Global View

Shanghai Journal: Landings

2011-12-02T13:31:00.007-05:00

Shanghai journal

Friday, December 2, 11

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

And I like rice. Really.

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

And we wonder why revolutions happen…

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

China, it seems, is always hungry.

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

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

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

In a week.

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

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

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

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

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

102 Below

2011-11-28T17:28:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live.

On stage.

Outbound - Shanghai/Tel Aviv 11.27.11

2011-11-27T07:18:00.003-05:00

Washington National Airport

Sunday, December 27, 2011

And, of course, its never easy.

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

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

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

So Francisco got added.

Almost. Sort of.

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

And then there's Francisco.

He's from Chile.

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

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

At which point my phone rang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Shanghai calls and that's amazing.

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

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

2011-11-24T23:03:00.004-05:00

Basel Journal

Sunday, November 16, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Count on it.

Washington Journal: What images tell us....

2011-10-30T09:17:00.009-04:00

Washington, DC

Sunday, October 30, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's what images are for.

Wherever we have traveled in these past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats what images tell us.

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

2011-10-24T12:37:00.005-04:00

New York City

Monday, October 24 2011

The Bowery Hotel

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Rob Priore in Dayton, Ohio

October 24, 2011

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

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

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

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

Crazy.

Kyrgyzstan Journal: "Thank You for Calling Master Card"

2011-10-16T13:13:00.000-04:00

Washington, DC

Sunday, October 16th, 0050am

Inside the main entrance to the University

In the long, slow morning after Company E's standing-room-only concert at the Opera House in Bishkek five of us (Kathryn, Rob, Amanda and Christian, me) made our way West along State Route M39 out of the Capital and towards our Master Class at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in Kara-Balta. If you think that's a mouthful to write, try vocalizing it (but don't do it with anyone within ear-shot....). The drive was about 90 minute from the Silk Road Hotel (where we would later go on to leave our lasting impression by the shattering of a glass-top table as our last act after checking out at 3:40 in the morning) and as always the view out the window told many tales so unlike those in the city itself. Time travels backwards in Central Asia very easily.

Unlike most bus-rides, though, this one came with its own soundtrack. We'd come equipped with Season One of "Mad Men" and the mid-point of Don's endless dalliances. The van had the sound system and video that one only dreamt about as a kid in a hot car on a summer "trek." And, as the scenes of semi-rural life went by outside, the scenes of America at the turn of the 60s went by front-of-cabin. As with so many things that seem at first incongruous, this one, too, would later reveal itself to be in so many ways fitting to our destination.

An old guardian still lives outside the Capital....

At the beginning of "Mad Men" lie the roots of the 60s, but Don, Roger and the mens club of "Mad Men" are very much Nixon men. Kennedy was for the girls, as it were. The Soviets are everywhere in people's minds even though we are months removed from the Bay of Pigs and years from the Cuban Missile Crisis. The cars are long and loud, just like the ones outside the van. The phones have dials and long straight black cords that snake into the walls. The length of walk-around-while-talking travel in a call is only that of the length of that cord. Its not today where a single conversation begins in the kitchen, extends through getting ready to leave the house and often terminates at a destination 30 miles away and involving unlocking and locking doors, navigating traffic lights and finding a way to stay connected while talking to a parking attendant two-levels down into the earth.

One State Route M39 the road is rough and Kathryn, a seat behind me is verbally at war with the unfaithful Mr. Draper. Up front someone is snoring.

Along that old road, the kind of road that assuredly was once upon a camels back part of the entire silk road network the dust kicks up easily and the pot-holes, though not deep, are ubiquitous. Your liver gets a workout even though the van's breaks and shocks had been replaced sometime in the night.

As we wound our way along the reality of just how in the middle of nowhere we were took hold. Small mud or brick homes, low-slung stood set-back from the road. The windows were small and the slope of the roof too like the old sway-backed mare out to pasture to create any comfort. Before long livestock became a part of the scenery -- not rural livestock but the kind that accompanies a semi-transition into a store-bought life -- chickens, an occasional goat, a mule. There is still much of what people need to be found in those animals at the foothills of the Tien Shen Mountains and Whole Foods is 10 time zones and a life-time distant.

As we neared the end of the first episode we were watching, as Don flashed back to his Korean origin story (if you know the show it will make sense, if not -- well, download it or something), we also neared the entrance to the University and our first encounter with one VI Lenin. Banished from the cities his presence is far from absent in the country and small towns. He is, here in this small city, clear and present.

The van, as it pulls to a stop outside the entrance to this "Tara-like" mix of a mansion and a mausoleum, groans a bit. The air is clear and clean and the Company tired.

At the top of the long stairs to the right, past ferns and paintings of plants and V.I. himself a woman, early 50s with blond bangs, black spandex, a ballet-skirt and what can only be described as an ample figure proudly shared through a low-cut leotard presents here students. Here there are ways to show respect that we forget at home -- and whether they are needed or not is irrelevant. You honor those ways to return that respect. The rooms moves as one in a mini-ballet of welcome.

One of the young artists who enchanted our class in Kara-Balta.

The class begins and Rob, in his wonderful way, sets about torturing a room-full of young minds and bodies and making them love him for it. How much laughter are we really used to in jumping jacks? Yet he always elicits love with what will, a day later, be serious abdominal angst when they try to get out of bed.

I vanish back down the stairs.

Outside Lenin waits. Inside Lenin waits.

But the contrasts are overwhelming. In the front chamber the ever-present woman, guarding the castle, as it were, sits at her desk. The phone by her right arm is, surely, the original one. I'd seen one just like it in the van on the screen. Black. A long cord stretching from its base to the wall. Small metal rotary dial. When it rings the plaster shakes. Her record-book is as old as the building, it seems. Yet it all works and that building will stand a million years from now. Its 1960 again. Just like on TV.

But its also 2011. Her face glows a bit in the half-light. Some comes from the windows behind her. But most of it comes from the enormous flat-screen TV in front and to her right. On the screen are two avatars and in front two boys with controllers battling it out in Wii land. The sounds are digital and analogue combines as they yell and the phone rings. Behind them a tin relief of a bare-breasted woman, paint brush and palette in one hand, hammer-and-sickle in the other, reflects light as on a pond at twilight. In the corner V.I. watches and on the wall, barely visible, he stands in his study examining the papers of the day.

It all fits into one small hallways down Route M39 outside Bishkek. "Mad Men" lies 50 years in the past, yet save for that Wii and a bit of time travel it was yet in front of me in a cool October morning. Upstairs an iPod blasted out Rhianna and ADELE. Downstairs a phone rang on a handset my grandparents would recognize. In the studio young bodies with feet in both worlds laughed at the 100th sit-up.

The day before the Company left the States Kathryn called her credit card company.

"I'm calling to let you know I'm going out of the country and want to be sure I can use my card."

"Sure. No problem. Where are you going?"

"Kyrgyzstan."

"Ok. And what country is that in?"

Its a fair question.

Thank you for calling Master Card....

Kyrgyzstan Journal: Even here...a story for Mr. J.

2011-10-09T06:02:00.006-04:00

Washington, DC

Sunday, October 9, 2011

6:03am

Aeroflot flight #179 from Moscow touched down in the deep night air in Biskhek, Kyrgyzstan at 5:04am on Monday, the third of October. Reflexively I looked at the time and re-set it to the local time, two hours further east from Moscow, 10 from Washington.

Against common sense I checked email, turning on the cell phone and using the data search to find a local Kyrgyz carrier. I put the phone back in my pocket and gathered my belongings from the overhead, the under-seat and all the other places I store my technology and gadgets when on the road and in a cabin at 35,000 feet. For some reason I remembered standing in line in O'Hare in mid-July, arrived just from Hong Kong, a bundle of books in my arms because I had given my iPad to Aidan for his 14th birthday and hadn't replaced it. For some reason I thought I really didn't need it anymore, and that books were fine. The Buster Keaton (look it up) imitation standing in immigration, and then in security for the connection to DC provided far, far too much amusement for the people behind me, and, finally, led one guy with a belly stretching to Texas and a drawl to match to say "Man, get with the 21st century -- get a Kindle."

