(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.

We need this here

The jump-off point for our two week tour of Chile is the city of Talca. Its a great place for a beginning.

We have two main tasks at hand here in the administrative capital of the Maule region south of Santiago. The first is underway as of today. A three-day workshop for 32 students who have come from north and south (its not particularly challenging to come from east and west as the country only takes about two hours to go from the Andean border with Argentina and the Pacific).

"We need this here," Isabel Croxatto, our Tour Director and the choreographer of our work, "Revolution of the Butterflies," said to me, Chris Morgan and Jason Ignacio in the cafe adjacent to the Teatro Regional del Maule this evening just after the first workshop wrapped up. "People are hungry for this, and there is no one to offer it." It sounded exactly like the words we had heard just a few weeks ago 8,300 miles away in Amman, in Ramallah, in Nazareth (that's not a number I made up, it really is that far away from where I write this).

When I think about the challenges we face in the States every day, for audience, for the dancers who can do the work and the choreographers who can create dances which last, I am constantly frustrated. Yet to step outside the States, to the countries we have been and the one in which we are now, is to realize we also have an extraordinary number of resources and advantages. It is so often just a matter of circumstances and perspective.

To be here, in Chile, and to have the opportunities we have here is both an honor and humbling. To see the anticipation, and the excitement, on the faces of the dancers who came into the theater today for the workshop was inspiring. Christopher has opted to do a three day workshop centered around his dance "Thirst." Using a similar process to the one he employed in the original creation of the work, he's got the students exploring, through movement and writing, the questions of "what they thirst for." Its an elegant process, and it inspires the students to both create and absorb.

The images in the previous post (just below this one) are from today's workshop.

The second part of our time here is devoted to two performances on Thursday at the theater, which is one of the most elegant and beautiful we've ever danced in. Its reminiscent, as Alicia mentioned today, in some ways of the Concert Hall at Strathmore. Not quite as large a house, but close and with an exceptionally fine stage. Isabel mentions its one of the finest in Chile and I can believe it. We're looking forward to Thursday's shows.

More in a bit.

Talca: Workshops on Day One

A few shots from the first day of a three-day workshop in the Chilean city of Talca, about 250km south of Santiago.

Along the Pan American

A few shots, heading south out of Santiago to Talca.

The world is round (with apologies to Tom Friedman)

Saturday, May 23, 2009
9:35pm. Over South Carolina.

The week in the States lasted at least twice that long. If travel is tiring planning, meeting and getting next year figured out is exhausting. It’s good to be at 40,000 feet and heading south with the cell in Airplane mode for the next two weeks.

South. To Chile via Miami. To a land I am learning of outside the guidebooks. To a long thin strip of a country I have dwelled upon since my father first said “in your lifetime, if you travel nowhere else, you must go all the way from the top of Chile to the bottom. In one continuous stretch of one endless land you’ll experience every environment known to the planet. You can stay on one road, starting at the top in the North at the border to Peru and finish almost in sight of Antarctica, and never leave Chile."

My Father had a way of making the most mad journey romantic. As a child I had a map of the world in my bedroom, and on that map I populated the planet with stickpins representing the places he traveled to. I remember them today more as living things consuming the visible space of the land masses than as green tipped plastic and pin-prick steel. In so many ways it was the closest I got to my Father. Those pins possessed that strange telekinetic power inherent to lonely children, that power that enabled them to see into the fog of absence and find within it the hug missing at bedtime or the words lost to a failed and frayed cable lying on the seabed between two people of one blood but two disconnected lives. Chile is inextricably interlaced with those inextinguishable strands of childhood.

In the long night (or night-long) flight ahead there is also the mystery of what lies beneath. Once Miami is behind us the journey is both magical and invisible. An all night arc around the Earth, never leaving Eastern Standard time yet traveling the same number of miles as from Washington to Amman. The cognitive dissonance associated with this is tied intimately to the European mentality from which I come. We are East-West travelers, travelers who expect that as the miles accumulate the hours will be lost or gained. The anchor to the experience is jet lag. Exhaustion at noon and midday exhilaration at 3 in the morning. That was what it was to journey into the heart of the Middle East, to stand toe-to-toe with the Al Aksa Mosque and the Wailing Wall. That seven-hour time difference made it real, made it tangible. We knew we were somewhere else not simply because of the language, but because of the discord between our 3pm and our families 3pm on the other side of the world. When you hit Dubai the time difference becomes 8 hours between DC and you, and the business day is completely out of sync. That’s how you know how far away you are.

But that’s not how it works going North to South. On this airplane, at this moment, its 10:05. In DC its 10:05. In Miami its 10:05 and in Santiago its 10:05. It’s on the other side of the world, but its 10:05. And you’re on the WEST coast of South America. My 8th grade Latin Studies teacher would be proud. When he gave us a day-one pop quiz to draw the Americas I put Rio de Janeiro in line with Los Angeles. I knew all the European Capitals and the rough geography of a then divided continent from the Urals to the Atlantic, but I couldn’t begin to tell you where anything was below Mexico. The Panama Canal might as well have been in Hawaii.

There’s a point to this rambling.

There is an episode of The West Wing, the television show I’ve more or less memorized in the last 5 years, with its fictional White House and public servants who make you think of what the best of politics can be, in which White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry “throws open the doors to people we could care less about, day (in the words of Toby Ziegler)” There were two episodes with this idea at their center, called “big block of cheese” days (for the uber curious, Google Andrew Jackson and cheese or, better, take in the second season of WW – or call Betsy in our office) In the second CJ and Josh sit down with a group called “Cartographers for Social Equality.” CJ asks “where’s the inequality in cartography.”

Turns out its right in front of all of us. The world as we know it, as we’re taught it, was drawn by a European named Merkatur. It’s his map we study, its his map that tells us where everything is and how big it is and what bounds it. It’s our indispensible framework for making sense of the world. Except it’s wrong. Very wrong. It reflects not size as it exists in the physical world but size as it existed in the political world of the time, and that time has extended onto the walls of schools, the pages of books and the minds of all of us ever since.

The issue of Europe being physically several times smaller than shown on that map is just one issue. Another is the disparity between how things really are in relative size in the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern. The map adjusts size to make a round world flat (there’s an irony), and in so doing, and in so overstating the importance of Europe and all things Northern it marginalizes Africa and South America. That North-South attitude carries forward to today. It’s top and bottom.

Imagine, as they do in that episode of West Wing, if you did two simple things – turn the world upside down and redraw the map to scale. It’s been done in the Peters Projection Map. And its jarring. It makes all the important things you thought you understood less so. Size matters. “You can’t do that,” CJ says. “Why?” replies Hewk.

“Because you’re freaking me out.”

South America on the horizon. Somewhere my Dad is smiling.

Cultural diplomacy

When its all said and done, when the bills are paid, the flights flown, the audiences come and gone, the classes held and the thank you's written, what is it that three weeks in the Middle East, or anywhere for that matter, means?

Everything.

This past January I wrote a draft of an Op Ed which I decided to table until we'd been on out on the road in both the tour just finished and the one which begins in a few days. It was about the need for a culture offensive -- a renaissance of America not in its military or even in its industrial presence, but in its culture, out in the world.

