A sequence of photographs helps to complete this image: Two dancers pose in black unitards before Johnson’s moticos panels, their dark silhouettes set off against the colors behind them. “Photo on other side a fragment of my moticos stage set which was used last Sunday very successfully I thought.” This letter-photograph seems to have functioned like a calling card announcing his theatrical chops. The ethos of dance — both its fundamental mobility and its built-in community and network of artists — was a catalyst in making the moticos move. Shearer didn’t return the Taoist collages. “Have you seen a moticos lately?” he wrote in the concluding lines of “What Is a Moticos?” “They are everywhere.

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Persons: Johnson, Shearer, “, —, Shearer didn’t, ”