually to create his drag persona.  This is the origin story, and I am proud to say Dito always recognized it as such.

At the Pig Iron School, Dito and I would regularly co-teach a seminar on Graham that began with Night Journey.  These sessions were so much fun, even though the video still made me cry.  

In the early 1990s, we worked hard to make Swarthmore College and the Department of Theater nurturing and supportive of Queer students (if you recall, these were also the late years of the AIDS epidemic).  Our Department’s “queer incubator” included the College’s first classes in Queer Studies and Queer Performance taught by Sue-Ellen Case, a distinguished (and controversial) visiting lesbian-feminist performance theorist.  

Several future founding members of Pig Iron (not including the still bashful Dito van Reigersberg) took those classes.  Those who stepped up in Dito’s place included Nate Read, Jeff Sugg, and Telory Arendell (then known as Telory Williamson).  In Sue-Ellen’s words: “Allen, I love all these queer-friendly straight men at Swarthmore, but where are all the gay guys???”

“Sue-Ellen is scary…!” I remember Dito saying.  As if Martha Graham would be easy…???  

It’s okay, he was really young.  

Dito as an undergrad wasn’t fully out yet.  But I think the Swarthmore incubator was doing its job with him, just on a really slow and low setting.  

Pig Iron finished the work for us.

While studying at the Martha Graham School and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, Dito was also a keen follower of drag performers such as Raven-O and Justin Vivian Bond, who like Martha Graham Cracker were actual singers who did not rely on lip-syncing.  A drag omnivore, I remember Dito also being a fan of Lipsinka, who was the apotheosis of lip-syncing in the 1990s.  

I remain in Dito’s debt for insisting that my husband Richard and I go to see Raven-O live at the tiny Lower Manhattan venue known as Bard-O in something like 1996.  Raven-O sweetly doted on us as the only obviously gay audience members in a house otherwise filled with drunken NYU frat boys and sorority girls (to whom Raven was utterly wicked, way worse than Sue-Ellen Case in Dito’s imagination).

Among Pig Iron’s earliest and most successful shows was Poet In New York, Dito’s one-man performance piece freely inspired by the life and writings of the gay Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca, first performed in 1996.  With Poet In New York, Dito and Pig Iron made an historic contribution to Philadelphia Queer performance.  Poet In New York had a long life of local, national, and international touring, including two performances at Swarthmore College sponsored by the Sager Committee for Queer Studies and the Department of Theater (aka Prof. Kuharski).  

The show created a sensation at an international festival in Lublin, Poland, in 2000, and in addition was performed at times by Dito in Spanish on tours to Latin America.  Martha Graham Cracker similarly conquered Lublin in a solo performance in 2014, alongside a tour by Pig Iron of ZERO COST HOUSE.  

After Dito passed away, we heard from Grzegorz Reske, the long-time curator of the Lublin festival, who told us that Dito was the most frequently-seen international performer in the 45-year history of the festival (6 appearances) and that Pig Iron was the most frequently-invited international theater company (5 appearances).

To my knowledge, none of the extensive press about Dito’s passing to date has mentioned the remarkable fact that he was a perfectly bilingual actor able to perform as needed in both English and Spanish.  According to his mother Stephanie, Dito was somewhere between a native and a heritage speaker of Spanish, being raised in a bilingual household in the Virginia suburbs of DC.  In theater, this is truly a rare accomplishment.  Dito loved the Spanish language, Spain, and Latin America.  Pig Iron’s ambitious 1998 Lorca Trilogy was the fullest expression of this side of Dito, as then embraced by the entire ensemble.

Dito first appeared on stage in full drag as a clownish cafeteria worker in 1997 in Pig Iron’s first big local hit Cafeteria, which was the break-out success of the first Philadelphia Fringe Festival that year.  For this work, Dito received a Barrymore Award for best choreography.  This show also enjoyed a significant and long life, including a revival at the Arden Theatre in 2005.

Both Cafeteria and The Lorca Trilogy were incubated (rehearsed and previewed) in the Lang Performing Arts Center on the Swarthmore College campus with in-kind support in the form of free housing and rehearsal space by the Swarthmore Project in Theater.  

Martha Graham Cracker has been invited back to Swarthmore more than once to perform, now as a role-model of courage and artistic success to the campus’s fledgling queers.  These invitations did not depend on the sweet-talking of the now-aged Prof. Kuharski.  

One of my personal medical providers, a gay man, saw Cafeteria at the Arden in 2005 and made his decision on the spot to move to Philadelphia, saying “I definitely want to live in a city that has theater like that…!”  Twenty years later he is still living and practicing here and has happily followed both Pig Iron and Martha Graham Cracker all that time.

So the city and region that have incubated Dito van Reigersberg and Martha Graham Cracker since 1990 has also surely been paid back for providing such a nourishing, warm, and cozy artistic nest for wave after wave of emerging artists and audiences, alongside all that GRIT.

Thank you for listening, and thank-you to everyone in the village of Philadelphia (including so many in this room) who have helped to make it so!