How often have we heard "we like Americans regardless of whether we like your government or your policies." That was echoed, and then reinforced in remarkable ways, in Ramallah, a city which, if you were looking for a place you would anticipate anger at Americans to surface, would be high on the list. That anger was nowhere to be found. There was, instead, a grace, an appreciation, a kindness and and openness to what a group of American artists had to offer, to say, to teach and to share that we should be so lucky as to find here within our own borders.

We are not known around the world. Let me say that again: we are not known around the world. Yes, of course American television is known everywhere. Is that America? Yes, of course our soldiers and our tanks and our guns and our incredible power are known everywhere. That power has the ability to do remarkable good, but is also inevitably, overwhelmingly controversial. And while, yes, that is America, is that the only America? Is that the only presence we want to have on the ground?

We are not known around the world. Images on television are not America. They are two dimensional. They are 1s and 0s and they are utterly controlled by the people who put them there. Nothing, nothing replaces a handshake, an embrace, an afternoon together in a classroom where smiles are shared, lessons are learned and Americans, in their warmth, grace and talent, are present and involved.

What America do we seek? Who do we want to be and how do we want to be known? You do actually change lives on the road. You change them one at a time, and in the end, person to person, that's the way the world changes.

At a time of profound debate about how and where to spend our money, of obsession about American visibility, American stability and American security, the investment in the exchange of Americans and people from other lands is both inexpensive and yields breathtaking results.

Culture is not a hand out. It's not a bag that says "a gift of the United States (as important as those gifts are)." Its an exchange -- and that's the key term. We learn with each other, from each other. It empowers the people you meet as much as it empowers you. It teaches the teacher as much as the student. It inspires the performer as much as the people for whom performances are held. We learn. Together.

I am constantly reminded of the phrase "he who saves a single life saves the whole world." It can be adapted so subtly: "he who changes a single life changes the whole world." I have watched, in these past weeks, that power up close. Young people who were unclear of how to say what they felt, express what they had bottled up, dream in non-verbal ways of the people they want to be, inspired to move and empowered by it.

In Abu Dhabi I had a teacher come up to me and say this: "I'm just a PE teacher here (as it that needed an apology), but I want you to know that I think this performance you just did, this 45 minutes, is worth more than two full months in a classroom."

In Ramallah I was asked to help create the infrastructure, the curriculum, the core, of dance in the West Bank for the future. Its a mission for my own life now -- an honor and an extraordinary idea.

In Amman we watched young people en masse leap to their feet to join in learning a dance with three CityDance monkeys in Jungle Books. Boys. Girls. Everyone.

The United States needs to decide how it wants to be known to the world.

Throughout the region I met a small group of people, Cultural and Public Affairs Officers with the US Department of State, who spend each and every day trying to make possible what we just did. They do it well. They do it with passion. They do it with commitment and determination and they do it often feeling like they are banging their heads against the wall with their own government. But they do it. And they don't give up. And they make a difference and, a person at a time, they change the world and the way America is seen. What more can you ask than to have a chance to work with people like that?

We are visible in the world. That's our choice and our blessing and our curse.

How we choose to embrace that visibility is everything. But that's what art does. And it does it in ways away from home we fail to understand here at home. Leave our shores and find out that people know nothing of America, but that they very much WANT to know about America -- from Americans, and that art is a way they love to take us in.

The Federal budget for cultural exchange should be 30 time larger than it is. Artists should be everywhere. Everywhere. Teaching. Speaking. Dancing. Singing. Acting. Painting.

Sharing.

Its how we can make a difference.

Bones

May 13, 2009 in the desert between Abu Dhabi and Dubai

He said, “If a man dies in the desert, it doesn’t smell.” I was holding a rib bone in my left hand.

“Same with the camels.”
At my feet, in the compact sand, the forlorn and full skeleton of a ship of the desert lay, bones bleaching in the sun, drying and already weathering in the heat, in the sun and under the relentless pressure blasting of fine sand whipped by the thick desert wind coming in off the Red Sea and over this landscape of shifting and often airborne sand (reminds me of Michael Ondantjee’s elegant descriptions of the Aajej, a wind in the Moroccan desert). The sun had slipped below the horizon 20 minutes earlier, while we had been sitting upon the dunes a mile or so north, but it was yet light, the twilight that comes when there is enough matter in the air to sprinkle the sky with color reflecting off the landscape.

There was still fur and flesh on small parts of this dead beast. The sand brown hair, course, deep-pile carpet thick, still felt just as the hair of the camel I had ridden in Wadi Rum, a few thousand miles and an eternity away. Bits of flesh and tiny traces of sinew still connected to bone at the hind legs, desiccated and mummy-like. The edge of the sand was slipping slowly over the remains, a blanket that will soon enshroud it as the desert has all things throughout the eternity of the struggle between life and death in the desert that the desert inevitably wins. How many bones lay beneath this surface? How much of the dust that gathers on your clothing, slips inside your collar, tickles your nostrils, was once part of something living before being finely ground into powder?

The skeleton was complete until my driver and I disturbed it. The long, elegant neck revealed bone-by-bone, the head, perfectly upright, looking out, as it had in the moment it closed its eyes for the last time, staring ahead – at a six lane superhighway in the desert. The super-transport of the (recent) past had seen in its last, solitary moment the super-transports of today. Less than a generation separated them in this part of the world, in the long, long empty sands that stretch between Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

That highway lay no more than 200 yards from the camel’s open grave. At dusk it bristled with lights, moving like a video game show, the low rumble of all those diesel trucks causing a near constant pulse in the ground, a low hum that you could tangibly feel in your soles. There were few passenger vehicles, and those that you could see were on a “beat the autobahn” mission to Mars. Their Testarossa’s and Maserrati’s, BMW’s and Bentley’s shot back and forth across the long straight strip of cement and tar, like a tether pulled taught, in the seemingly endless money of these two tiny Emirates which have captured the world’s imagination and the insatiable desire for oil by a simple twist of geographic fate. This is what the camel saw in its last moments.

In the sand hard by the highway, which is raised above ground level on a long stretched mound to prevent the sweeping sands from doing to it what it was doing to the camel, enormous sections of pipe sat out in the open, stacked carelessly, stretching all the way in either direction of the highway.

“Oil?” I asked.

“Water.” He replied. “Much more precious than oil.”

“20% of all oil revenue goes to making water.” Making water? My driver was born in the South of India, but had grown up in Abu Dhabi. He moved with his family when he was just a child. But he is still Indian, not Emirati. I recalled another driver saying to me in the morning that “he hated the taste of the water here – all processed water, not like my water, not like Pakistani water. That’s real water, water from the mountains.” But he was not in the mountains (which this day is probably good for extending his life-expectancy in Pakistan). He, a cab-driver, like my Indian guide, was in the UAE. Both came for the money. “I hate it here – the heat. But the money…”

There is an irony in the endless oil-bought wealth of the UAE. All that oil, all that mashed up life from bygone millions of years, is fueling an economic boom in a country with virtually no population that is allowing them to do what only alchemists have dreamed of in all the ages of all the world: to make gardens out of the desert.

