CityDance Professional Summer Intensive

Day 1

Day 2

Intense

Yeah, OK, so how exactly did 20 days go by between the last words and these?

Back in DC its still somehow spring. Given that in Chile its winter and in the Middle East its about 400 degrees I suppose that's fine, but we're in the middle of the Professional SUMMER Intensive.

This is year one for an intensive like this. It was essentially Christopher's idea (our rehearsal director and choreographer in residence) and he was spot on about doing it. We really had no idea how or who would come in, but the quality of the dancers (all 30 of them) and, more, their grace, openness, kindness and interest has the four of us teaching (Christopher, Kathryn, Jason and me) completely motivated to make it the best possible experience for them.

How one does that is the interesting part. CKM has a lot of depth in this area, and he's done a great job of facilitating the things needed to make it work. Right mood, right approach, right challenges (at least from my vantage point). And Kathryn and Jason are great choices to come in as teachers. Their spirit is always infectious and it rubs off.

To make a CDE experience you have to have range, so in the section I'm doing, which is essentially choreography/rep today was about incorporating the styles and movement of two additional choreographers, Karen Reedy and Jason himself, into the process so that, in one work -- one stage experience -- the dancers in the Intensive would have to change personalities as artists many times. Given that the concept is emerging as a streetscape that makes sense -- and is very CityDance.

Great fun. Great video blog from Francisco from Day One and another for Day Two on the way.

Its on Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/5290128

The warm-up

62 minutes from Curtain. The room, 150 years old, is named after Claudio Arrau. “He’s better known outside Chile than in,” the woman said to me. Hard to imagine one of the great pianist of the 20th century not being celebrated in his homeland, but then that seems to be what it is to be an artist these days. You have to leave home to go home.

This afternoon the Director of the Teatro Municipal, in which we perform tonight in the Sala Arrau (capacity about 225 as opposed to the exquisite Opera House of 2,500 next door) told me that for our concert tomorrow night we have so much press coming that they don’t know where to put them all. “We never can get this much press for our own productions and companies.” He was clearly a bit irritated. Talk about preaching to the Choir. Why does one have to be a curiosity to garner the attention, and hopefully the respect, of one’s hometown?

If you were to imagine one of the great salons of 19th Century France, or Vienna or Florence, you would understand what it is to be in this room tonight. A 35 foot arched ceiling adorned with plaster bas relief and busts of the great 19th and 18th century composers, red velvet curtains masking the windows which open in classic French door style to a covered patio used only for the Theater Director. Think “Breakfast in the Loggia” by John Singer Sargent.

The Company is on stage warming up. The elegance of the room permeates everything, and is in sharp contrasts to 24 hours ago, when we stood in a converted sports complex imagined in less than those 24 hours from a basketball court into a theater, with trusses built and winched up into place, 800 people in the audience of stadium seats, including the Mayor of Santiago, the US Ambassador and his family and an entire class of Military Cadets. The air was achingly cold, blowers of propane and flame forcing heat onto the stage to little effect. Here it is insular and warm with the aging smell of a great hall.

It would be hard to offer greater contrast. Last night a performance for the people of Santiago who have the least but who would do the most for you of any people you have ever met. Tonight a private sold-out performance for the Foreign Ministry, arranged by the Minister himself, with a house of Ambassadors and dignitaries and the people who make the foreign world real for Chile.

Curtain in 38 minutes.

Santiago; notes from the back seat of a taxi

Tuesday, June 2
10:05am

On the streets, in a cab, in Santiago. Riding in the backseat. Laptop open. Eyes wide open.

Cabbies here are crazy. Not the crazy of Amman, where EVERYONE drives crazy but everyone drives the same and you never feel like you’re a heartbeat away from an accident. Here there are so many distractions, so much traffic, so much noise coming out of the stereo and drivers typically with headphones in both ears that you definitely have the Disney’s California Adventure thing going through your head as you drive. On the other hand we always get where we’re going.

And in now almost five weeks on the road I’ve actually never seen an accident on the road. In DC you see them it feels like every day.

The weather is picture perfect. You get 10 of these days a year in DC and it seems like they happen here most days. Along the streets, looking out the cab window, the buildings are flushed with color. Its like San Francisco color (ala Haight Ashbury) but classic European architecture. The park to the left is flush with green and the light here, which is completely unlike the light in the northern hemisphere, hues everything in amber.

You are surrounded by mountains. They rise up at the end of city streets and over the tops of the towers. White caps in the Andes. Dirt brown slopes along the lower perimeter in which Santiago is placed. One moment it feels like lower Manhattan. The next like Denver with the Rockies in the distance.

In the front seat last night driving back from a site visit to the Penalonen, a sports center in which we are performing tonight, Chris took to making a “ding, ding, ding” sound everytime we passed a Chinese restaurant or carryout. It was like a constant bell. Never seen so many Chinese restaurants in my life.

The driver stops at a light and hails a street vendor to buy a pack of gum. Trucks laden with water tanks crosses in front. There is water in such abundance all around.