Disembarking, my back left pocket buzzed -- the little alert that tells me when I have mail (a far cry from "You've Got Mail" to be sure). It then double-buzzed to tell me that there were also SMS messages waiting and, finally, pinged -- voice mail.

The trip to Kyrgyzstan had come up so last minute that I hadn't had a chance to get my visa before arriving in Bishkek. They're easily obtained at Manas International Airport, a tiny, old Soviet construction place where the lights buzz and the smell of cigarette smoke clings. A small line for the one overworked immigration officer was simple if slow, and in about 15 minutes my passport had its latest piece of paper allowing me access.

The entire operation for immigration -- entry, visas, security, border control -- is no more than 40 feet long and 25 wide. Three immigration kiosks, the usual machinery and scarred floors from too many feet and too much buffing, all stood in close proximity.

I'd been at the very back of the plane, and with my visa process was the very last to complete everything. Immigration was empty and the kiosks closed save for one.

I had my knapsack on my right shoulder, cameras and lenses on my left and my phone in my hand, pulling mail and searching the directory to figure out what Hotel I was going to (I had no recollection and I needed to be sure in case the transportation arranged didn't arrive).

The kiosk open was at the far right, next to the window overlooking the tarmac. My face, I suspect, glowed a bit from the light of the display screen as I pushed my finger over the screen, sliding the mail cue up and down looking for my itinerary. Usually we get asked where we are staying, and I figured probably best to have some idea when that question arose.

I put my passport down on the counter and said good morning. All routine.

And then, suddenly, there was a guard -- tall, thin -- maybe 6'1" at my right shoulder. "Hi," he said. Not the usual greeting from a border guard. He said something in Russian and then there were three guards around me. And then a second at the kiosk.

That's typically not a good sign.

"iPhone?"

I looked at him and he looked at my hand. At my phone. At the buzzing, beeping, humming, find your hotel walking through an aged and aching airport in the dead of an October night deep inside a tiny country still battling with Lenin's ghost in so many ways (more on that another time) machine in my hand that fit easily in my palm. He was snake-charmed. Transfixed.

"iPhone!" He said and looked around to the other guards.

He held out his hand and, for all practical purposes, pulled my iPhone from my hand -- a bit of gold glowing in the night. It wasn't an offensive gesture in any way. Just one of anticipation and breathlessness.

He took it with a bit of wonder it seemed, and over his shoulder the other two guards outside the kiosk leaned over his shoulder. He looked at me again, wanting a lesson in iPhone-ese. And so, for a few minutes, we played with my phone - the mail, the browser, the internet and the video and then, finally, the music.

"Music -- how?"

I pulled up the last thing I had been listening to. Randomly, it was Miles. Kind of Blue. "So What." He put it to his ear, then looked for the sound, which was coming from the tiny, tiny speakers at the machine's base. High-hats tick-ticking and then Miles's opening solo, just loud enough to echo, faintly, through the Manas immigration room at 6 am on an October morning.

He played with the screen, with multi-touch, and I wondered, for a moment, if I'd ever put my hands on my magic device again. But standing there, in that space, the random American walking half a dozen border guards through the wonder of that little machine -- completely non-verbally because we couldn't actually talk to each other -- the world got small, and easy and friendly and funny. All because of little box calling out one of the great albums of all time.

Finally, and a little possessively, I took it back from this guy -- this lit-up guy. My passport had been stamped minutes before. An after-thought, really.

We all said, in our way and language, good bye. You never say good-bye to border guards -- particularly not in Post-Soviet countries where its all so random. But we did -- bonded by a little wonder that went quietly back into my back pocket, buzzing again as it did so.

Turing past the kiosk and just before the door that took me to my luggage, with the sound of the moment fading, the guard said one last thing to me.

"iPhone. COOL MAN."

Two days later, at the Silk Road Hotel, sitting on my Mac and typing in a note before the day start Jason, in the other room, said "Steve Jobs died."

For some reason that moment in the airport was the first thing which came to mind. All my years of love of these machines, of my endless evangelism for them, for my gloating and glee as all the people who told me over the years that Apple was a fad, a faded company, a place where children went to buy their toys but business people shunned and all the things I'd heard for so long but which had utterly vanished in the past years, came back to that moment in Bishkek. I gave iPhones to friends when they came out in 2007 -- it was the present for the people I loved the most, a machine -- but more than a machine.

I've wondered for days what to say about Wednesday's news. So many elegant words from so many brilliant people -- I wanted to say something, but couldn't imagine what I could offer. And then I thought about Monday.

As I gathered my luggage, the kiosk doors closed behind me and the early, early dawn coming to Biskhek, I heard Miles in my pocket. I'd forgotten to pause the iTunes track, downloaded from the iTunes store onto my MacBook Pro, transferred to my iPhone some years earlier. I thought of that border guard. Of the wonder of that machine now buzzing away.

"Even here," was all I remembered thinking in that moment.

"Even here" those ideas, those dreams, those machines and those tiny bits of genius resonated, bringing smiles, wonder, cordiality and a moment across so many different collisions of culture in the pre-dawn Central Asian air.

"Even here."

Kyrgyzstan Journal: A Master Class image gallery

2011-10-05T01:23:00.003-04:00

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Wednesday, October 4, 2011

On Monday October 3rd the Company began its working time here in Kyrgyzstan with a Master Class program at the Seitek Center for Children. The students of the Youth Ensemble spent a few hours with Jason, Christian, Amanda, Rob and Kathryn learning a bit about the contemporary work of the Company....

Valencia/Madrid Journal: A reluctant farewell

2011-10-01T17:54:00.002-04:00

Madrid, Spain

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Walking along the densely packed, verbal, social and sensual streets of Madrid in the early evening tonight, trying to take in every image, scent and sound I turned to Belén, my graceful, careful and thorough guide this past week of dozens of encounters in three exceptional cities and said, simply "this is an easy country to fall in love with."

In this past year perhaps only Rome has had the impact on my spirit that these three cities - Madrid, Barcelona and the most subtle jewel of them all, Valencia have. There is a grace at work, combined with a restlessness, that leaves you a bit breathless. Elegance meets a sense of a country in deep distress as the unemployment rate pushes above 20%. Barcelona by night was a wonder, and yet at every turn people told me to "be careful." My camera, the ubiquitous Nikon D3 and 80/200 2.8 is always an attraction. But there, in the old city, in the empty yet utterly alive streets it garnered warning after warning -- "he shouldn't bring that in here" was the common refrain.

Yet despite all the warnings, and despite the hair standing ever so slightly up on the back of my neck, an internal warning that time in strange places have told me to attend to, the images were just too urgent to turn away from. Sometimes the camera has the control far more than you. It knows more than you do and wants more than you do. It knows, for lack of a better way to put it, that a picture is waiting. However crazy that may sound, its the truth.

As the sun set tonight I found myself in a working-class neighborhood in Madrid, in a town square filled with immigrants, babies, soccer balls and the scent of more than a little illicit smoke. It was Saturday night and the weather, utterly perfect, emptied the houses and enjoined the streets to celebration, wine and beer and laughter and romance. Its was enchanting.

The reason for being there was not a simple tourist visit. It was "Don Quixote," (I found out a few hours later that the site where the house of the Master stood, where he was born and where he died, was literally around the corner from my hotel), and it was to talk, and to think, and to begin, and in the beginning seek a collaborator from Spain.

Last Sunday I went to a performance by Maite Larranetta, a show I wrote about earlier this week. It was to her neighborhood I went and to a meeting with her (and her nine month old Son). A simple chat in a park pub and a sense that I was on the right track, and that, just maybe, Don Q has the beginnings of a team....

Kyrgyzstan Journal: Departure Day (and Valencia day)

2011-09-29T15:01:00.002-04:00

Barcelona International Airport

Thursday, September 29, 2011

As I wait for my flight to Valencia the company gets ready in DC for a rendezvous at Dulles International Airport for the journey to Central Asia and to Bishkek, the Capital city of Kyrgyzstan. Company E's debut concert takes place in the Opera House, in partnership with the US Department of State on October 6th with our friends a partners from Samruk Dance Company.