Drive in Abu Dhabi, in the endless, thick moisture that is the air and you see green EVERYWHERE. Along the highway, that same spit between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the world is being transformed. But unlike almost everywhere else in the world, where the desert is encroaching on what had been fertile pasture or semi-arid land, in the UAE the desert is in hard retreat. There are fields and fields and fields of trees, and endless acres of that most notorious water-thief, lawn grass. Step outside the City onto the Emir’s road and you see entire farms of green – not sheep farms or cattle farms – plant farms. And snaking through each and every carefully planted mound and tree is a tiny black hose, connected, after endless miles, to a water/irrigation system. It’s drip agriculture, dispensing water with great efficiency, little waste and astonishing results. Forests in the desert.

“I think you are another of those desert loving English,” Prince Faisal (who went on to become King of Jordan) said to T.E. Lawrence during one of their first meetings. “While I,” he said. “I long for the gardens of Cordoba.” Those legendary hanging gardens in Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But they are as much legend as archaeology (though more traces of them have been found). To make a paradise in the desert is so utterly far fetched as to become legend. It can’t be done. Except that it can. And the force behind it is oil. The next time you get into your car consider that some percentage of the money you hand to the gas station will find its way back to governments and people using it to make these lush gardens in the desert.

And here’s one – Abu Dhabi, an utterly desert-based country, has, according to a press release by Siemens announcing another desalination plant, “Abu Dhabi has the world's third-highest per capita drinking-water consumption. And according to the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA), daily water consumption is set to increase to 3.57 million cubic meters by 2015.” Longing for the gardens of Cordoba.

It was getting dark, finally. The camel had lost two bones now; that rib bone and now a vertebra. We put the rib bone back.

The vertebra has moved to Washington.

Embers

These are from the last evening of the tour in Abu Dhabi, and are taken en route to, and during a company gathering in the desert.

Back across

On May 8th the company jumped back across the Israeli/Jordanian border. These are moments in the trip from the Rosary Sisters Convent (where we stayed) to the doors of King's Academy. Mostly shot through the window, they also find a few images of our now legendary cab driver, who made sure to show his affection for Shannon....

A few images from the performance in Nazareth

These are shots from the Company's May 6th performance in Nazareth, Israel.

Jerusalem. Looking back (part one)

“Arafat said ‘it is the job of every (Palestinian) woman to have 14 children. 4 for themselves and 10 for the cause,” said the woman to me as she was crossing over the manic road, taking me to a street-side falafel stand. Her eyes were filled with the horror of the idea that one could invoke such an idea of violence from fertility. The 10 were to provide the raw meat, the mules, of the suicide bombings. It’s not a quote I know, but apocryphal or not it parallels quotes he made at other times. Yet he also won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzak Rabin. But Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli, Sadat by an Egyptian; Kennedy and King by Americans; Gandhi by an Indian. We feed on our own.

She was not native Israeli nor native Palestinian. She had been born in what was then Rhodesia, a fertile agricultural heartland, into the white minority that finally relented the power it had not earned, turning the country over to Robert Mugabe, who hurled it so far back into the stone age that it is, even from a distance, a tragic scar instead of a thriving heartland. Her family fled as so many white Rhodesian/Zimbabweans did as things went badly for that community, as Mugabe took greater and more accurate aim at the tragedy of his policies through the invocation of a race card, a land card and a power card by zeroing in on the most virulent symbol of Colonialism, skin color. She had taken a circuitous route to end up in Israel, in Jerusalem, another city wrenched by the barriers of color, faith and a desire for the land upon which others stood.

A charming, urbane and endlessly curious woman, she showed me the grace of the region, whether from a treat of a curbside meal or the kindness implicit in being an elegant, wandering host. We had met briefly in Washington, but became more truly acquainted in a day of meetings, touring from success story to success story there in West Jerusalem. Those success stories are of peace, of common purpose to teach, to lift up, to invite dialogue and invent possibility from the ether. All in the deep shadow of fear, which casts about in Jerusalem seemingly at will and alive, spreading and receding, somehow infused into every single heart and mind I encountered, a living thing, a violent emotional thing that upends conversation and takes root in that part of the brain that controls the “fight or flight” response.

“Jerusalem is dying,” an Israeli artist said in mid conversation. “Culturally it is dying. The art which was central to the city 20 years ago is being forcibly migrated out, polarized and pulled apart, Israeli to the West in Tel Aviv, Palestinian to the East and North to Ramallah. If we don’t find a way to change it, the city will be dead of all culture save religious culture, and then where will be find any common ground?”

Jerusalem is only now emerging from the grip of a religiously conservative mayor, a man who ground the secular art of the city down.

We think of Israelis as very westernized, and of course we think of their dance as among the finest, if not the finest, in the world (which in my view it absolutely is). Yet there are now just two professional modern companies in Jerusalem. They occupy different floors of the same building, and do so in a strangely symbolic way, one at ground level, exposed to the world and to the street, buffeted by that experience, the other below ground, working on many levels, and working the land literally at a farm outside the city, taking root, a plant, at first underground and then emerging from below to create something wondrous.

Amir Kolben’s studio stands at ground level of the plaza. To enter his workspace you enter his studio. It’s a grand tradition, really, that you must walk through the workspace to get to the changing space and sitting space and reflecting space. It reminds me of the old Feet First in DC, and there’s something very inviting about it. Art exposed, really. His studio is compact, but enough to generate large, deep and devilishly hard choreography. The company, like ours, is 8 or 9 dancers, and like ours they are full of that life, and that banter, that implies a healthy inquiry and deep passion for the work.

Coming in as a guest the hospitality was wonderful, though embarrassing as I disrupted their entire process and got a treat in seeing some of the material performed. Captivating hardly describes it. Such invention.

The door to the studio stands at the far right corner of the room. All the rest is windows. Mid run of an excerpt from “Interface” I glanced at the windows and saw a young and exquisitely beautiful woman with her young son. They were peering through the space where the shades were open between the small footing wall and the space about 3 feet above the ground. She was electric in her energy and he was fascinated, smiling and absorbing the mad energy of the work.

At the end of the run I asked Amir if he had seen them there. “Yes,” he said. “A few months ago that would have been impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because the religious restrictions of the last Mayor made it a requirement that we close those shades completely. Our work was indecent and people had to be shielded from seeing it. Too immodest.”

But this was Israel I thought. Israel is a liberal voice in the arts and I was so startled by the idea that what I was watching was only months before unacceptable to peer at through a window. So much human beauty hidden from sight when it should be celebrated.

It reminded me of the challenges I had been advised of in terms of Cultural Sensitivity when coming to the region. But those warnings had been for Arab societies. Yet again, these two sides were not so very different.

“You know I used to go to Ramallah all the time to listen to jazz. It’s illegal for me to go there now.”

I never asked him which side had made that law.

The sound of oranges

Abu Dhabi, Tuesday morning, the 12th of May.

From the marble flooring to the wood arm chairs to the business man in his two button, two piece deep brown suit and not-too-matching tie to the insane price for internet access here in the Novotel one could close his eyes and be anywhere in the States. Except he’s talking on his cell to someone who is, apparently, “the guy” to the Sheikh, which he says just loud enough to make sure that everyone knows its an impressive call. “So, should I just grab the Sheikh at the end of the wedding, in the reception line, and ask him for a few minutes then?”

Grab the Sheikh? Really?