Its about 65 degrees. Things move at a pace that is neither weekday nor weekend.

Yesterday a wonderful woman stepping in to help host us and I were walking the streets between a lunch and stop at the Teatro Municipal. She was talking about (the driver just took out one headphone to talk on his cell while changing gears in his clutch/manual transmission auto. We’re going about 45 miles an hour, changing lanes and passing an ambulance on the way to the hospital with an emergency passenger inside) how different Chileans are from other Latin Americans. She’s Argentine (before us the mountains rise at an incredible slope, filling the sky) and has lived in many lands before coming here to settle for the second time. As we walked past the Presidential palace she took a breath. It was the breath of memory. “In Allende this is where the military bombed the palace. Theere were planes in the air, and rockets fired from this plaza. It was the start of Pinochet.” “1973, yes?”

“Yes, September 11, 1973.”

“September 11?”

“September 11.”

“It was the start of all the changes,” she said. “There was a curfew for years. No one could be out on the streets after 6pm. Can you imagine? People were very afraid. They couldn’t trust anyone so they turned to family. They became insular, quiet. It’s the thing they live with now. Then the curfew went to 8 or 10. Then to 2. The Dictator years. They haven’t come out of that yet.”
It was hard to imagine this in a thriving street filled with people passing through. Chileans are kind, gracious, elegant and so filled with hospitality. They go out of their way for you as easily as they draw breath. Its hard to picture this city empty at night. Yet it is quiet. It’s a subtle thing, but you can feel it. I thought it had to do with being, as they like to say, “at the end of the world.”

But its more than that.

We drive past a shanty shop in the poorest part of Santiago. A man is making an incredible and elegantly detailed door, hand carving the wood. He is bathed in sunlight in the cusp of the mountains growing ever larger before us. The buildings are low to the ground, not too far from shacks and yet clearly cared for. It isn’t poor in the way it is at home. There is small industry, handcrafting art everywhere in is seems every doorway. And then someone is selling tires out of a garage beside a fresh vegetables stand where the colors are so deep that you realize at home you don’t even know what fresh is.

Pulling into the stadium now (yes, stadium – more on that later)…..

(Lots of) Falling Water

Chile is a constant surprise. I wrote in an earlier entry about my Dad telling me that to come to Chile, and to go from the north to the south, would show me every climate the world has to offer.

He forgot to mention the water.

On the road from Talca to Temuco, a road which doesn't bend (can someone say I-80 in Iowa?), Isabel turned from her front seat vantage point in the bus and said that the driver asked if we wanted to see an extraordinary waterfall along the way. I asked how far off the road it was, and how far away it would take us. I thought an hour perhaps. She looked at me strangely and said, "it's Chile. About 5 minutes." The point being that in a country 5,000 miles long and 5 miles wide its not really possible to go too far east or west.

So I said sure, lets stop.


We pulled off the Pan American, which is a toll road in this part of the world, and drove to the waterfall. About, oh, 1/2 a mile. Now, spectacular nature isn't supposed to exist within spitting distance of the major highway in the country, but there it was. The falls themselves were all the you could imagine and hope for. The strange proximity of a hotel, with a dozen back porch sliding glass doors just about 50 yards from them, and the empty swimming pool, with its inevitable, unearthly green/blue paint, threw the bucolic nature of a stunning cascade of water hurling over the lip of the earth off. So did the 50 gallon drum upended on the north bank. But the falls themselves were exquisite.

The contrast in those falls, where so much water falls from the sky throughout the drainage basin for just this one river, to that of the arid Middle East, where the dominant talk is of Amman, Jordan (and much of the country itself) running out of water in 30 years is startling. From desert to deluge in four weeks time on tour -- at about 8,500 miles distance. I honestly doubt as much water flows through the Jordan River in an entire year as flows over just these falls alone in a single day.

And it wouldn't have surprised me if someone went F.L. Wright one better and built a house over these one day. (that's not an endorsement in any way of that idea). Call it "madly falling water."

Butterflies in concert

The cornerstone of our concerts here in Chile is "Revolution of the Butterflies," the dance about the impact of human society on the natural world. Isabel Croxatto, the Chilean artist who made the work and who organized this tour for us, has made something remarkable that we are only now finally being able to see in its full light and texture as it goes onto major stages here in her home country. Its an amazing thing to watch as an American dance company inhabits the artistry of a Chilean in her native land. Humbling as so much of these international experiences have been.

These are shots from the opening night concert in Talca.

Temuco, Chile

Look on a map of the world. Any map will do. Find South America and then find Australia. Go to the place where South America reaches below Australia -- heading towards the southern most place on the earth. That's where we are right now. There is only one place on the planet farther south where there is a greater human population and its another Chilean city down the Pan American highway.

Crazy. And great.

Temuco has an exquisite theater in which we dance today (two shows) for what will end up being about 2,000 people -- that's two sold out houses. The reception we have received in Chile has been startling in its graciousness and care. I thought it would be difficult at best to live up to the hospitality of the Middle East, but this has been every bit as remarkable.