For us its the start of an incredible journey in these next months. Christian Denice makes his company premiere. We show Roni Koresh's extraordinary "Theater of Public Secrets" (that's Amanda in the table solo in rehearsal in Philadelphia earlier this month above) and spend a week teaching and dancing.

Everyone lands in Bishkek on Saturday and I leave Spain, from Madrid (after Valencia) on Sunday for a Monday arrival. Kathryn has done a brilliant job of organizing everything from DC while I've been out of the country. Jason has set a great itinerary of classes. The Company is dancing beautifully and they're ready....

An amazing way to begin.....

Barcelona Journal: Day One -- a postscript in Images Part Two

2011-09-29T13:30:00.007-04:00

Barcelona Journal: Day One -- a postscript in Images

2011-09-29T03:00:00.006-04:00

Barcelona, Spain

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

In the heart of the Old City...

Barcelona Journal: The Coward of the County

2011-09-28T19:24:00.001-04:00

Barcelona, Spain

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Fifteen minutes before midnight, tearing down one of Barcelona's broad and beautiful boulevards at a good 45 to 50 miles and hour, weaving through the still thick traffic of a city that clearly does not believe in sleep -- or, if it does, it succumbs in shifts, staggered to ensure that its reputation as a place ever-alive is intact. Back seat of a black-and-yellow Barcelona taxi. Windows open. Night air fantastic and light, the most distant hint of salt and sea laced inside it.

The cabbie, driving left hand only, leaning forward into the wheel, tactile and present as though contemplating driving the cab with his chest. At every light he is forced to stop at he is all over the place looking for companions in next-door taxis to wave to, greet -- waving at the prettiest girl awaiting a light-change to green. Right hand never far from the volume control of the stereo -- an amped up stereo to understate it. Singing. Bobby and moving to the lyrics.

This is Catalonia, remember. Deep traditions. Passionate people. Passionate music. All day taxis were working the sound -- some to talk radio, some to music indigenously inflected. Spanish. Catalonian.

Kenny Rogers?

He hits the gas. Belén and I hit the back of the seat...

"He was only ten years old when his Daddy died in prison.

I looked after Tommy 'cause he was my brother's son.

I still recall the final words my Brother said to Tommy:

'Son my life is over but yours is just begun"

We zoom through the roundabout. Fountains in full glory. Cabbie in full throat.

"Sometimes you got to fight to be a man!"

A day that started with a bullet train from Madrid pulls to the hotel entrance and Kenny Rogers is restored to legend by a Caribbean cabbie in perfect english with EVERY lyric to "Coward of the County" at his lips.

Left hand at the wheel, Travis Tritt hits the stereo. The wind blows as the cab vanishes. You can't make this stuff up....

Welcome to Barcelona.

Madrid Journal: Of insects and artists

2011-09-26T17:46:00.005-04:00

Madrid, Spain

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Random quote for the day: In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness,” she said, “to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”

-- Wangari Maathai -- first African woman to win the Nobel Prize for her work on the environment. Maathai died yesterday of cancer in her hometown of Nairobi, Kenya

At the end of an exceptionally interesting, challenging and full day two young choreographers completed the journey with a visit at the hotel tonight at 8:30. What might have made for a tired conversation was instead a bit of inspiration centered on issues of climate change, environment, sanctuary and that word I so love in art -- honesty.

What they shared was a dance that lives on Vimeo and thus one I can share -- and has won prize after prize in its life. Fresh. Challenging. Fascinating.

The artists are Alvaro Esteban and Elias Aguirre and their work is presented under the name EA & AE...

Madrid Journal: 21 lights. 21 Lives.

2011-09-26T03:03:00.002-04:00

Madrid, Spain - Sunday, September 26th

21 lights. 21 lives.

“This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers., instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in midair by Hercules he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane.”

- - -- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Tonight my real journey in Spain began. Belén, my guide and interpreter arrived at the hotel to take me through the streets and down into the Madrid Metro to the first performance of my time here. The evening air was full – not exactly humid, but dense nonetheless as we scampered through the streets to the underground and into it. Sleek white trains that don’t look quite like any other line I have seen – exceptionally smooth, precise and yet somehow cold. You didn’t need to hold the poles but you also didn’t have any sense of life in the system, which surprised me. It did the job, but it told you little, unlike the system in, say, Moscow, which is all personality (a word that can mean many things in this context) and battered efficiency. You could talk at a normal level in the Madrid metro. In Moscow’s it really was all sign-language and curiosity at the commuter dogs that populate the system.

From the station we came up onto a plaza of stunning fountains illuminated after sunset so that the water spurted white, magical as snow rendered viscous somehow, with stem-upon-stem of white flowers surrounding the entire central flow. Breathtaking, really.

Down narrow streets filled with slowly strolling people and young men and women together in that lovers bubble that happens as it escapes parental view we walked quickly – I’d made us late – to a theater which, as small spaces often do, just appeared, as though carved into the conscious of the neighborhood yet set in so as to be unobtrusive.

Tiny space – a bit like the Mead Theater Lab in DC. No air conditioning. Perhaps 60 seats. For most artists a box to be overcome not embraced.

Not this time.

As you entered the black box the performer sat on a saran wrapped drafting chair, diagonally placed so she was looking upstage left. Behind her on the same diagonal a large canvas, bare save for a silverback gorilla similarly facing away from you but present enough to leave you to ask what he was looking at.

Over the course of perhaps an hour a journey between Maite Larrañeta, the choreographer and performer ebbed and flowed in an intimacy only the most gifted performers can sustain. In a space so small, with a performer determined, elegantly, to confront the audience, it becomes personal, intimate.

She was, at first, the gorilla, supple, stretching technique in service of emotion so that you understood her command of movement but forgot in the moment that she was a “dancer,” and not a creature removed from her evolution and restored to something elemental.

At one moment, deep into the story, evolved into a modern woman emerged from a shower, she sat again in her chair, back almost to the audience, and took a long serrated blade and sliced long strips of flesh from her left leg, placing them languidly into a bowl by her right arm on a tiny table. The effect, in less skillful hands, would be trite. But with her, with the environment she had built, it was terrifying. You had come into her world and the slow movement of the long blade felt as it was on your own skin. Later you would look reflexively at your own leg and wonder if it were still whole.

That ability to remove the space between audience and artist is what I find myself seeking constantly. It is the intimacy between us that is so often absent in performance today, especially in the States. Its what Ohad has, what his “Mamuttot” did for an to (and still does) me. Ms. Larrañeta, in her way, achieved the same.

The title of her work is “What Would You Do if Your Were Medea?” For me there was a journey of ecology, of environmental violence against the creatures we share a planet with. For Belén it was a different journey reflective of her life and aspirations. That the two experiences were utterly different is, I think, the magic of it.

In this theater, which contained only 21 lights, there was an audience of 21 people. Each had their world, I think, altered.

At one point yesterday I was talking by Facebook message with my friend and colleague Dana Ruttenberg, who was at that moment in Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow bound for a small Russian city to perform. Our conversation was about the power and impact of performance beyond the major venues and cities, ones where you reach people one-at-a-time. Somehow the world seems to see those as less meaningful, less prestigious. I disagree. The world changes by degree, and to affect it one life at a time is an extraordinary thing.

At breakfast this morning here in Madrid I came upon the bacon waiting in the bin. Warm, greasy, sizzling. Yesterday I would have taken it.

Not today. Not yet. The story of Medea, of the deep history of literature, has pores. It has features and, in a moment in a theater of 21 lights, the faces of life.

Madrid Journal: Beginnings - a post script in images

2011-09-24T17:48:00.002-04:00

In the heart of the old city at and after twilight. As with so many graceful parts of Europe this part of Madrid is almost all foot-traffic, cafes and elegance.

Madrid Journal: Beginnings

2011-09-24T14:24:00.002-04:00

Madrid, Spain

Saturday, September 24th 2011

Random quote for the day: "I sometimes think the writing process is a state of total denial about what you’re doing or your motivations for doing it.”

