Dancing with Cats

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With a hey diddle diddle, the creators of Why Cats Paint return with another version of feline (and human) reality. And suffice it to say that in Burton Silver and Heather Busch's hands, Kipling's cat that walked by himself has turned into a deeply co-dependent dervish. Their first book was a brilliant parody of artspeakBusch's photos of creative felines matched by Silver's text. Their second, Dancing with Cats--an epic three years in the making!--juxtaposes psychological and spiritual mumbo-jumbo with the language of dance criticism. As Silver explores everything from visualisation to mirroring to empathy, Busch is busy with her human pairs. In one sequence, Fred, clad in tabby tights, kitty-cat body paint and a tanga with a long black tail, leaps about the place with a slightly puzzled pussy: "I share its grace, power, and oneness with the universe. I relate to Fluff and the whole spectrum of feline physicality on a profound level--I even regard birds differently." On the very next page, chubby Helen, sporting a tie-dyed purple gown and a deep-sworn belief in Feng Shui, identifies perhaps a bit too deeply with chunky, amber-eyed Boots (who looks suspiciously like "Trans-Expressionist" Bootsie from Why Cats Paint). And then there's Sue and Zoot. In one photo, the recumbent grey and peach cat raises his left paw to the sky as his ecstatic human does the same. Then Sue dons a feathery jerkin "in order to dance out some of her past traumas." It's difficult to say which is funnier, the photos or the text, as Silver catches pseudo-therapy's mixture of self- affirmation and non sequitur: "Dancing with Zoot helps Sue re-enact and come to terms with the joy and sorrow of a brief but painful relationship: when she fell in love with her daughter's her while he was photographing bridges in the neighbourhood." Though the two-legged models must have been prepared for this inspired silliness, one does wonder what on earth the cats made of their eurythmic adventures. Alas, until interspecies communication reaches a greater height, we can only dance amid our uncertainty! -- Kerry Fried