The cognitive dissonance of this is impossible to relay. Much as I love words I cannot express the mental confusion of being 8 time zones from Washington and yet surrounded by English, by Western dress, by cappuccino and the chill blast of air from an overactive A/C system. It’s a form of disassociation, challenging you to hold the brain cells together and remind yourself that you are in fact in an utterly other part of the world.

And then there is the sound of shattered oranges. Fruit is ubiquitous in this journey. Far from being a “have to find it” commodity as it is in the States, here it is everywhere, in every restaurant, in every hotel and in every home. Here, at 8:44am, I am on my second glass of fresh squeezed orange juice., doubling my intake in 30 minutes over that of the last six months. The oranges, the carving knives, the grinders, are in each restaurant, and the grating sound of their evisceration is omnipresent, an underlying tempo to the rhythm of the morning. Strange to notice this above all the other sounds in a room.

The Middle East of our experience, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, is suddenly far distant. The age of a place cannot be invented or invoked (except by the occasional genius who forges 2,000 year old antiquities which end up in great museums until called out with a sigh and a shock), and when that age is of thousands of years the rush of the 10 year old hotel, the 20 year old main thoroughfare, the smell of wet cement and deep humid air is grating.

Step outside the hotel and you are immediately smacked by the thickness of it, of the air, tangible, taste-able, laced not with the tang of salt but the acrid hint of diesel and petrol fumes. Around you are all the trappings of a fully modernized city. More than the trappings. Its an immersion. There is an abundance of everything in a way that parallels, and exceeds, the lack of basics in Ramallah. It is care-free in this sense. Open and alive in the way Miami and Vegas are with motion and activity.

Can’t speak to the culture because it is distant, over the horizon.

Bound for...

...Abu Dhabi. Virtually nothing in these past 16 days has been what we would have guessed it would be. Traveling with this young a group, with several out of the States for the first time, has opened eyes but also revealed the world to be filled with the challenges of inexperience. What is commonplace here is unheard of at home. Flying across the entire length of Saudi Arabia, passing in the setting sun 35,000 feet below us, one thinks of the utter differences in that society and in ours. On the flight we are bound together by identity but more by the simple fact that we are on this one small aircraft and completely dependent upon it for our individual futures. If it were to land in the desert, under Saudi law, what would each of us experience?

The women next to me have come, it appears, from a haaj, from Mecca. They have in their bags a poster of the Great Mosque, picturing the elegant and honored moment when a swirl of black clad pilgrims circle it in an intense and profound ritual of worship. It is not something I would be permitted to see even if I wished to be there. My experience of it will be this one, of two middle aged women, completely inexperienced to flying and to the world at large, with exquisite headwear and down coats (in May) completely baffled by our fast talking, stunning stewardess asking them in lightning fast English whether they want salmon or chicken. The poster, stuffed into their carry on bag, alongside a plastic shopping bag with an inscription in Arabic over a painting of a woman, shoulders bare, black tresses flowing, with an impossibly large red hat looking knowingly towards me, is as close to Mecca as I will ever get. These two women, who complete their meal by opening an enormous canned corn, scooping it out in the only actual flatware I have seen served on an airplane in memory, with the scent of pilgrimage upon them, are my intersection with one of the core duties of being a Muslim – to go at least once to Mecca.

Inside that seductive image is something that is, indeed universal. It contains a tan Teddy Bear, bound, no doubt, for a little one waiting in a home somewhere over the horizon of what I know and possibly what I can imagine. They speak no Arabic and no English, they possess perhaps the worst cabin etiquette I’ve ever experienced, but the are so happy, so chatty, that none of it really matters. The contradictions of the bag, the New Orleans or old Charleston ingénue, and their manner is matched and then completely exceeded by the two women in full Hijab a row behind me.

Sitting in this first row of coach I have the legroom of first class, the seat of coach and a view, through barely closed dividing curtains, of the passengers in first. The newspapers are all in Arabic; the watches worth a years salary. The curtain parts and a man peers through in a classic white dish dash, with sandals and headwear. He is unshaven, with deep eyes, scanning the cabin. In the States he would be both an anomaly and a source of fear. His stepping through that curtain would inflame every stereotypical insecurity of a post 9-11 community on an aircraft.
Here he’s just looking to see if the rear cabin rest room is vacant.

The pilot comes on to say that we’ve just crossed out of Saudi airspace, entering the United Arab Emirates. The time on the clock jumps ahead another hour and we’re 8 hours in front of the States. Here its 8:09pm. An irony of the time zone is that it is used on only a small strip of the world, and the major cities are Muscat, the capital of Oman, Victoria in the Seychelles, and Port Louis in Mauritius (is it any wonder that two of those are utterly Western names?). The world clock skips a beat above Abu Dhabi, jumping not one but two hours ahead for the rest of the world. We are East of the African continent, East of Madagascar. North of us is Iran and Iraq. West of us is the Saudi desert and south of us….nothing below Yemen. To jump off the horn here you would not yet again encounter land until you came, at last, to the ice of Antarctica. We are at this moment closer to Australia than to the United States.

A woman walks by in the traditional black of a Muslim woman entering a conservative country. A moment ago, heading in the opposite direction, she was in an elegant pants suit. Yet in this moment on this plane we all co-exist simply, bound by that same purpose as of an hour ago --- confined to the cabin.

A sneak peak from Wadi Rum

We had the chance to film and photograph in Wadi Rum, the protected reserve in Jordan yesterday.

Here's a quick peak at some of what we did....

Time to go

Its about 1:30 in Jordan. In 30 minutes we board a bus for the airport and a 4:30 flight out to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The notion of leaving this part of the world is strange now. I've just come from watching from the back of the balcony a performance of Dancing in One Language, our ubiquitous outreach program performed today for the entire student body here at King's. I am reminded always that there is so much more that unites us than divides us. The young people here take in the program in so much the same way as they do in Anacostia, in Rockville, in Philadelphia. They find the same charm in Roger & Lucie (the tale of a boy and the mop with which he falls in love after she comes to life in classic Disney fashion), they find the same odd vocabulary and confusion leading to fascination with "Harmonica Breakdown," Jane Dudley's 1938 masterwork about change and challenge in New York.

And what is not so different, though you would think it is, is that few have seen what we do here as few have seen what we do in the States. Dance is new in this part of the world -- modern dance, western dance -- and yet we encounter this at home in almost the same way. Each program is an introduction. Each program is a guide, a window, into what could be, given a chance, a truly universal language. What stop it from being so is the striking lack of exposure, not the lack of commonality. We do speak these languages of movement together. Today is just further proof of a truth that needs more time, and more advocates, to flower.

Time to pack up, say farewell, for now, to Jordan and to an extraordinary country, people and time in life.

But we'll be back.

Looking for Lawrence (part 1)

From the town of Madaba, in which King's Academy sits, the road to the south is covered in the contradictions of modern life smashing into tradition. King's is the first coeducational private institution in the Middle East. Walk its campus, with grassy hills, freshly planted trees notched into the landscape, granite walkways and a clock tower situated at the mid point and you could breathe the air of New England on a May day. The students are in western clothes. They banter as kids do -- loudly.

