¿Quién era antes?

April 1, 2013 - Washington, DC

Noemi stands maybe 5 foot 2. Her hair is henna rinse red, but her eyes, shocking green still in what seems likely to be her mid 50s, are entirely her own, missing nothing, gentle and warm but completely direct. “I’m next in line,” she says gently, but as firmly in that gentility as one would expect of a Mother talking to a truant son (that would be me in the moment). They’re her first words to me, but come with a familiarity, and courtesy, that suggest an intimate comfort.

Around us both, standing, sitting, crouching, holding toddlers and propping up elders, people mill about in an oddly calm quiet. It seems that there is absolutely no order in the room, but the only person exhibiting even a hint of unease is me. I, clearly, am the only person with no idea of what is going on.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Noemi, whose name I won’t learn for another 10 minutes. “I have no idea how this works.”

She smiles. “You may go in front of me.” The thickness of her accent is like honey, sweet and slow flowing. While the Spanish inflection is easy, it's the distinct musicality of it that says its Cuban. That would follow given where we’re standing.

Over my shoulder, in this tiny, crowded room, a voice in distinct mid-western English comes. “You need to ask who was before you.”

“Sorry?”

“You need to say ‘¿Quién era antes?’ – who was before. That’s how it works. The Cubans are very polite people. They have wonderful manners impeccable manners. So when you come into a room like this you ask ¿Quién era antes? That’s how you know the order of who is next.” He smiles. “Incredible people.”

For a moment, I think somehow I’m already in Cuba. The traditions, it seems, have followed them from their country to this one, and they’re playing out in this room where the Gringo is the only person who has no manners. All during these moments the room is watching, listening. If I needed a primer for what’s to come in a week, I couldn’t have come to a better place.

That place would be part of the only Cuban soil in the US – the Cuban Interest Section of Castro’s Cuba – the proxy Embassy of a government we haven’t recognized for over 60 years.

All this takes place a five-minute walk from my Mount Pleasant home in the heights of DC. I’m used to hearing Spanish in my neighborhood. There’s hardly a native English-speaking owned store on Mt Pleasant street. That Spanish, though, is Central American – Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan.

Here, in a building that is every bit as small and bunker-like as your imagination of a Cuban Interests Section would suggest, with a three-foot poster of Fidel dominant behind the plexiglass that separates the Cuban Government from its Expat people, all of whom, having left, are waiting for visas to go back to visit, its still Cuba. The plexiglass divider, like that of an 80s bank, makes it impossible to hear the person on the other side. There are no microphones or anything to amplify voices, and so you lean down as close as you can to the cut opening through which you pass your documents and listen to the bald, utterly polite, civil servant on the other side.

Over his shoulder, in the working room behind him, through a 30 inch hollow-core door, a photo of Ché dominates. Fidel is good for visitors. Ché is the guy they keep close.

“Are you going to Cuba?” Noemi asks.

“Yes. Next week. Assuming we get our visas.”

“You will love it,” she says.

“Did you?”

“I left 23 years ago.”

I think of 1980.

“Yes. In the Mariel Boat lift.”

Between mid April and the end of October 1980, in the middle of a presidential election in the States that would end with Ronald Reagan in power, as many as 125,000 Cubans fled their country for Florida by boat. As many as half of them settled in Miami.

“Where do you live now?”

“Miami.”

Noemi still has a Cuban passport. “I live in America, but I am Cuban.” She had flown to Washington the night before, not to get a visa for herself, but because her friend, who sat quietly nearby, needed a visa to Spain, and needed her passport updated. She came all the way from Miami just to help a friend get a visa to Spain. They were getting on a plane back to Miami at seven that night.

The consular officer behind the plexiglass, in front of the poster of Ché, took my documents. Looking through them he glanced up at me a couple of times. ‘A visa to Cuba” I thought. “This will be interesting.” I thought of all the questions that could come – its Cuba and the US after all.

“It will be a minute,” he said through the portal.