-- Tea Obreht, author of "The Tiger's Wife" in the New York Times, March 14, 2011

Random thought for the day: If you're ever going to travel anywhere in the world where there are bugs, take Jason Ignacio with you. Guaranteed you won't get a single bug bite even if you walk into a mosquito infested, spider laden jungle so long as he's within 20 feet. Turns out his popularity as a person extends to the critter world. Moths to the flame. (and make sure you're not eating when he starts telling you about cockroaches that eat your eyebrows while you sleep.....)

For the second time in three days I find myself referencing a conversation I had with Sonya and Ariana (the US Embassy Minsk Fullbrighters) as it pertains to the world in which I find myself. In this case it was about the seemingly random provoking profound change in your life. A few years ago I went to coffee at Kramer Books & Afterwords Cafe in DC (my pseudo home, really) at the invitation of the woman who has become our Board Chair at Company E, Alexandra Migoya and her work partner Pilar O'Leary, to meet "someone you need to know." That person turned out to be Jimena Paz, a Cultural Affairs Officer at the Embassy of Spain, Washington. The conversation was enchanting, engaging and fun as it ranged through possibilities and notions, but it never dawned on me then I'd be sitting tonight on a perfect evening in Madrid, a few hundred yards from the Prado, having just arrived from Minsk, because of it.

The reference to Ariana and Sonya was the point we found ourselves sharing that every conversation in life matters because you have no idea where it will take your world and into what it may lead your life. For me the genesis of everything we are doing in Company E today has its DNA in that simple coffee with Jimena and Alex. Out of it came the entire notion of building complete concert programs in partnership with a single Embassy, of finding common-ground between your art and their vision of celebrating their country. Because CityDance's mission was, and our mission is, to build partnerships through art (I'm referring here to the dance company -- CityDance is still very much an organization of partnerships in its education work), and because we're a repertory company, the thick loam of who we are fits into the seeds of partnership. In a day and time when no one has the money to regularly travel companies of 30 - 130 people for performance the possibilities of dance, of music and of "large art" are in jeopardy.

But if your mission is to seek out brilliant choreographers and their mission is to showcase the exceptional talent of their artists, well, then you have something to talk about.

In so many ways the NEXT series of international work began, and has evolved into my sitting at this table in this city on this night because of that discussion. Who knew? (side note: is there anywhere in the world anymore where you go and DON'T hear english all around you all the time? -- I could be in DC)

I'm in Madrid because the Embassy of Spain, the Ministry of Culture and the Foundación Carolina embraced the idea of sharing with both arms, both legs and a bungee chord -- because Alex and Pilar and, especially, Jimena saw possibilities that were worth building on, budgeting for and investing in.

The next week and its 20 meetings in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia are rife with the opportunities to find those artists, those choreographers, those directors, presenters and producers who lead you to the people making dances in this country who have something extraordinary to say, to building the bridges that will have them say it through us in the United States and beyond. This is all about NEXT: Spain and it is happening entirely through the support of the Embassy of Spain in DC, the Ministry here and, at the most "on-the-ground" level, the Foundación Carolina, which has put together an itinerary that just blows my mind (one of those, "really, I get to met who????)

If the adage (if you can call it that) that Ariana and Sonya and I talked about on the lawn in Minsk has truth to it, then each of these coming individual conversations will be the beginnings of the family tree of our 2012-2013 season in exactly the same way the faith of WPAS, the Harman Center and most particularly the Embassy of Israel is for our 2011-2012 inaugural season with NEXT: Israel.

You never know who is across from you and where it can take you. The kindness and grace of people is endlessly astonishing. All it takes I think is listening to what they have to say.....(oh, and never, ever sit too close with a beer in hand, a laptop open and a group of madcap skateboarders swearing in Spanish when the trick of the night goes wrong....)

Minsk Journal: Voices in the Hallway

2011-09-23T17:51:00.003-04:00

Minsk, Belarus

September 24, 2011

Just before 1am on Saturday (Friday night) and the bag is packed and the batteries charged on the traveling equivalent of the Apple Store (the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod and the laptop are all fired up). Anastasia, the Director of "West Side Story" asked me at dinner if I worked for Apple. Would that I'd had the brains to have faith in their stock the way I've had faith in their product over these decades. Money wouldn't be an issue EVER.The last two days, in the push to finish "Cool" I wound up being responsible, directly or indirectly, for sprained ankles on my two principal dancers and the people who have to convey all the material to the rest of the cast.

That's one of those firsts we never aspire to. The first sprain was a result of ignoring the critical adage of rehearsal: don't overwork exhausted dancers. For Mouse (my nickname for Anastasia the dancer [as opposed to Anastasia the Director] ) I'd been working with her for almost 11 hours (with lunch and dinner breaks, but still....) by the time she pulled herself up off the floor to learn one last thing. A mistake I would never make under less demanding circumstances and, circumstances be damned, won't make again. We'd been through an insane amount of material, including learning, on pointe, the first half of "Entangled," which is a dance I made for Liz and Jerome almost two years ago now in DC. All it takes is a wrong landing.....

The second was one of those things that happens in tough material being demonstrated as well as danced. But it ended the chance of finishing "Cool." And, really, that's OK. We got through an astonishing amount of material, Jason and I, in two weeks. The challenge now, from great distance, is to stay connected to it somehow to keep it fresh and alive. Odds are I'll be back here in November for the premiere of "Entangled," to clean and complete the missing parts of "West Side" and very possibly to build something new for some of the really gifted dancers here, which would be a preamble to a program we've been invited to create in June 2012.

Of all the magical things one seeks in our company its collaboration, and now that collaboration comes from the Director of the Musical Theater at which we've been working to create an evening-length concert of all live music with their orchestra to be presented on an outdoor stage and then toured around the country. Can't ever, ever ask for something more enchanting than that....But we're at the end of this second part of a three-part journey with West Side that continues for two weeks in April. When Jason and I are back the show will be largely mounted, the dialogue learned and the songs readied. It will be something to see...The postscript of the day is actually its centerpiece. Its the why of the title.At the end of the rehearsal day for the full cast today three of the dancers we'd spent these weeks with came to Jason and to me and asked if they could "borrow us" for a few minutes. They had that wonderful crazy glint in their eyes and there was only one answer to the question before turning to "Cool" (and that second sprained ankle).

There wasn't much space to find, and time was short. Around the corner we went, in between the two studios, next to the various coat and costume racks, in the strange dim light that signifies an unimportant corridor and a transitory space. If it had been previously significant for any reason the reason was that it had the most insane echo and so conversations in it were a bit like the old "Get Smart" Cone of Silence.But that changed the moment that one of the three women before Jason and I began to sing.

Eyes closed, hand just slightly raised as she took in the idea of what she sought in a note, breath low yet full, a sound grew from her which stopped all the breath I had. Gentle, assured, graceful and utterly committed to the moment she took a journey that lifted you from time. And then there were two voices. And then three. And in the space of a few minutes the world simply became perfect. The hallway, a space of annoyance instants before, became one of conspirator, grabbing onto their song and inhaling it and then echoing it back out in pitch perfect reverberation. If I have ever understood rapture it was in this moment. As they filled these spaces in Jason's and my hearts people walked back and forth from the two rooms. In most circumstances that would have upended a mood, a moment, a song. Not here. Nothing could have broken that bubble in which they embraced us. The harmonies, the polyphonies were so easy and so natural that the insane difficulty of them was invisible until, later, when walking down the street, you tried to keep that air in your lungs a moment longer.It was a gift, they said.

They'd learned it the night before and was their present to us for these past weeks. As someone who places the voice above all instruments -- and, in many ways, all other forms of artistry -- it was a gift beyond measure. Goosebumps would have trivialized it. It was beyond that if that makes any sense.These are the moments that happen only in the embrace of art. They are the simple, yet so utterly profound, moments of grace that give you the sense that you are somehow utterly, and undeservedly, blessed. If we have given Minsk anything, those three ladies gave back something that I will have just inside my skin far, far, far into the future.The Embassy car for the airport comes in two hours. A 5:30 departure for Frankfurt and a 9am connection to Madrid. A new journey begins, but the one ending here stays now, thanks to three voices in a hallway.....