The dining hall is a cacaphony of glasses crashing together, of laughter and voices bouncing off the high A frame ceiling past the lecturne and the wall jacks for microphones and overhead systems. The food is pasta and chicken and the pita is off to the side but present. Yet the language is Arabic far more than English. The school is in its infancy, and despite the trappings of a high income, high society Andover or Choate, the bulk of its students are scholarship and they come from around the country in search of the best and brightest to lead the Kingdom into the second half of the 21st Century. It is the King's Academy quite literally, and the concern for who will guide the country is clearly present and proactively considered.

But a few feet beyond the guarded gate other worlds emerge. Southbound down the main highway the three + hour drive to the ancient city and landscape of Petra are the seemingly endless intersections of ways of life challenged, cherished and churned up. Down the black tarmac of the highway, looking straight ahead, the highway and transportation system in unremarkable save for the utter disregard for the dividing lines for traffic and lanes. Cars wander between and astride them in ways you can't do in the States without incurring the road rage for which we are too well known. Here is it unremarkable and odds are that if you observed the lane system too closely you'd just end up causing the chaos you were trying to avoid.

But at the tarmac's end everything changes. Just past that blacktop life intersects, and does so in ways that can lead you to impressions devoid of understanding or simply missed. Countless herds of goats, tended in the tradition by a lone man and an aged stick, edge the road, slipping onto it at the margin and herded back with a combination of care and casualness that reminds that this has been going on since antiquity. What is odd is the realization, not that there are goats, but that there is something about the road's edge that makes for a more fertile landscape, laced with more vegetation. The ridges of the road attract moisture in some way, and that facilitates green growth and that, in turn, invites the goats. They coexists and the ancient becomes oddly dependent upon the infrastructure. Herds of goats abound. You see them in small grassy areas surrounded by the detritus of car repair warrens with people bent over hoods as the grease monkeys of the States are. They intersect. But they are not, as seems to be too easily missed, a sign of backwardness or poverty. They are tradition, and tradition is at play with the times here. It cannot be seen through Western misunderstanding.

Yet there are oddities everywhere. Over long stretches of the road south you see the narrow black tubing of slow-drip agriculture. Those tubes are linked to well-spaced green cylinders set on steel a few feet above ground. Each of these has a single tube tracing out from the center at bottom and running through the cement footings into the ground. Its ground-water and these tanks, surrounded on all sides by fencing are irrigating. But it is what they are irrigating that is the surprise. Just as we do in the States, beautifying the great ugliness of highways, these cylinders are feeding water to trees and shrubs planted, single-file, along the highway. Behind them is sand and rock and semi-desert. Before them is highway. One day it seems that you will drive the southbound route and tallk pines and shrubs will convey to you the greenness of a lush landscape. Why? Is there a master plan to it, or is it just that someone somewhere sought a way to make the road lovely?

From the corner of your eye you catch a rush of orange. At road's edge a single man is standing atop a crate placing the last set of rich orange carrots atop a great cone of them. Thousands of carrots piling up against the brown landscape. In the distance a tent, set in the traditional rectangle. Even at distance you can see the hues of orange and yellow and gold of fresh fruit. The front of the tent is peeled back on each side, and, for an instant, an aged man sits, cross-legged and still, his Kaffiya on his head, his long dish dash draped, and a cup of tea at his feet, appears. The next day, driving back, he will be again in that spot, seemingly unmoved, awaiting a traveller to purchase fruit.

Heading south, towards Petra, the landscape is more churned and battered. Part of it is nature's will. Part of it man's. There are signs of mining (phosphorous?) and the dust of diggging. Its compliments by the dust devils of nature's handiwork. They together raise dust into the air. The landscape goes green and radically brown and another green tank sits in the distance irrigating against the rush of desert.

Towns go by, all seemingly unfinished. Its as though a massive construction and urbanization program was undertaken, and then, mid-construction, someone said "just kidding," leaving the first floor unfinished and the second as no more than the first layer of cement pilings, the rebar jutting from it in forlorne ascent. Its everywhere. Yet inside some people sit and take tea.

The King is also everywhere. His portait abounds. But it is changing. In Amman it is he and his exquisitely beautiful wife and their children. Here he is in full military garb. Farther south that portrait changes to traditional garb. He is many people to many regions, yet remains remarkably one King. Its an incredible, and vital, balancing act, and everywhere there is a sense that he genuinely does it well.

Off in the distance a single man carries a vast bundle of twigs and sticks gathered from all around. Firewood. Yet in his left hand, balanced to an ear, is a cellphone. The shepherd to the left out the window swats at a stray goat while in mid sentence on his Nokia. There are no women to be seen anywhere.

In the distance a single rail line snakes along with the highway. It travels the entire length of the journey, heading, it seems, towards Aqaba.

Aqaba. From the land.

Lawrence was here.

5 minutes

There is a falafel shop in the Old City of Jerusalem where the shopkeeper makes what seems universally to be regarded as the best falafel in the Old City. He is apparently now a rich man, with many stores, but Suzan took us to the source. It was indeed great food. Sitting at this small restaurant, which is at the intersection of the third station of the cross, I became curious about the incredible range of people walking past. So I gave myself five minutes to photograph everyone who walked by.

The first image is of my colleague Shannon, the videographer of all trip and the person who has made the video blogs and mini-documentaries while I've done the text and photo entries. All the rest of the folks who will pass by here in the next few moments were portraits of a city in a moment in time.

Back across

Friday the 9th is really Friday the 13th, meaning its our 13th day since we left the States.

We're back in Jordan after another adventure crossing out of Israel/The West Bank. While this one didn't come with the capriciousness of an Israeli Customs agent lying to us about a new law demanding that our passports be stamped, it did take hours. But really it was uneventful but for the delay. 

We reached the Israeli/Jordanian border just before 8am. The gates to the crossing were not yet open, and so our taxi and the mini-bus that hauled us from Convent to crossing pulled over for a bit to await the start of the transit day. Getting out at the last slip of land in Israel (which was Jordanian by mandate in '48 and fell to the Israeli's in the '67 war) and walking a few feet away from the car set in motion the inevitable exploration. Just off the road itself endless cigarette packs lined the thick sand of the Jordan valley floor. History will reveal that Marlboros are the choice of drivers by a wide margin. The discarded packs popped up like spring flowers, and the butts of all those cigarettes, thousands of them, were the seeds. It made you understand just how many hours have been spent by taxi drivers waiting at that spot. There are bits of gum, an occasional water bottle or soda can. But mostly its just cigarettes and cement and rebar, the detritus from more tense times of barricades and shells. 

At the center dividing line between traffic bound for Jordan and traffic bound for Israel are the ubiquitous cement barriers. But unlike the Jersey walls in the States, these are cubes. They're painted as dice. Always a crapshoot crossing the border. Someone has a sense of humor or a sense of irony. 

You have to pay to leave Israel, and its not lost on one that someone somewhere has been sent back for lack of a few sheckels. 

The ride on the Jordanian side requires us to pile into four taxis. Shannon and I get the last one, and its just us, our cameras and our drivers. Who, as it turns out, is completely crazy. There's a video of our trip with him coming in the morning. We called it "moments with a madman." He was hilarious. Talking and singing and muttering and passing cars at insane speeds, honking at everyone, waving, yelling "HELLO" to any convertible he could encounter, and poking me in the shoulder regularly. At the end he gave Shannon the biggest, wettest kiss on the cheek I think I've seen in years. And it was all gums. Not too many teeth left in what had to be a 75 year old mouth. Hilarious. 