20 minutes later, walking out of the Cuban Interests Section with my visa in hand, I saw Noemi and her friend outside the 10 foot-high wrought iron gate. It had taken a week at minimum to get a visa to Kazakhstan. To Cuba, 15 minutes. Go figure.

Noemi was waiting for me, it turned out.

“So? You go to Cuba?”

“It seems that way.”

“We’re going to the White House now. We want to send a picture to my parents in Havana. They won’t believe it.”

I know how they feel.

On the Afghan Border: July 11, 2012

July 11, 2012

All that separates us from Afghanistan is a rushing, frantic river; 30 yards of water and the pitch dark of a moonless night. Including the one emanating from my screen I can count 16 lights, single 60 to 100 watt incandescent bulbs in my entire field of vision. All are on the Tajik side. Afghanistan, so close, is utterly black.  When we arrived there were no lights at all. Electricity is a capricious thing in this hamlet, appearing when if feels like it and vanishing with equal impishness. The river’s rush is a constant companion, along with the trills of night birds and amphibians, insects and mammals.

 

I know Afghanistan to be there because I saw it all afternoon across that one wicked body of water – wicked because it separates us from setting foot in Afghanistan, a lunatic desire our hosts at the US Embassy have tried deeply to dissuade me from realizing. “You have a single entry visa, so, good luck getting back in if you figure out how to go across,” has been the common source of discouragement. More effective: “we had someone determined to set foot in Afghanistan earlier this year. He walked across the bridge from Tajikistan to Afghanistan. The Afghans turned him away. When he went to come back to Tajikistan they wouldn't let him in because he’d used up his single entry visa. Took six hours, the Tajik KGB, the Afghan Foreign Ministry and the head of Consular Affairs in Dushanbe to get him admitted again to Tajikistan. All that time he stood in the middle of the bridge, the river running under him, with nowhere to go. He could have been there a month.”

I seem to have settled on getting within 30 yards and no closer. I like bridges, but…

We knew we had reached the point where Afghanistan sat on the shore to our right not because of a sign, or a designation. No, we knew it to be there because it was our first sighting of entire villages of mud brick – villages completely and totally abandoned. No one in the fields. No one on the banks. Empty. Tiny towns of mud-brick, with glassless openings for windows and not a soul in sight.  


Barren.

An occasional donkey foraged, yet if it had anyone tending it, it was at distance. The domesticated animals had been left to their own devices, solitary beasts of burden munching on pale green grass as though they were the last inhabitants of earth. You wondered, when winter came, would anybody return to claim them, to shelter them, to feed them in the dead cold and deep snow of the high mountains?

At points a good throw of a solid stone would have landed on its shores. 90 feet away.

 

Overhead the Milky Way shines deep, a band across the night sky I have seen perhaps six times in my life. Such it is to grow up in the era of electricity and the thick haze of burnt fossils, and to be from Manhattan, where a cloudy night produces an orange sky more like a blanket than a void. To see the Milky Way stops you in the careful walk along the dirt road running through the village in which our guest house lies. That road is the often one lane path between Dushanbe and the South along the Afghan border.

Its name is the Pamir Highway. It is high, to be sure. And it is the only way to get where we’re going by land. Beyond that any resemblance to the word as we understand it in the States is purely coincidental.

 

The Pamir Highway runs, for much of its length, along the Tajik bank of the river, the river separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan here in the Tajik southwest. A map shows it to be in the panhandle of Afghanistan – the part which juts out east in a sliver of land, separated from the chaos of the heart of the country by deep cut mountains and, its seems, but spirit.

The river funs with such force it sounds like a strong steady wind through thick forests, even 100 yards from its banks. Cars pass by perhaps every 15 minutes. Other than that, at 10:30 at night, the sounds are solely those of creatures of the night and of the river.

Earlier, along the first mountains in the climb from Dushanbe to here, the landscape was easily the most tortured I had ever seen. Tortured not by man. By nature. Mountains folded in on themselves as though rolled – like slices of cheese you bend. Deep folds and 45 to 90 degree thrusts – a geologic wonder that is almost impossible to describe. 