Minsk Journal: Who Wants to Go To...

2011-09-21T16:25:00.003-04:00

Wednesday, September 21

Minsk, Belarus

Random quote for the day: “Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen.” - VI Lenin (surely its OK to drop a Lenin quote now and again)

Given the world of 12 months ago and the one of today it seems appropriate insofar as everything is turning upside down as the quest for something vaguely approximating fairness keeps surfacing. And, no, that's not a political statement (or if it is it has the legs of a millipede).

Random image of the day: Alexandra Shpartova in rehearsal for "America" from "West Side Story."

I find, as is so often the case, that the imbalance between the world I encounter and the world about which I read is at war in my head. The macro world seems bent on splitting itself into a thousand pieces, and more often than not for completely reasonable reasons. Greece the entity is plunging towards default -- and some economists are recommending that path as the lesser of two extraordinary evils. Day-by-day we whittle away at our sense and sensibility about the planet and become mired in the semantics of climate change and lose our way with the simple fact that, whether you believe its a man-made thing or not its happening and we have the power to do something about it -- and in so doing to tackle issues of ecological justice in our stewardship of the planet, our economic situation vis a vis job growth and sustainability, our responsibility to our own health (have yet to find anyone who will tell you that breathing China's air these days is actually GOOD for you) and so much more.

It leads you too easily towards the metaphorical bottle of little blue pills on the nightstand.

Yet every time that comes at me -- which is typically every time I read the New York Times online -- its countered by a daily reality -- one profoundly grounded in art now -- that counters it so forcefully that I don't know how to reconcile the opposites. Perhaps they attract, but if so its a dysfunctional attraction. Day-by-day I encounter more people whose vision, grace, humor and talent make me believe that anything is possible -- and that anything we imagine can be made real. I see it every single day all over the world.

In the past six months I've been in Israel twice, the West Bank twice, Kazakhstan twice, Belarus twice Peru, Switzerland, Iceland, the Czech Republic and China. In a few days I'll be in Spain for a week and then in Kyrgyzstan and possibly Russia for a week at a time. And in each of those places I've been confounded and comforted by the simple kindness of people and the talent they evoke in their art, their daily lives and their perseverance.

Tonight at a reception at the US Embassy for the incoming Public Affairs Officer here, Carrie Lee, I watched a lawn fill up with arts and cultural leaders in a country whose diplomatic relations with the US suck (sorry, its the right word) and for whom the entrance through the gates is an act of courage. Yet there was nothing political about the evening -- or there was everything political about it. That's the point, I suppose -- how do we look things? There was an evening of quiet comfort and of people talking gently, sincerely and eagerly about ways that things can be made better through the simple acts of engagement that are the centerpiece of everything we hope to do at Company E. I'm not suggesting we were a significant part of the evening. We weren't and we weren't meant to be. But in being here at all we are a part of a discussion about enrichment and that, to quote JFK, "makes all the difference."

Late in the course of the reception, as the sky grew that strangely magical deep blue it does here after sunset but before dark, I had the chance to talk briefly with two Fullbrighters on the lawn hard by the wine-bar. The Chargé was off to the side doing what he does so well - making people feel at home in a diplomatically estranged environment (not an easy feat and I know no one who does it better than Mike). They've both only been here a week or two, and they're teaching English at two of the major universities. I'd met one when we shared a ride upon arrival a week and a half ago. Exactly what you hope for in a person coming into a new environment -- curious, wickedly bright, capable and gracious. I asked her how the week had been and what she said was so utterly true of every encounter I've had in these past months -- "I can't get over how nice people are here." And its utterly true of Minsk. This is a deeply affectionate country, for lack of a better way to put it. People feel so at ease with each other -- far more than we seem at home most of the time. There is a gentle physicality that conveys ease and reassurance and comfort which I think underpins the strength of the people to take on what for us would be enormous hardships.

The conversation turned to the idea that here, in a country we don't know, lay the endless possibilities of discovery. That, as I have written about "West Side Story" the old saw that there is nothing new in the world is not true at all. There is. And you find it by putting your finger on the map in places which aren't "destinations." You find it in Huancayo and Piura in Peru. You find it in a walk down the nervous streets of Algiers. You find it in Minsk and Almaty and I suspect in Bishkek. I remember so clearly that sense in Venice -- but not on the Rialto. It was in the old squares where Kelly and I found our way into a part of the city that lived in the bubble of community.

For me, in so many ways, this is where the magic of cultural engagement lies. As powerfully as I want us to perform in London and Berlin, the impact of a "very long engagement" in Belarus and Kazakhstan is the place where, I think, the impact lasts.

We talked about the idea that there is no Belarus guidebook. In a day when there are guidebooks to everything that idea was both funny and perplexing. And yet its so needed, because this is a place of endless beauty, grace, kindness and nature at work with the population. The news, when it talks about Belarus at all, is terrible -- deservedly so in the sense that there is enormous injustice here.

Yet, just when the lights go dim in your head about the possibilities of the world, you find two young Americans on an Embassy lawn in deepening twilight, or Anastasiya, the dancer who has made me see the possibilities of "West Side" in ways I would never have done without her, and you are reminded that we have it in us to make it work.

I hope that, a year or two hence, a new generation of tour books might emerge, beginning with one from Belarus -- "Who Wants to Go To...." The first title could easily be "Belarus." The answer -- "You Do."

Kyrgyzstan bound: September 29 - October 8

2011-09-19T15:41:00.002-04:00

Contracts came in and its official -- at the invitation of the US Embassy in Bishkek the Company heads for a one-week engagement in Kyrgyzstan to start October. A week of workshops, master classes and an evening-length performance that features our premiere of Roni Koresh's "Theater of Public Secrets," and, in a real highlight for me, has the Kazakh company Kathryn and I have worked with so often, Samruk, coming over the Tien Shen Mountains to perform the dance she and I made for them at the end of May during the last of our CityDance days, "11: Thoughts on the Passage of Time." A dream come true to collaborate with Samruk, which is really my second family at this point. And, as always, its through the care and kindness and support of the US Department of State.

Pretty amazing.

Minsk Journal: West Side Story - "Cool" - a beginning

2011-09-19T14:44:00.002-04:00

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Minsk, Belarus - 9:46pm

Random stat for the day: A gallon of gasoline contains 89 metric tons of phytoplankton. You're basically taking little bodies from the cretacious 100 million years ago and pumping them into your car.

By the way, I'm still waiting for the bozos who are theoretically assigned with putting the electric charger in my garage for my ordered but not delivered (cause I'd have no way to charge it) Nissan Leaf to actually return a call about rescheduling the appointment they missed so I can, you know, stop harvesting (or at least reduce the harvesting) of those little 100 million year old characters.

How exactly, do you wrap your head around 89 million metric tons of anything? Of course when you put that into the full tank of a Ford Taurus its actually almost 2 Billion of them, so go figure.

Guilty pleasure music note: Its not entirely clear to me why, after 30 years of dissing the Eagles I have suddenly gone very deeply retro and bought half their catalogue in the last 48 hours, but it probably has to do with extensive sleep deprivation. Gotta say, though, the bass line in "Outlaw Man" is completely insane.

OK -- day eight of the WSS marathon. Working three-a-day rehearsals now, starting at 10am and ending at 10pm with a couple of one hour breaks in between to try and kick this together. Jason and I are splitting duty so we can really get the material out of our heads and onto a seemingly endless stream of changing, but not interchangeable, bodies. The range of ability is a bit like comparing the air at sea level with that of the summit at Everest (though we're not referring to anyone as "the dead zone" at this point). But the constant is how insanely hard everyone is working. And the fact that, despite the fact that many of them have a pass on certain rehearsals because they are also, you know, in two or three shows which are also in performance at other times of the day, they show up anyway.