Saturday and Sunday we are off to Petra and Wadi Rum, and so will be off line for a day or so. But there will be stories to share for sure when we get back....

The Rosary Sisters

The Rosary Sisters

It’s about 7:45 in the morning on Wednesday, May 6, 2009. Here in Jerusalem the weather is perfect and cool. The sunlight is lacing the olive trees outside and making those remarkable patterns the thick leaves and needles do in a light breeze. The air here is very dusty. Filled, really. They say it’s only in spring that the winds rise up in such a way as to hurl the desert into the city.

The Rosary Sisters Convent is a guesthouse now as well as a convent. Dina found it through a family connection, and its just literally next door to the American Consulate. Its an enormous structure with room after room after room, as you would expect. Down a long corridor one finds, in the morning, the Sisters at breakfast. There are only a few of them to our eyes. If there are more they are quiet and sequestered somewhere out of sight. In the guest dining room there is a wall-to-wall map of the world. It has little pictograms of soldiers with various populations of them by country. In the world today there are either 195 or 196 countries (depends on whether you count things like the Vatican).  On the map in the Sisters’ Dining Room there are 63. The map, like the city in which it has been looking down upon the endless stream of visitors to the Convent, is frozen in Political time. The map of the Middle East shows Jordan as the power in the West Bank.

 

The highway to Nazareth.

A divided land.

In a taxi heading north to the city of Jesus’s childhood. We’re in Israel proper at the moment, on the road at 130kpm. In the back seat of our Mercedes Benz taxi Tish, Julie and Shannon are sleeping. The scenery slips by and the topography changes. Ahead and to the left is Tel Aviv. We left Jerusalem about 60 minutes ago. From the steep hills of the West Bank we drove into a long plain. The trees a few meters above were pine covered. It could have been New Hampshire.

The highway out of Jerusalem was walled on either side, fortified in that most horrible of ways to which we have become accustomed. “On this side, Palestine; on that side, Palestine. Only the road is Israel,” says that driver. A strip of land appropriated to make a highway and locked inside those horrible high walls festooned with barbed wire.

Once into Israel proper everything relaxes. The roads are smooth and fresh paved. The traffic moves better than on I-95. Wide expanses of scrub brush and amber, dotted with olive groves and farms that run from the simple to the complex. And then a wall pops up on the right, just as those separating the Palestinians meters behind us from the Israelis. A sign on the road says, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, “settlement.” And you realize that even inside the country there is division, and that walls you hoped you had left behind pop up and cut off one from another. And then it is all ordinary again. The highway authority has been busily planting trees, beautifying the landscape. The scene again feels as if it could be in New England or Western Maryland. You realize that Israel has made a great country, a great infrastructure, rise. It feels so familiar, so well planned and made. It reminds you of what brilliant things they have accomplished in just a short tie.

A sign for Tiberium passes. This was the seat of Roman government, and exceptional and elegant city in antiquity that is being rediscovered through archaeology. It was in Tiberium that they found the name of Pontius Pilate.

To the left more Pine forests; to the right, as the land begins to slope again and slide, rich groves. The minarets of mosques peak above the woods, and small cities and villages come into view and vanish. There’s a sulfur odor suddenly and the realization of some industry over the hill comes into your mind. Israel has many mosques. We’re in an Israeli arab area. There are Israeli flags on the roads and endless mosques in the distance.

Ten kilometers down the road and we’re in a valley. The first sign for Nazareth comes and goes, along with a second sign to Tiberium (or Tiberias). The gals are awake and the conversation has turned inevitably to Christianity and the question of the Gnostic gospels and the endlessly debated issue of “the true gospels.”

Yesterday Katherine and several other members of the Company took a walk through the Old City and went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In wanting to learn a bit more about where they were Alice asked a man standing by the slab where Jesus was laid who seemed to know and be interested in sharing. He promptly informed them that he was a prophet, had died in the 1970s and knew the future. And that was just the beginning. In relating this story last night on the bus back from the closing night performance Dina, listening to them related that he was indeed a prophet, said "yeah, and I'm the snake in Jungle Books." Which, of course, she is. So who knows what his real deal may be.

The road to Jerusalem

The history of Jerusalem is so intimately tied to the history of the world that it is often impossible to distinguish one from the other. The definitions of world view, of faith, of values, of societies and politics stem from this place as the headwaters of the Ganges sustain an entire civilization. It's almost impossible to take in.

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where standard Christian historiography says that Jesus died, was taken and laid down from the cross, and then entombed, the various Christian sects are so divided that the have been know to beat each other with broomsticks, palm leaves and other implements over who cleans what, when and how. There is ladder on the second floor, outside the entrance to the Church. It is a simple wooden ladder, with nothing unusual or ornate. It's been there, in that spot, for over two hundred years because the monk or cleaning person who put it there TO CLEAN THE WINDOWS, didn't follow protocol in the agreement between the different sects within the Christian hierarchy and go called out. No one can agree to move it, so its there, atop perhaps the most sacred site in Christianity, in plain sight.

Inside the incredible Old City of Jerusalem, which is without question one of the most extraordinary sites I have ever taken in, a long market walkway, with floor stones thousands of years old, leads to a stair. As you walk up the stair you encounter stall after stall of all manner of goods, from frankincense to plastic baby toys. Walk to its lead step and the air goes quiet. There is commerce ALL around you. Five steps from the top an Israeli soldier steps from the shadows and stops you. He waves to put your camera down for a moment. He tells you "not now," but then relents and allows you to the top of the stair. To your left is a man who operates/owns the kiosk closest to the aged door. As you rise to the landing you realize that, through the door, is the Al Aksa Mosque, the third most holy site in all of Islam, the place where Muhammed ascended to heaven. IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES.

My colleague Shannon asks me details and I tell her about the raising of the Temple of Solomon by the Romans in 79AD (the destruction of which paid for the building of the Roman Colesseum), the creation of the Mosque, the sparking of the first Intifada by Ariel Sharon walking that revered landing. A man comes through the door and stops just long enough to look at me and say "it's history my friend. What can you do?" and then disappear down the steps.

The shopkeeper to my left says, "do you know what? My family has owned this place, this kiosk, for 1,600 years?" And you know instinctively he is not kidding.

Descending the stairs, you come down to an intersection, and at that intersection is the man who said "it's history." He invites you to his store and you enter to find it completely filled with every spice history tells you the Middle East is defined by. His colleague takes 20 minutes to share each and everyone one with you, to smell them, explore them and invite you to understand them in the context of an ancient land.

He hands you bread better than you have ever tasted and when that smile reaches your lips he says "its the water. Only Jerusalem has this water." And you believe him.

Day one in Jerusalem. And its not even noon.

Found in translation

One of the works we are presenting here is "Entangled" a work originally made in January of this year. As originally conceived it played to a contemporary classical score by Lepo Sumera. It never really worked in its original configuration, and it was a dance I was going to drop before, by the luck of things, I discovered the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. That came about because of a meeting arranged for me by the Department of State with the Palestinian Minister of Culture.