The sheer geologic power of the Indian Subcontinent slamming into the Eurasian land mass, bending the flat earth into thick folds which reveal layer upon layer of sediment, at one time buried under the sea floor, now bent like so many slices and hurled up thousands of feet into the sky. In places volcanic rock, magma which had poured out millions of years ago, lay dolloped on top of the sedimentary rock, so much topping on the land.

Driving that landscape, dwarfed by it and at any moment tumbling down into it if the road gave way (which seemed all-too likely), the sense of being small within the geologic combat yet going on in these mountains, was everywhere. 

Tel Aviv Journal: The Real Opening Night

Ben Gurion Airport

Tel Aviv

May 15, 2012

Waiting for the call for UA85 to Newark, with a precious few hours of sleep, its almost possible to take in what the last few days have offered.

A dance company less than a year old doesn't get the chance to dance Paul Taylor, Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar in front of a sold-out 800+ seat theater for its opening night in Israel. On top of that, it never gets the chance to dance in that same theater for four nights consecutively, all sold-out. In all of CityDance's life we had only one four-night engagement ever, at DC's Dance Place, capacity 160. And we couldn't fill it. 

Killer Pig by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar

Here, Company E took a step we could never manage at CityDance, with work which is simply a dream, and the Company took home on the bus to the hotel the love of an entire auditorium. Amazing. 

As always, it seems, the craziest challenge was in the program order. Call it the curse of a repertory Company-- what piece goes next to what other, and where does intermission lie. We were still "talking" about it 90 minutes before curtain. 

But we got it right.

Not in too many places could you open with a work like "Last Look." At home we never could, but here, the audience comes in ready and they absorb the full impact of it right from the start. And to see if come alive with this cast was rewarding in indescribable ways. Milan, taking the final solo, is finding the soul of it, and you can feel it in the audience as he does it that they are moving with him. And it will only get better. 

For our presenter, the Bimot Agency, to take a chance on a complete unknown, and to give it nine concerts in six cities, and to have those houses full, is really simply a dream. 

I head home for two days for an engagement at the Department of State's training institute, the Foreign Service Institute, and Don Quixote programming meetings, and then head almost immediately back to Minsk. The Company stays in Israel, dancing and absorbing an amazing experience. 

Doesn't get better than this. 

Tel Aviv Journal: "Opening Night" (almost)

Tel Aviv

May 14, 2012

Tonight was supposed to be a quiet dress rehearsal evening as we prepared for opening night at the sold-out 800 seat Herzliya Performing Arts Center just north of Tel Aviv Monday night. But when the chance to let "a few" people from the northern Israeli community of Carmel by the Sea see the Company E program presented itself we said, "sure." The house seats 600 and at least 500 of those seats were filled for that "informal" dress rehearsal. 

Killer Pig by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar

The program of Paul Taylor's "Last Look," Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar's "Killer Pig," Kate Weare's "Scorched" and my "Falling" were all Israel premieres -- or "almost-premieres." And to have the audience keep applauding the audience to more and more bows was an amazing, amazing moment. 

Presenting Mr. Taylor's "Last Look" in a country that knows him so well, and to be the company that premieres it here is an honor that's hard to describe. And this is an audience that knows its dance. 

The entire company was ready tonight. Fantastic to watch from the back of the house and also fantastic to realize that, less than a year after the Company's founding, we're here in Israel on a nine-concert, six city tour through the first private presenter ever to pick up either CityDance or Company E. And that's after a two-week tour in Switzerland and Germany that ended just a few days ago. Kathryn and Alicia have done a great terrific job leading the company. 

More on the real opening night tomorrow, but what a great, great beginning.

Shanghai Journal: Landings

Shanghai journal

Friday, December 2, 11

Sometime within the next 36 to 48 hours I will become a rice ball. This much is certain. We have been here a shade over four days and my consumption of the many and varied (albeit delicious) forms of rice has overshadowed virtually all other sensory impressions of this time in China thus far. 130 pounds of ambulatory, verbally challenged rice inside various wrappings from Hudson Trail Outfitter s or Hugo Boss navigating the startlingly cold streets of the French Concession in Shanghai. Jasmine scented rice. Brown rice. Saffron rice. Rice with tofu. Rice at breakfast. Rice at lunch. Rice at….