And talk about publicity...

There are posters and billboards everywhere. Yesterday was a press conference with the Director of the Theater and the Mayor of Temuco.

The theater is enormous, and that presents a different set of challenges. The way the proscenium is designed the audience is far from the stage even in the first row, and so even though the house is smaller than the one in Talca it feels less intimate, and that means adjusting lighting and stage spacing in order to keep the intimacy of the works. This show, with the exception possibly of "Scorched" by Kate Weare, is very much an initmate program. It's success lies in making the audience feel that they are "with you" on stage, and that's harder to achieve in a venue this deep. We're adjusting by making what seem subtle changes -- taking out the white cyke that lines most backwalls in a theater and going instead to an all black space (an enormous black box), adjusting lighting so that it feels closer and a bit more "closed in."

Those are the kinds of changes which are key to success, but the timetable is very short. We got into the theater at about 3 yesterday, with David Whitlock, our Technical Director for the tour and I arriving first to see what we had before us. Dancers arrived around 7 to walk through the dances as David worked. Tech today for David and I starts in a few minutes as we leave the hotel for the theater, with the company coming at 2 for a 4pm matinee. Its such a long day for them that we are opting to bring them in late and keep them safe. But it makes for a bit of an adventure in lighting.

Nonetheless, great fun.

Oh, and talk about pressure -- the language on the posters says "the best dance in the world" Yikes.

The dog that wasn't there

In Jerusalem there are cats. Everywhere. In the Old City they are in the shops, on the streets, in the houses, alleys, corners, shops. Everywhere. Same in Amman. Same in Ramallah. And people talk about them all the time. "Damn cats. Howled to the point all night where I couldn't sleep." That sort of thing.

In Chile, its dogs. Sort of.

During our four days in Talca, Chile, from the 27th of May to the 30th, I went back and forth from the Hotel Marcos Gamero to the Teatro Regionale about 20 times. They're close by, separated by only about 5 blocks. As with any place you walk that often in that short a period of time, you start to get to know that one tiny stretch of a place. You see the street art, you see the vendors (and the most unusual of which is the little "ID" place right on the corner, where you can get your photo taken, your information printed/imprinted, you ID put to paper and laminated all out there on the corner {though my favorite so far is the little "to go" coffee stand I saw today in Temuco that was built right out of the garage of someone's home -- now THAT's for me{).

But what I really got to know were the dogs.

In Chile, at least in the parts of Chile we have been, there are dogs everywhere. Mostly they are feral. They either don't now or never did belong to anyone. In the States a stray dog is rare, and when you see on it's usually frantic. Not here. There dogs are no only mellow, they are quiet, friendly, walk up to you or more often just ignore you. And they commute.

Honest.

They commute. Walk past the bodega during business hours and the same two dogs are sleeping (which is their most common occupation) in the same area throughout the day. Walk past after or before hours, and they're gone.

People pay them no notice at all. They just wander around. They cross the street (generally with the light -- which, given they are color blind makes no sense to me at all). They sit at the same spots -- my favorite being the three that sit, statuesque, in front of the Ministry of Agriculture alongside, but not with, the guards. They just -- well -- they just are. They're part of the fabric of the town. And sweet. Gentle.

And commuting.

Watching from my hotel window the other morning to try and take in a bit about the town, I saw the usual things you see in any city or town around 8:30 in the morning -- people going to work. Only here its not just the people. Watch for a few minutes and you realize the dogs are going to work, too. They walk on the same side of the street as the people going one way or another. They wait at the light (I'm not kidding). They pass people, they defer to people. They just, well, commute.

And, as I say, they seem to get along just fine. People step around them, or they around people. They are healthy (in the main), seem well fed (must be good jobs here), and just sort of inhabit their own separate world. The challenge for us is not to take them home with us. They're adorable, sweet and very willing to please. They don't much beg, but if you give them the slightest encouragement its clear they would love your affection (and your lunch, I would imagine).

The dogs of Talca are their own city of inabitants. They sort of have their separate universe from the people. It sounds strange, but its completely charming.

They're the dogs who aren't there. And they commute.

Walking Talca

May 25, 2009

A few shots from the streets.

Return to a revolution

"My butterflies have flown to Chile."

The trip to Chile began in earnest a bit over a year ago. Its genesis was the inspired work of Isabel Croxatto, who has since become a trusted friend as well as a respected colleague. Her work, "Revolution of the Butterflies," had its premiere with us in March of 2008 at the CityDance "tan box" theater at our home at the Music Center at Strathmore. A part of our work on climate change, "Revolution" quickly became a favorite of all who saw it (far to small a number as it was a studio show). It needed to come back to the repertory, and it needed time with Isabel to make it work.

Our first rehearsal with her was this morning here in Talca. It was a "get acquainted" rehearsal, and there are the first few images from that rehearsal.

As we go through the next few days there will be time with her both on video tape and in images. This is a start down that road.