Darwish is an icon here, and even in english translation it was quickly easy to understand why. I found a particular poem that spoke to me, and to a subtle current running through the original "Entangled." It was the way to revitalize the dance.

The idea was to present the work in Arabic, in the original language, and let the dancers take it in as music. They wouldn't understand the words, but they would understand the cadence, the lyricism and the magic of the sound. Arabic, especially its poetry, is deeply musical.

The poem I chose is, or was, called "Night Overflowing the Body." That's the Jeffery Sachs translation of the title. Except its wrong. We have had the privilege of working with brilliant authors and artists here in bringing the work to the stage, spoken live. The first, in Amman, was Taher Riad, a man who was a close personal friend of Darwish. When we met he said "the translation into English is all wrong." He offered to, and then did, translate it again for me, and all of a sudden the poem, its intimacy, its meaning and grace become clear the way Dorothy opening the door into Oz did in taking the world from black and white to color.

The actual title is "A Night Flooding From the Body." Its completely different. It goes from passive -- from something happening atop you, to something emerging from you, overwhelming you as emotion and experience.

I'll put both translations up next time I write.

Stepping Up

Any international experience takes the challenges, stresses and theatrical insanity of a Stateside performance and magnifies them about 30 times. You succeed or fail entirely because of people rising to that challenge. To a person everyone here has done that, and then gone far beyond.

It takes days to understand those challenges, then time to process the depth of what is about to be demanded of you. You thrive or you end up losing ground. Its extraordinary to me how much people have taken on, exceeded what they each thought was possible and then found the joy in the experience.

Show tonight in Jerusalem. Meetings throughout the day.

More later.

A few shots from the performance in Ramallah

5/3/09

We danced tonight in Ramallah. The full repertory concert of "Thirst." I finally had a few moments to photograph the last two dances in the concert, "Scorched" and most of "Thirst." Thought to share a few....

A few other images from the West Bank

The inevitable...

....question. What is the real situation, as seen from the ground, in the West Bank? It's the subject of articles every day in the paper. It's the subject of books that fill shelves in stores around the world. It dominates conversation in the UN and is the sole mandate of a special envoy, George Mitchell, from the United States. Even starting to frame an answer to that question opens the ultimate Pandora's Box.

As with all situations involving life, justice and injustice, you are confronted by the "depends on what side you see it from" dilemma. How do you develop a vantage point, a perspective, that stays objective? Or is it meant to be that you have to take a side, a stand? And, if you do, what does that do for your ability to contribute ultimately to a solution? What, if any, role can/does an American dance company serve in that discussion, that dialogue, that world? Before we left the States I was challenged by a past patron over why we were even coming to the West Bank. For him an agenda which doesn't exist lay under every conversation. It lead me the reprimand my own staff for the terms of art they used to describe where we were going. What was "the Palestinian Territories" and what was Israel.

When, if ever, can you use the word "Palestine" in conversation without igniting debate and forcing a situation where people think you have "taken sides?" In the end, what I find is that we are doing what people do every moment of every day -- meeting other people and forging individual relationships that are ex-political, meaning, simply, not political. That may sound, and seem, naive, but what choice is there?

We, as a delegation of Americans from Washington, DC, are not going to invent peace in the Middle East. Each of our experiences, and each will be very different from one another, will frame not a region but a life. We will bring back different tales, different memories, and those will infuse themselves into our individual lives, as the experience of meeting us will shape the lives of the others we meet here. It is the weaving of small webs that will last. People came here afraid on many levels, persuaded by the stories on the news that this was a war zone, that walking down the street put your life at risk. It's not and it hasn't. That alone is worth the journey.

We are, by nature, tribal in my view. We form bonds and communities, and develop passion and care for those, and in so doing too easily develop an "us against them" mentality that is somehow preternatural, built into our genes. Its a survival technique. But its built for a less complex time, and for a world that no longer exists. But when you are, as we are here, in the midst of a land, and of peoples, divided literally by walls, separated by funnels in the form of checkpoints and barriers, where you can see the lights of Jerusalem from our hotel but are with people who cannot travel there but could travel to the States, you are forced into the reality that goals, and visions, do not merge with reality easily.

There are artists from all around the world here for this festival. They have traveled great distances, stood in many lines for many hours, raised many funds and done so for, often, 90 minutes on stage in an elegant theater (or theaters) in the cradle of so many great civilizations. Why? The easy answer is "because its what we do." But the honest answer if far, far more complex and far, far more individual. The shell overlying a trip like this is the performance we leave behind.

The nutrients in the soil beneath it is the experience and life we take away.

Other images

The morning of May 1 we headed out from Amman to Ramallah. As noted in an earlier post, it was a journey that took many hours but would have seemed likely to have taken but one. Travel days being what they are, people arrived in Ramallah more tired than they would have been doing two shows. We stacked the cabs in classic National Lampoon vacation fashion.

Within seconds of departing the cab I was in was separated from the others and so we raced on another to the border. Descending from the hills of Amman to the Dead Sea, a valley which, long past, was part of a vast inland sea that is steadily drying out, becoming more and more saline with each liter of evaporation, you feel the heat rise, the air thicken and, unexpectedly, the land become more fertile. The sea itself, on the horizon over a hill marked by a sign in arabic and english "sea level of the dead sea" in ancient times, and the sea level at present, is startling in its utter blackness, absorbing light like a blanket. Almost all the company went there our first full day in Jordan and floated around, salt stinging their eyes and relaxing their spirits.

At the Jordanian border everyone assembled their bags (we're carrying 30 somehow) and a few stopped just outside border control for a picture with Lucie (who, by the way, has logged more air miles than anyone in CityDance's lifetime than me).

But travel is travel, and by 2pm Jason and everyone else had that "are we there yet look."


Tish, pictured at left, is at a stop in the West Bank, about 15 minutes outside Ramallah. On the horizon is an Israeli settlement. The issues between these two peoples are literally visible at every turn.

The unavoidable

And then there's the drama of travel.

One week in we have lost a 17 inch MacBook Pro because we left it in the x-ray machine at Delta Airlines. Four days of frantic calls yielded nothing from all sides of the various countries and oceans. And, just when it was clear we (meaning me) were in a real mess because it was out in the world, Delta writes to say they have it.

10 minutes before I read the email from Delta saying it was found one of the staff on the tour came down to the cafe in the hotel in which we were staying in Amman completely white because she thought her passport, wallet, credit cards and everything irreplaceable had been stolen. It was in her bag.

The following day one of the company members iPhones vanished from the stage in Amman during a cleaning sweep. Its still missing and presumed lost. (an appropriate service will be held when we get back).

Last night another one of the company members lost her mind when she lost her wallet, containing her passport, DL, credit cards and everything else somewhere in Ramallah. A night of frantic searching turned up nothing. It was in someone else's room.

These are the inevitable things of traveling. But they are insanely stressful, and add that madcap, 60s screwball comedy air to the day. That which is simple at home is complex here, and the random absent-mindedness that is commonplace at home becomes an "O H M Y G O D" moment far away. Lose a drivers license in DC and you have the hassle of getting another one and losing half a day. Lose your passport in Ramallah and......But we didn't, and things continue apace and we all just learn as we go.