And I like rice. Really.

How it is possible for a nation of 1.4 Billion to grow enough rice to feed itself boggles the mind. There are vats of it, seemingly endless vats of it everywhere. Bags of it in various weights dot the small street-side shops abounding here. Stacked, stuffed, packed and shelved from the street to the back of the diminutive rectangular notches cut into the low buildings which have stood since the 1930s in this part of the city under the linden trees planted by French colonialists who carved their enclave in Shanghai and required the Chinese themselves to obtain papers to enter parts of their own country for the privilege of working for people from Europe.

And we wonder why revolutions happen…

Even in the cold December air the smell of food dominates. Open-air preparation abounds, the scent of wok oils sizzling, the sound of stir fry flipping, cooks and their beans, tofu, onions and sprouts slipping in and out of sight through the steam of water and sesame oil. Hot coals on a fog-thick night turning heavy air red as the bicycles slip by and the occasional bone-rattling heavy truck bores a hole in your skull.

China, it seems, is always hungry.

At four am on a jet-lagged sleepless night walking down deserted streets the only things open on Shanghzi street is the 24 hour Japanese sushi stand (which makes great cappuccino) and McDonalds. The rain comes and the air clears and you smell, faintly, the sea after the water absorbs the dust and the carbon monoxide and the almost touchable dirt in the air. Beyond being hungry, China is every bit as polluted as it is reputed to be. You smell the food, but you taste the air before the rain.

Yet when the air clears the taste is sweet, the air so pure. It makes you long for it, and draws your awareness of what we sacrifice in pursuit of “modernization.”

A colleague told a story the other day of Shanghai. He said that he went out of the country for a week on business. When he returned he had friends arriving from overseas. To meet he chose a popular, delightful restaurant not so far from his house. When he arrived, not jus the restaurant, but the entire block was gone. Razed. Vanished.

In a week.

He thought he’d lost his mind. “That’s China” he says.

On Shanghai’s east side entire neighborhoods, the size of cities, just spring into being. The Green Tree Hotel where we found ourselves on our first night was in a neighborhood that didn’t exist a few years before. “This – all this was vegetable gardens.” Re-bar loaded trucks, stacked metal - like old kindling - fill at every corner as history vanishes in days, replaced by towers erected willy-nilly everywhere. The city grows and people have to have places to live, and so the charm of two stories surrenders to the necessity of 40. Elevated roads out your sixth floor hotel window layer like some madman’s cake and you see, from that window, the old lady sipping tea as behind her the traffic clogs the elevated. Gardens spring up in the areas underneath the tangle of traffic exchanges and thick vines crawl in spyrograph-like patterns. Plantings drip over the highest elevated roadway, and you feel like you’re looking at a fantasy.

The US feels small, New York modest. Its like Los Angeles was supersized in a McDonald’s patterned-world. Come across the largest bridge in Shanghai, the carotid artery between East and West and you are so far up that you have to spiral down to the ground in three consecutive 360 degree loops, a hot wheels track run amok. It takes minutes to spin to the bottom and spill out into the semi-dark of the underpasses and “old” Shanghai.

Yet, in the end, it is magical. Shanghai is magical – a city spinning in multiple centrifuges at the same time. Shanghainese are clearly proud of their city, their enchanted city locked in the embrace of central planning and controlled infrastructural chaos.

Down the street a wok turns, the coals glow and the food turns in deep elegant twists from a skilled arm. The sound of traffic fades, the sound of mandarin rises in the laughter of a late night meal, chopsticks clicking and laughter spilling over into the night.

102 Below

It's pitch black over the North Pole. Peeking out the portal over the shoulder of a dozing Chinese businessman (he’s in textiles) we’re moments from what is literally the top of the world. Due south Prudhoe Bay and Alaska lead to Honolulu. Other than that its blue water or white ice till the Antarctic ice shelves – more ice, just ice covering a landmass. Really, you could come up on Africa without ever seeing land before the coastline came into view. An entire globe covered in salt wet water and solid fresh water; the domain of great blue whales and marine life capable of circumnavigating the planet.