Honestly, my favorite are the people for the evening rehearsal who are actually ON STAGE during rehearsals who come in either before their stage time or in between or after in full costume. Hard to describe exactly the look of "Dance in the Gym" with a woman in an 18th century ball-gown and powdered wig, eyelashes that could catch a fly at 30 feet and those wide hip things they used to wear shouting "MAMBO" at the top of her lungs.

Only in the theater.

Truly, these people work so bloody hard its difficult to describe. They get one day off a week and they're there when I get in and they leave when I leave or, if they're in a production that night, way after, and we're talking 12 hour days that involve shows, rehearsals and all the stuff in between (you try putting on those costumes they run around in in period pieces and see if you can even imagine running into rehearsal with the craziness Jason is throwing at them -- great craziness, but craziness to be sure).

Today, rather than work with the full cast of "Cool" during the mid-day session I pulled my two favorite dancers into the studio and just said "lets forget everything that we think people can and can't do and make the dance we want. We'll adapt later." That in mind I think I really went out of my way to kill them -- pulling steps onto each beat in certain percussion lines and violating any sense of sanity about change of direction and things that went off the wrong foot because they made sense musically and had that innate relationship to the music they need for a dance as tortured as cool.

Beyond me how anyone makes music as brilliant as what Bernstein came up with for the entire show, much less "Cool." Seriously, how often do you actually get paid to use the best music in the world and make up a dance that pushes every limit you ever thought you had? Really?

(oh, and "Hotel California" is a pretty good way to accept permanent loss of hearing through a pair of "Beats Pro" by Dr Dre - and what's with the solo by Joe Walsh?)

Kate Jordan characterizes my infatuation with certain dancers as my "Little Adorations" (hence the name of the dance of the same name). I have one here and she's got that crazy ability to make you see movement that you'd never have gotten to on your own, but that pushes you endlessly farther than your own brain would have taken you. That's the wicked fascination with dance -- because the canvas is living and not in your control (whatever some choreographers might say). It lives beyond and above your own creative abilities and has this stunning, shocking way of making you see exactly the right step for something not because you made it, but because the person in front of you interpreting what she thought you asked for (and when neither of you speak the same language its really all body language anyway) saw and heard it in a way that was honest to her or him and that responded to the soundscape and it was just right.

Thank God for muses, I suppose.

"Cool" is such an icon its hard to describe. What Robbins made was perfect, and so I've actually forced myself not to watch that section of WSS. Its too easy to imitate it without trying, and in so doing make something that ends up being a dime-store copy, and that doesn't serve anyone. The music demands so much of the dancer that you want to find that for and with them without a Master in your head at the same time you're trying to discern what needs to be said. There's truth there as well in "Dance in the Gym" but there, in the "prologue" section, I chose to quote a step at the very beginning because it grounds the dance in the history. Its one step, and its been used endlessly in other places, but the quote was very much on purpose. And it just establishes the entire dance. Teaching them all swing was fun, except I almost knocked a girls teeth out in a spin she'd never seen before and opted to try to take her arm through her head as opposed to over it....not quite the "knocked her out" one seeks in those moments, but such is life...

Minsk Journal: West Side Story - Images

2011-09-16T15:10:00.003-04:00

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Minsk, Belarus

I'm trying to figure out how to explain the currency situation here. Unless you've been to a place where its seriously uneconomical to print paper below a certain denomination because, you know, its not worth anything, then I'm not sure how to put this into context.

Try this: last night I spent 34,000 Belarussian Rubles on a cheeseburger. That's not a typo. Jason Ignacio, our Associate Artistic Director and my collaborator on West Side spent 35,000 on a Guinness. Yes, he spent more on a beer than I spent on dinner (can you say exchange rate problems with imported merchandise), but, that aside, together we spent over 100,000 on two cheeseburgers, one beer, two cokes and bottled water. Ummm....

What, exactly, do you do with that? And two days ago the currency was devalued essentially by half. The official exchange rate went from 5,000 to the dollar to 8,500 to the dollar. In a day.

For me that all sounds vaguely funny. Try living here and the humor stops like a car going 90 into a steel wall. How, precisely, do you buy that which you have to have to survive? I couldn't even imagine what it must take to walk into a car dealership.

Yet, with that, people are so remarkably wonderful here.

On a Friday night in Minsk, deep in the worst kind of jet lag (assuming there's a good kind) I'm at the cafe in the hotel lobby and noodling around about heading out in search of music (there's a pretty good music scene here, and the restaurants are great). But tomorrow is a full rehearsal day and its the beginning of the very hardest part of West Side -- the Somewhere Ballet. Somewhere never made it into the film of West Side. Its a feature of the musical and as such is really rarely seen and understood. And its a tricky thing because the score makes it easy to fall into cliché. Add to that the fact that your stepping in and around Jerry Robbins and you better do your job well.

So I've been through the score, both in recording and sheet music, about 50 times and sat up last night (not that there was a choice) working through storyboards and ideas and a sense of inquiry about what the music was asking and what the choreographers notes (thank you Library of Congress and the luck of living in DC) were saying.

This iteration of West Side is strangely familiar in terms of the challenges that came up almost 55 years ago -- how do you get the best out of dancers who aren't singers, singers who aren't actors, actors who aren't dancers -- and how do you do it within something called the "Somewhere Ballet." Its there and its possible, but its not something to take lightly.

My initial answer is to bring together the best man in the cast with the best woman on a day off for everyone else and set about making a dance I understand and believe in, and then go from there -- what is the art that you need to make as oppose to the art that is in front of you. Forget the limitations - find what for you is the truth and then work your way down the trail until you find what everyone you need can do, and be challenged successfully by.

And that's a key that's easy to overlook I think in a musical situation like this -- one where the work has never been done in the country, and where you're in the middle of the first American musical ever staged here. Be sure that you are cognizant of the experience for the artists -- that, at the end of the day they are rewarded, challenged, and filled with possibility. Don't expect them to be anyone else but who they are with what they have the ability to do in six months. Not today, but down the road. That's the trick. This is a new place, a new space and a new experience for almost everyone here, and so its a different, but remarkable, journey.

Yesterday we had class -- for all 50 people in the cast -- in a small studio off the deck of the main stage (rehearsal, mercifully, was on the stage itself) and it was a crazy, crazy thing to watch Jason navigate it all (and do so brilliantly). Then, in the evening, it was "America," which, in the Broadway production is only for the women (the movie version with the boys is so infectious its hard to get it out of your head). Jason is really the lead voice in that dance, and he embraced the role....as the images below will tell you.

Jackie's quote

2011-09-15T16:46:00.002-04:00

Minsk, Belarus

Thursday, September 15, 2011

In the midst of an engagement in a country which was the subject of an intense Op-Ed in today's New York Times, a piece which gives meaning and definition to the challenges faced here and yet of the value and impact of cultural diplomacy as perhaps the only tool of engagement possible a parallel piece in today's Washington Post reminded me of the power of culture in a different way, and from a different time.

Jacqueline Kennedy (and later Onassis) echoed the meaning, and potency, of an Administration which, unlike virtually every other one to succeed it in the US, recognized that art, too, is a tool of society, of diplomacy and of a country of enlightenment. On the fiftieth anniversary year of the inaugural of John Kennedy, in a country far, far from home on so many ways, a few of her words seemed worth sharing.

The restoration (of the White House) may be emblematic of Jackie’s best and greatest legacy, much more lasting than her sense of style, her pillbox hats and her breathy adoration of her beau. Her understanding of culture — and the power of culture — may have left the country something larger. Jack and Jackie both loved reading about great civilizations, she says at one point in the tapes. She believed that the cultural power of civilizations was more important than political power or military power in the lasting influence of those civilizations.

In her 20s, she was once asked what her ideal job might be.

“Art Director of the 20th century,” she said.

She just may have gotten her wish.

--from "The Root DC" on September 14, 2011

Minsk Journal: West Side Story - Day Two

2011-09-14T15:58:00.004-04:00

Wednesday, September 14th

The Hotel Minsk lobby

The search for the perfect Italian restaurant continued in earnest here tonight. So far Jason Ignacio (our Associate Rehearsal Director) and I have found at least three in a three block radius from the hotel. Haven't quite figured out what the preoccupation with Italian food is here, but as a life-long Caprese addict I'm not complaining.