3 Saturdays

I think when we decided two and one half years ago to stage "Jungle Books" as our family show we had dreams of it having some viability and some lasting values. I know we never dreamed of it doing what it is now. Think of it this way -- three Saturdays, three cities, two countries in consecutive order.

On Saturday April 18th we found ourselves in the Lansburgh Theatre at home in Washington, DC performing two shows, the first at 1pm and the second at 4pm. We had a cast of 25. Our Baby Birds premiered, four insanely adorable tykes who stole the show from the grown ups.

On Saturday April 25th we found ourselves in Baltimore, Maryland, in the Meyerhof Symphony Hall, guests of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. There were 1,500 kids in the audience for an 11am show. At the back of the stage, on a raised platform, sat five musicians, all but one veterans of the band Board Member Matt Jones founded, Bottomland. The music was Clifton Brockington at his crazy, creative best. The cast was almost completely different in their roles. Jason was stil Mowgli, Maleek was still Baloo. But everyone else was shifting around, literally on the fly. Daniel Zook, of CD2, played as many roles as one person cum animal could.

At 6pm we were on a plane.

On Saturday, May 2 were are here, in Ramallah in the West Bank. We upended almost the entire program, spent the day trying to ramp up a narrator to step into my role as Rudyard Kipling because the show text had been very roughly translated into Arabic. The cast couldn't understand the narrator. The narrator had no experience with dance. He spoke almost no english, so the only way we could communicate with one another was through Dina Ghandour, who we ultimately put on a headset wired to the booth just so we could cue him as to when to come up to the stage. We were changing entrances and exits for him at 5:30 for a 6pm curtain, and rehearsing him in the kitchen backstage till 6:10 (yes, that's 10 minutes after the show was supposed to start).

The cues were, literally, the only common words between us -- the names of Kipling's characters. Maleek knew to enter when the lights changed and when he heard his name, "Baloo" called. After a days rehearsals the actor still blew through his cues, eliminating Kaa's entrance altogether, throwing our newest Shere Khan, Christopher, onto the stage without warning, and the only way Julie (our TD) or I (calling the show and running sound) knew that something was wrong was when we heard Kaa's name too soon and our technical director in the theater went "ooops." It was a rock and roll show to be sure. We went from 25 dancers to 8. Delph, Liz (making her stage JB debut), Kathryn and Giselle turned into the craziest, cutest monkeys you've ever seen. People crashed into each other, Jason almost did a backflip into the boom.

But the kids loved it and clapped after almost every number and filled the theater.

I think its as close to heart failure as I have any interest in coming, but once the "it should have been perfect" dies away the reality is we just performed Jungle Books, in Ramallah, on a third consecutive Saturday, IN ARABIC.

Crazy.

Amman by night

A few other images from the Childrens' Museum

From April 30, 2009 at the Childrens' Museum

The Childrens' Museum (4/30/09)

The Childrens' Museum (Amman, Jordan)
April 30, 2009

Thursday, April 30 was a day of outreach performances for children coming to the Children's Museum in West Amman. One of the most beautiful an impressive buildings for little people I have ever seen, it was filled with kids from wide stretches of the country. Unlike so many of our own museums, this was, less than two years old, is very much an interactive one, with seemingly everything hands on. There were two JB outreach shows, and both garnered that same level of attention as at home. Thousands of miles away kids still know the story of Mowgli, still called out the name of the bear and still wondered where the Hell Bagheera was. They picked up a little tweak in the story that suggested that the Tiger had resolved is conflict with the boy, asked great questions and, in the first of two programs, clapped throughout all of the last scene. Jason, on a stone floor, went for it, with all the diving, turns and twists he would normally reserve for a more safe floor (its his birthday today, by the way).

The museum is located in an elegant and affluent section of the city, at the far west end, across from the City Mall (in which lay the only Starbucks I managed to get my very Washington hands on -- turns out that about the first thing every American asks for upon meeting with folks from the State Department is Starbucks. We no longer seem to care abour McDonalds, but woe to anyone denying us Starbucks).

The kids were from public schools in the first show, and one little girl in particular was so animated by the story that she was just up and out of her chair the entire time, dancing the steps (particularly Alice's). Kathryn, Delph, Giselle and Liz were the perfect monkeys, and just sold their roles as the mad Bandar Log.

Christopher, the reluctant Tiger, pressed into service when Jerome bailed and forced a cascade of role changes, was a great and completely different tiger -- long and lean and perfectly in the face of the kids. Maleek as well, moving over from Tiger to Bear in these past two weeks, moved in and around the kids and their teachers, emerging suddenly from a corner and delighting the kids, scaring the heck out of the teachers, and being the perfect best buddy.

Its a remarkable reminder, again and again, that kids are kids. We had been worried in our monkey outreach part, in which kids are invited to the stage to learn a part, that we would violate some of the cultural mores of keeping boys and girls separated. We wanted to be very careful, and very respectful, of this, and had set up a plan for Jason to bring the boys on stage and work with them and for the Monkeys (an all female band) to work with the girls, but everyone flowed in together and created a crazy wonderful energy.

Six and one half

...Hours since we left the hotel in Amman.

Six hours.

So, it’s 44 miles between Amman and Jerusalem. At speed it should take 40 minutes to get from the Old City of Amman to the Temple Mount. In traffic it should take 1:20. We are now six hours and counting and I am still sitting in the Immigration building here at the Allenby/Hussein bridge. The rest of the company has just jumped out and is bound for Ramallah. Somewhere in the innards of Immigration Control Christopher is trying to locate our last bag, which contains ALL our tape stock for the tour, our projector cables, various XLR cables and that assortment of things you absolutely have to have if you are going to make a documentary, and project images, on an international experience.

The Israeli passport office lived up to all its storied reputation for making it challenging to move across the border. The tradition is that if asked the Israeli's will put a paper stamp in your passport, rather than an actual stamp on the passport itself, to allow for Americans to travel to other countries in the Arab world. They refused today.

CKM has emerged from behind IC and all the bags are intact (except mine, which has chosen this particular moment to explode).

It’s 30 degrees warmer in the Dead Sea Valley than in Amman. Given that it’s a 30 minute drive that’s a bit startling. But it’s also the lowest land point on earth (which is a favorite thing to tell tourists).
In the Immigration Control Center there is, on the Israeli side, a poster that shows the many faces of the country an says, cleverly “believe in Israel.”

Khaki pants, an Uzi with the possessors right hand on the butt and left hand scratching his crotch. He’s wearing a blue and white striped polo shirt and Nikes to complete his outfit. No hat. No formal uniform. Just a gun that lets you know he’s official.

On the bus. I boosted a wifi signal here at the station. So this is real-time....

We’re just inside the Palestinian controlled West Bank. The bus from IC stopped 100 yards inside the border walls, laced with curved and snaking barbed wire and a sign that reads: “No Israeli citizens permitted across the border.”
The bus is parked, people are out smoking, there are diesel fumes wafting in with the blasting air conditioning and the bus is vibrating the way idling diesel buses do. I keep thinking about the systemic waste issues.

Jason is over my left shoulder asleep, as is almost everyone else. People are jumping back on board. Time to post and head out....

Immigration……
So, passport control…all they said it would be and more.