The dateline is about 20 minutes away and, over the equator, its high noon. But winter is in force below – out the cabin window its 102 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) – a temperature I’ve never seen before.

At the Bearing Sea, for a 30 mile stretch, its just water to Antarctica. No a spit of land for 10,000 miles; for an entire half the earth.

Nightfall is over the East Coast. Its 5:44 and dark in DC on Thanksgiving weekend Sunday. At 3,400 miles traveled we’re less than halfway to Shanghai. The 8-inch view screen shows you a globe made so very, very small, tickling you with the Chuckchi and North Bearing Seas. Morning has come to Tokyo and all of Australia is in broad daylight in mid-summer. Nightfall will be close by the time we land.

Somehow all of that is visible real-time on this tiny monitor pulling its signal from a GPS satellite 17,000 miles above us (GPS satellites are in geo-synchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the surface, so were about a quarter of the way there) in this metal and plastic machine burning a form of kerosene (a uniquely gifted substance with a stunning greenhouse gas signature) hurtling 36,000 feet over the ice sheets on a black, black night. Yet if you could look up the stars would probably blow you away. And what the Hell is Agana and what’s it doing on this map?

What we do routinely now was impossible until 50 years ago, when jumbo jets capable of flying over the North Pole came online. Of course in those days we didn’t fly to China. We’d fought a real war with them in Korea in the 50s and something of a proxy war with them in Vietnam is the 60s and 70s. And it wasn’t till Nixon in 72 that we even started down the path we walk (or fly) now. Yet today (or yesterday since we crossed the dateline about 5 minutes ago and so now its Monday morning not Sunday night) Francisco and I left for Shanghai on one flight out of Newark, Kathryn, Rob and Amanda on another out of O’Hare and Christian left LAX on still another all bound non-stop for Shanghai and all landing within 60 minutes of one another – every seat sold on all three.

There’s nothing like 13 hour time-difference jet lag where you leave your house at 5 in the morning on one day and get to your destination at 3 in the afternoon the next day. You can’t quantify it. And I’d say you just have to experience it but……

Beth SMS’s me just before we left Newark asking when we could trade lives.

The trip to Shanghai is a dream come true for an endless array of reasons. For me, in this moment, the biggest is Friday afternoon at 3pm. In China there’s an instrument, a one-stringed thing that bears a minimal resemblance to a violin (essentially because it has a string and a bow) and which makes the most exquisite sounds I think I’ve ever heard. In 15 years of choreography I’ve never stopped wanting to collaborate with someone playing one. Friday I get my wish. At a program of senior Shanghai officials and some of the team from the US Consulate General in Shanghai we dance “Falling” as a part of the Opening Ceremony of the Festival. With an erhu placer as our soundscape.

Live.

On stage.

Outbound - Shanghai/Tel Aviv 11.27.11

Washington National Airport

Sunday, December 27, 2011

And, of course, its never easy.

When you deal with last minute trips and people from any assortment of different countries the reality is you can never do too much checking, because the thing you don't fully investigate will be the thing which trips you up.

Take, for example, Francisco Campos-Lopez. Francisco was added last-minute to the Shanghai itinerary to film the two-week program and create the video blogs, concert tapes, documentaries and creative films that bring the work back home to the States. One of the key lessons of all these years of international travel is that, just like the old adage about a tree falling in the woods, if you don't find a way to bring the experience back to the people at home whose support you need then from the eyes of those in the community you need support from (read funders), you really never went. And then those extraordinary, exotic, powerful programs mean nothing to the people who didn't make the journey.

In the end, from the standpoint of your Board, your staff and your funders that can be fatal.

So Francisco got added.

Almost. Sort of.