And the realization that the women in Minsk are the best dressed women I've ever seen outside of Italy just keeps getting reaffirmed daily. Serious style in this city everywhere.

As to the reason we're here....

How many times in life, and especially in art, have you heard the phrase "everything's been done. There's nothing new." It so easy to see it that way. But its wrong. Here, in Minsk, there's an opportunity to set a pace, a standard and a way forward for the creation of a musical theater community and culture that doesn't exist here yet. Never mind the one in New York -- you can't just transport 45th between Broadway and 9th Avenue. The one here, lurking under the surface like a stalk inching its way through the soil to the sunlight is fresh; unique.

The musical traditions, and the theater traditions, are so different that the pulling together of the separate cords of what makes a great musical great are being fabricated both before us and through us. From the "this is what a grapevine step looks like" to the flirtation/competition of the "Dance in the Gym," its all new here. The ideas of how to train to succeed in a musical are new. The chance to make it their own is present and it, too is new, because its a canvas they have to make for themselves. That's about courage, and there is so much of that --- and excitement. 42 dancers in the room today -- some of them true dancers, some actors, some singers -- but 42 people locked into Jason's every note and riveted on his footwork of his accent on the downbeat of the "5."

We set out to do some swing partnering, and it was the awkward high school dance all over again -- and that has to transform (and it will) into the elegant sexiness of an entire environment charged with it.

Too much fun.

And a Kazakhstan post-script

2011-09-13T17:09:00.004-04:00

On Saturday, September 10th, just before Jason Ignacio and I left for Minsk, the Samruk Dance Company, a company I have come to adore and be endlessly delighted to work with, presented a program in the Capital City, Astana, of all-American choreography. Most of those dances were sponsored by the US Embassy. Rebecca Rice, a wonderful and elegant choreographer, premiered a work, "Uplift." I had the chance to see just the very beginnings of her dance, and it really resonated with me. Strong yet supple; smart yet accessible. Not easy to do those things.

For me, and for my colleague Kathryn Pilkington, it was a particularly remarkable night because of the four dances presented, three were by me or by she and I together. That's the first time that's ever happened. Its an odd thing to realize when you direct a dance company and have for the better part of 15 years. Yet CityDance, and now Company E's mission isn't my art -- its great art by many voices, and so I never imagined putting that much of my own art on stage in a single performance.

Yet, thanks to Gulnara Adamova, Samruk's courageous and visionary director, and the US Embassy and Consulate in Kazakhstan, that's what happened 10 time zones from DC.

Here's the image from the Embassy of the US in KZ's website.

Crazy. And a real honor...

Minsk Journal: West Side Story

2011-09-13T16:52:00.003-04:00

Tuesday, September 23, 2011

Minsk, Belarus -- Cafe DeLuxe

First of all, who says there aren't great restaurants in Minsk? They're everywhere it seems. Especially if you love pasta and really good local beer. And at night this city is absolutely gorgeous. Temperature in mid September is perfect, the people stunning and sitting outside at a cafe pretty much heaven (you could say I love my job).

OK, that out of the way, lets talk Tony, Bernardo, Maria and Anita.

This is round two (of three or possibly four) for Jason Ignacio (Company E's Associate Artistic Director) and me to be in Minsk working with the National Musical Theater Company of Belarus on West Side Story. As I mentioned in a note in July, this is the first time an American Musical has ever been staged in Belarus, and the US Embassy, especially its Chargé Mike Scalon and its Cultural Affairs office (thank you Irina) have made this an elegant and exceptional opportunity to collaborate across culture, language and style. And what a musical to begin with.

There are so many sub-plots to West Side Story that fall, in their own ways, into the still-extant geopolitical craziness of this part of the world. Of all the post-Soviet states, including Russia, only Belarus kept the name KGB for its security services. That, by and of itself, should tell you that its a complex relationship here between official America and official Belarus. Yet, as is the case every single place we travel, once you get past the politics to people the relationships are elegant, engaged, exciting and extraordinary.

Underneath the surface of West Side Story is the whole question of tolerance, of understanding and the consequences of not -- lives ravaged and communities shattered. And when you look at the news it seems a micro version of a macro world. And in that way the very same questions that emerge at the end of WSS -- could and should it have turned out differently -- live on.

How much those questions emerge in the staging of this show will be interesting to uncover. What will make West Side Story real in Minsk? Its not the story of a Puerto Rican gang trying to find its way on the streets of Manhattan in the 1950s, that's for sure. Yet the music, the love story underneath it all, still resonate, as does the incredible opportunity for movement to take center. That's one of the reasons taking this assignment with State was so appealing. There are almost no other spaces and places in dance like the one Robbins carved out in West Side. The movement and the story live inside each other. Getting that into the bodies and spirits of dancers whose life experience is utterly different than those of the Manhattan I grew up in (albeit a few decades later) will probably be the most interesting challenge.

Tomorrow we take the material we made in the rehearsal studio today for the "Dance in the Gym" and start imparting it onto the bodies of the cast. The work really begins then -- the competition, the power and sexuality of the movement and the odd mix of power and insecurity that is at the heart of West Side....

Cannot imagine a more wonderful journey.....

Kazakhstan Journal - Tuesday, August 23rd

2011-08-23T13:12:00.002-04:00

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

There is a realization anytime I tell people where I am that Kazakhstan is a mystery in the States, and in many ways throughout the Western Hemisphere. Yet over the past 11 months my relationship to it has grown and grown through a series of opportunities to perform, to teach, to choreograph and to explore. Here, in Astana for the third time in a year, I'm in the last days of staging "Falling into the Sea," a 31 minute dance that has been evolving for eight years, changing with each iteration. Its the third dance of mine Samruk takes into their repertory, and the first time I've shared this dance with another company.

That is really just a part of the story of Company |E, and before it CityDance, in Kazakhstan. Our life here has taken on so many levels. Right now Jason Ignacio, one of Company | E's Associate Artistic Director's is in Astana, the Capital, working with another Kazakh Contemporary Company, Terra. To have two of us in Kazakhstan at the same time, in completely different cities working with different companies is really about as far from what a year ago I might have imagined as you can get. Yet the journey, like so many before it, has been rich, textured and full of life and surprise. How do you wind up with two people from one company in the same country 10 time zones away from DC at the same time, yet not working with the same people or on the same work? Crazy.

All this, really is due to the US Embassy in Astana and the US Consulate General here in Almaty. Through Jeff Sexton and Sue Kuester and the Public and Cultural Affairs teams we have been given a truly unique chance to share, in depth, what we do with these artists, and to build work, and bridges, which will endure for many years. My time here now lives outside State Department funding, supported instead entirely locally by Samruk, a step which is so much a part of our philosophy of building enduring partnerships which live past the time-frame that typically works for State. Yet none of it would have happened without them. Jason, for his work, has come at State Department initiative, and they're expanding the reach and scope to Astana, which was a dream for us.

Over the course of the next few days I'll have the chance also to share Jason's writings, images and thoughts with Terra, sort of a dual lens of working in KZ. Its the first time I've been able to share the writings of a colleague on this blog, and his ideas and musings are fascinating.

Here's Jason's first entry:

Day 1 @ Terra

"It was 3 am in Astana and I couldn't sleep, it was perhaps a mixture of unmerciful jetlag and excitement with my first day working with Terra Dance Company. I usually prep myself by researching the dance company's work beforehand but unfortunately Terra Dance Company does not have a website nor any publication available online.

Sometimes I like being left in the dark, it forces me to listen to what the dancers need as supposed to shoving a lesson plan that does not fit in the dancers' level. Terra Dance Company is a contemporary dance company housed in a beautiful theater called the Pyramid, which is literally a pyramid with an astonishing architecture from inside and out. The people from the US embassy and I arrived just in time for my 11 am class, I was greeted by 16 female dancers, all wearing dark leotards, tights and jazz sneakers (which I asked to be taken off before the class).