Among the various challenges of the Shanghai trip the fact that the team going is coming from different places and leaving China at different times meant that we bought many different tickets -- in fact, for the seven people going we ended up with four completely separate itineraries. Christian starts in LA, meets us in Shanghai, leaves five days ahead of the rest of the Company and ends up in North Carolina. Jason, from the Philippines, left Thanksgiving Day to go over early to jump out to Manila to have time with his family. He arrives in Shanghai a day later than the rest of us from a third country. My flight, by the time I booked it, had to be completely different than Kathryn/Rob/Amanda's because their flight was full. So the three of them and me arrive to Shanghai at EXACTLY the same time -- 1455 Shanghai local time -- on two completely different flights originating in different cities -- despite the fact that we all left National within an hour of each other. And I leave on the same flight as Christian on the 5th, leaving everyone else in Shanghai to teach.

And then there's Francisco.

He's from Chile.

By the time it became clear we needed to bring him (I have to serve as technical director for the program) airfares had changed dramatically and so we had to get creative. We found a great price on Air Canada with all the needed components to get him over at a price we could afford.

BUT, when you book a flight on the day after Thanksgiving you leave yourself exactly no room for error. And it turns out that the Canadian government requires a transit visa for Chileans even to transit through an international airport. Even though he never leaves the international terminal, going straight from one flight to the next, they denied him a boarding pass at National Airport at 0515 in the morning.

At which point my phone rang.

Now, when you buy your tickets online from web services -- in this case web jet -- you can't count on 24/7 service. And there isn't any. By the time their offices open to either cancel a ticket or change a route we have to be wheels up to China or lose days of work - with no guarantee we'll fix the problem anyway.

So, cancel or buy a new ticket and raise the standard of protest with Air Canada and web jet when they open -- meaning pass it off to one of the people on my team staying in the States. Because to the best of my knowledge there's no cell phone service just yet over the North Pole.

If a tree falls in the woods.....

I bought a new ticket. For a flight to China. Which leaves in 51 minutes.

Can never, ever, ever be too careful and dot too many "t's" and cross too many "i's."

No matter how many details you think you have covered, there's no substitute for obsessing.....

But Shanghai calls and that's amazing.

(And Delph lands in Tel Aviv to start her work with Yossi and Oded in about 90 minutes)....

Basel Journal: Like money in the bank....

Basel Journal

Sunday, November 16, 2011

As always the rails and wheels argue when leaving the station, pulling past the crossovers and the ties, wrapping the air in friction. Metal on metal. The air is cold. Wet. At 0940 precisely the glide begins, discernable only because the light glistening on the window changes. Basel slips into view. You’re always almost somewhere else in Switzerland. Arrive to Geneva airport (I had a few days earlier) and you’re presented with two choices: exit to Switzerland or exit to France. At Gard du North, the other train station in Basel (there are two as I found out by going to the wrong one for a 1430 meeting Friday) it turns out that at some moment in time INSIDE the station you’re somehow in Germany, not Switzerland. Not really sure how that happens, but, hey, its fun to say you were in Germany for about 60 seconds – especially when you had no earthly idea that, you know, you had been.

I had wanted to see mountains. It’s Switzerland after all. The day before, Saturday, at the conclusion of a long walk along Lake Geneva after a conversation about art, environment and collaboration inside one of Lausanne’s most intriguing theaters I said, somewhat randomly to the consultant with whom I was working on our planned Company E tour to Switzerland in April, that I wanted to find those legendary mountain passes through which the trains roar, darting into and out of tunnels, over trestles, spanning ravines of glacial melt-water.

“No problem,” was Philippe’s reply. A five minute metro ride straight uphill (everything in Lausanne is uphill or downhill because it all leads to the lake) and we were standing at the ticket window at Lausanne station and Philippe and the ticket agent were merrily engaged in an impromptu “lets go through the mountains” discourse.

It wasn’t so much that it was possible; that you sort of figure. It was that every few seconds the guy behind the glass was printing out these itineraries on what looked distinctly like old computer flat cards and that, on these papers, were itineraries that involved not just trains, but trams, buses, and funiculars, and that the schedules involved the WALKING distance from the train to the tram, the tram to the bus and the bus to the lift, and the times were separated by minutes – as in “the train arrives at 1420. You walk two minutes to the tram. The number 6 leaves at 1425 so its easy to get to. Then the tram arrives to the transit bus at 1431. You change – there’s a bus at 1434. Then the funicular leaves at 1445, which is easy because the bus takes 5 minutes.” Ummm. I’m from America. You know, where there might be a bus and if you’re really, really lucky you might catch your train which every third Thursday arrives on or reasonably close to on time. Oh, yeah – and what’s a tram?

Now, in the end I ended up by-passing the mountains in favor of searching out places to perform in Basel. But the whole experience told me why no one is ever in a hurry in Switzerland. The streets are almost empty of cars. The trams and buses run constantly and as a result everything happens when its supposed to happen. I tend to be pretty casual about leaving early for things, but in Basel? It seemed like I was constantly worrying about missing some form of transport when really the only variable was how fast I was walking. Other than that, it just got done. It just drives home how much of our stress is induced by automobiles. We think we’re free, but the reality is that the choice to drive, as opposed to be driven, to mangle public transportation systems instead of expanding them, turns the whole daily stress level upside down. When you know you’re going to get somewhere on time, and that you’re not responsible for getting there on your own wheels, it all just gets – simple. And it calms everyone, and everything, down.

The 0940 pulls into Zurich Airport. The schedule says it arrives at 1058.

Count on it.

Washington Journal: What images tell us....

Washington, DC

Sunday, October 30, 2011

On a cold clear October morning there is snow still lingering on my deck, the wood below and the sun above not warm enough yet to transmogrify it back once more to liquid state so it can seep beneath the insecticide injected timbers onto the petroleum tar roof below, down the tin pipes to the (lead?)-lined drain and, ultimately, into Rock Creek at the insertion point just above the Washington National Zoo, where this morning the howler monkeys are quiet, bound indoors because they are meant to live in places where no such thing as frozen water exists.

On a typical October morning like this they'd be the alarm for the neighborhood, our Mt. Pleasant rooster proxy.

Since records have been kept of weather in Washington -- the mid 1880s -- snow has fallen in Washington 15 times in October (at least according to the WP). A hurricane. Snow. The hottest summer and, in New York, an all-time record for snow fall in Central Park in October.

But climate change is a myth (just ask everyone on the Republican party dais on debate-night).

In Peru its begun raining during the dry season. In Italy the town mayor of one of the worst-hit parts of the coast during the rains and floods of the last month says, categorically, "its climate-change" that caused this.

And yet the day is brilliant and gorgeous, and the wide-angle lens we all need to see through narrows in the course of absorbing it. We see things day-by-day and so the aberration of yesterday drifts into the walk in the park of today. Unless you're still cleaning up debris on the ancient Italian coast or watching your family's possessions float by from your roof in Bangkok, or sifting dust from your piano bench in Texas as the dust of a season of wild-fires settles once more on the land.

In our DNA we approach the world day-by-day. Hunger will do that, and hunger works on a cycle of a few hours, not a few days or a few weeks or a few years. We have to over-rule that clock to comprehend something longer and larger. When you worry about your ability to feed yourself and your family should you lose, or fail to gain a new, job, the global gets much harder to comprehend.

That's what images are for.

Wherever we have traveled in these past

30 months the images we have taken, both mentally and with various digital sources, have been our conduit to communicate what we have experienced. Yet without context those images are the same snapshot-induced experience as the day's search for milk, bread and coffee. They live in the moment and fail us contextually.

All this comes to mind because of a short piece in today's New York Times. The title of a brief photo essay is "Halloween Photos of New York: Not on Halloween." The subhead is "When New York was a House of Horrors." Taken by John Conn in the late 70s and early 80s they are of things I had forgotten -- or chosen to forget -- from the city where I grew up and which were very much real during my childhood. They recall a time so visceral, where sometimes a trip "on the train" set your hair to standing on the back of your neck, that the images themselves set me back in time -- but only because I experienced elements of it. They are art as life or life as art, images so beautifully framed as to catch you in design and not in documentary.

And, then, what is next is the recollection of a defining moment for me in art. Once more those images turn me to Paul Taylor's "Last Look." When I set out to explain to people why that dance defined my sense and sensibility about the power of art I will, from here on out, refer to Mr. Conn's images because, in their way, they were the mead for Mr. Taylor. A city collapsing in on itself, eating, if you will, its young and itself. "Last Look," literally, is that mirror. It stands today and, ironically, it does to the dancers what it does to the audience -- break them down. Sometimes physically. Sometimes mentally. Inevitably spiritually.

If art is to be more than dressing we have to understand it as a portal.

Not an end in itself, but an end of dispersion into contexts large and small, funny and fraught, framed and fantastic. As snapshots that we open, Harry Potter-like, and which can, through the opening, tell us what lies inside the moment of creation (not in a biblical sense, just a more mundane daily sense). That, for me, is the genius of photography. It's reality transformed into time capsule, offering the viewer the chance to comprehend context.

I remember not understanding the impact of climate on our water until I saw the photographs of one of the great glaciers of Iceland this past summer and seeing, year-by-year the frantic retreat, and of walking through the parking lots of old as man chased places to deposit his vehicles as the glaciers run away from them up into the mountains.

Taken only in a moment, a photograph is still. That's not their point. They are designed for more, and as photographers we're obligated to that more, I think. We see, and we capture, but the moment we share the images go beyond us and into the world.

We are in a place of profound change. We're not built for that change, but we must become so.

Thats what images tell us.

New York | Dayton | DC | Utah -- another day at the shop

New York City

Monday, October 24 2011

The Bowery Hotel

One of the things I love most about the people with whom I have the pleasure of working is their creative intelligence. Each could direct -- and each often does in their own way. Take, for example, today.

In the midwest Rob Priore is knee-deep in a two-works in nine days marathon at Dayton Contemporary Dance Theater, one of the great contemporary companies in America. He was asked to make a new work not just for DCDT 1 or 2, but for both. AT THE SAME TIME. That's insane. But I know Rob and I know he'll make something great for each, working to their strengths, challenging their sense of limitations and building new understandings in each dancer of what they are capable of.

**The image above is of Rob during one of our Master Classes in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in October 2011....

Here's Rob's journal entry on the first days:

"After two rehearsals the dancers have really started to make something beautiful. A working title for what we have started is called the " Four Corners Of The Heart". I just tried compressing the video files and they are all still too big to attach and send :[ I try to have someone who is understudying take some pictures during process over the next few days and once I start working with the first company I think I will have more to say. I do have something to say about the collaborative artist."

"After meeting with Willis "Bing" Davis, it became very clear to me how organic this collaboration would be. His series of paintings called "Ancestral Spirit Dances" is making its way into 400's. They all look very similar however once he explained his inspiration for the paintings they began to take on hundreds of very different looks. Each painting is based on the different meter of poly rhythms in tradition African music. Half of each painting is pure improv wild strokes of color. The other half is based on kinte cloth patterns which is very structured and layered. This all started to make sense for me. I love to structure my work. Starting large maybe with all seven dancers on stage then as I progress I break sections down into smaller groups of dancers like the structure of the African meter 7,5,3 and so on. The other half to my choreography is based on some loose improv as well. As Bing and I continued to talk about how we like to create our art it became clear this collaboration was going to be dynamite."

-- Rob Priore in Dayton, Ohio

October 24, 2011

Meanwhile, in Utah Christian is in the middle of his own process of work. We haven't seen him since we came back from Kyrgyzstan, and won't again till right up before we leave for China (or Russia if we go there before China).

Jason, Kathryn and Amanda are in DC, rehearsing at Achmedova Ballet Academy and crafting the newest Company E work as a collaboration that Rob will leap into as well when he comes back from Dayton.

And as for me, I'm in New York, writing a business plan, meeting with the New York members of the Board -- Susan Wall and Aaron Graham -- and meeting with collaborators and potential partners for NEXT.

Four cities, four projects and processes, yet all tied into the creative spirit of the Company and its vision.

Crazy.