The class was held right at the vast space behind the stage, the floor is in good condition for dance but it was a little dim which I find very challenging throughout the class. Their strong ballet training was easily spotted in the beginning of the class, their spine is rigid and they struggle in standing with their feet parallel to the floor, which I find very common in dancers who don't have a regular modern or contemporary training. This gave me somewhere to start. Aside from helping them break free from one form of dance style, there is one mystery I needed to solve. The dancers were able to produce the movements exquisitely but somehow appeared disconnected, the question "why are they disconnected?" ruled my entire day. I tried series of exercises and activities to find out what's missing and I was able to locate the "disconnection" through the constructive improvisation exercise. They struggled in imagery and visualization, the movements kept appearing fake due to the disconnection of imagery, visualization and movement.

There are many factors associated with the inability to imagine and visualize while moving, most dancers are contented in just mimicking what the choreographer showed them and over time dancers lose their ability to think beyond counting and parroting shapes. I raised the question of "What motivates you to move?" as a performer I always look for a reason why I do things, a simple leg kick can mean so many things but why did you kick is the important question. Body language cannot lie and your body will naturally project what's in your head. Throughout this week I aim to draw a lot of things out from these gifted dancers from Astana, their strong potentials and spirit is inspiring me to do what I love to do…mentoring and teaching.

For tomorrow, I asked the dancers to write a personal story that will accompany the duet they helped developed today. I'm very excited to see the difference it would make to have a story running in their head while dancing."

Bodysnatchers (with thanks to Thom Yorke)

2011-08-14T15:31:00.004-04:00

Over the Kazakh steppe inbound to Almaty

Sunday, August 14, 2011 2241 local time

The sense of time that air travel engenders is akin to a distance warp (as opposed to a time warp). It always seems entirely possible that you get into a box surrounded by green screens and on a gimbel and you don’t actually go anywhere. Life in the Matrix as it were.

On Saturday morning Nathan (the 12 year old in my world) and I woke in the quiet comfort of the Reykjavik Centrum hotel just off the main street in Iceland’s Capital. The sun had stayed up until well past 2200, and the light only really left the sky at midnight, glistening again about 4am. To a photographer that’s magic in indescribable ways. In summer the famous “golden hour” of light just before sunset lasts three hours, and the rush to catch the perfect tone on a woman’s face or a meadow’s sleek slope gives way to thought and framing spread out over minutes not moments.

The streets were empty at 0730 but the parties of the night before were still fresh on the sidewalk – cups, slices of lemon or lime, bits of pretzel, carrot and cucumber and the scent of Viking beer. Yet the air was cool and bracing as it poured in over the North Atlantic which hung low and impossibly blue just down the street and so the smells were not off-putting. The city itself hugs the ground, the result of living in a land of eternal earthquakes. In Iceland they rumble all through the day, though they largely remain imperceptible to us. Perhaps that has something to do with why Icelanders so love their music -- even through the double-paned hotel window I could hear hints of it – little earthquakes on the glass, drumbeats and bass lines vibrating deep into the night.

We’d come off a two-day trip by super Jeep (think jacked-up Pathfinder with tires as tall as you are – or standard transport for rural Texas) deep inside the Valley of Thor (Thorsmork in local parlance – though no one looked like Chris Hemsworth that we could see). You haul yourself up and into it by pulling just so on the door, balancing to the step and up and over, avoiding hitting your head on the halogen lights strapped to the side and overhanging the cab. “When your driving in a glacier-fed stream or river at dusk you don’t want any surprises, you know,” said Ingo, the driver/guide and soon friend on our SJ tour.

“You’d be amazed how easy it is to drive off the end of the world here.” However euphemistically he may have been speaking, the time in Thorsmork and up on the glacier’s melting face drove that point home. The pictures with humorous captions of an endless array of vehicles half-submerged in water, ice, ash and sand made that clear. “We love that foreigners contribute to our economy, though that’s not always the way we have in mind….”

Those Super Jeeps blast through everything, but they’re at their most entertaining in town, where suddenly you’re the center of an endless amount of attention, particularly from photographers and teenage girls (and particularly from teenage girls who fancy themselves photographers). The presumption is probably that only rock stars drive those – both the geologic and music types – and so your “cool factor” goes way up. To see a 12 year old clamber out of that thing was particularly fun – especially since he navigated it better than either Ingo or I did. Sort of Nathan’s introduction to a particular and particularly peculiar form of rock-climbing.

Just off the Reykjavik coast is an island habitat of the local Puffin population. Incredible birds (who are monogamous) they spend their summers nesting and conceiving, hatching and raising their one chick per pair and their winters on the open ocean. Yet in the last five years that population is in trouble. In 2006, 2010 and it seems again this year there are huge die-offs of the chicks, apparently of starvation. The small fish species that chicks can consume are missing – some say because of over-fishing – and the fish that the parents find to bring them are too large for the chicks to eat. They starve with the food beside them.

“The whole sea is being fished-out” someone next to us on a whale-watching cruise muttered.

But that’s something to talk about another time.

Our flight departed Reykjavik at 10am local time. We landed in DC just before 1700 DC local. By 2200 I was in the air again bound for Almaty. It was 24 hours exactly from the time I left Reykjavik to the time I flew over it again at 35,000 feet; daytime for the entire time. Summer is a strange beast that way. A 90 minute layover in Frankfurt to change planes and I find myself here, 45 minutes out of Almaty, at just before 2300 local time (1700 in Reykjavik, 1300 in DC). Either none of that makes any sense of it all does. Two days in four airplanes. Jet lag doesn’t even describe the disorientation – or maybe you actually get the better of it because there really is absolutely no sense of linear time. How often in life do you fly over a country you were in a day before?

147,000 Frequent flyer miles on United/Lufthansa since summer 2010 and counting. Since the beginning of May its been Israel/ the West Bank, Kazakhstan, Peru, Belarus, Switzerland, China, Iceland and now Kazakhstan again. All save Iceland were State Department projects and all as CityDance the dance company collapsed around and after the Peru tour and the new company took shape. Hard to reconcile so much success with so much transition – like stepping onto an airplane on a hot summer afternoon and waking 12 hours later on a new continent – like being body-snatched.

Almaty glows out the window to the right. Time to pack up and get ready for the next part of the journey.

Victoria Harbor sunrise: an iPhone video or two...

2011-07-22T18:52:00.004-04:00

The magic of an iPhone at sunrise over Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong on a Saturday morning in July....

Jet Lag: Strange Magic

2011-07-22T18:38:00.002-04:00

Hong Kong

Saturday, July 23

5:48am local time

If there is a blessing to jet lag it is found in sunrise. The inability to sleep, the narcoleptic roll of the eye and the strange lights that flash behind closed lids, the twitching muscles seeking to right themselves somehow from 14 hours and 32 minutes of continuous flight through an eternal day over Arctic Canada and the sum total of the Russian and Chinese Pacific are rendered a joy at daybreak in the right place.

6:20 on Saturday morning, the hotel window at dawn

The 42nd story of a hotel with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the magic of Victoria Harbor is one such place. A unique place, laced with imagery of times distant and near. The Kowloon Mountains thrust up just past the endless verticality of man, and the long shrouded-images of the China of my childhood, forbidding and forbidden, Maoist and menacing are recalled through the mists of what was then British Hong Kong.

"They'll never get it back" I remember my Dad saying of this tiny English colony in the early 1980s, meaning what were then the Red Chinese. Yet they did get it back, in 1997, nine years after the fall of the Soviet Union, another "impenetrable" fortification of totalitarian power. I remember the images of Prince Charles at the ceremony ending British sovereignty.

Oddly, history suggests that it was the raising of the question of sovereignty in the New Territories by the-then British Governor of Hong Kong which led to the final return of all of Hong Kong. Hong Kong itself, and the Peninsula, were, under treaty, permanently ceded to the UK.

Ultimately, of course, that was not how it happened. Victoria Harbor, the Harbor 42 stories below me, is one of the great ports of commerce the world has ever known. Through it, through the endless shipping that courses the Harbor, a harbor of deep green water the color of which scarce seems un-colored, vast amounts of what I knew in my childhood flowed. Everything was "made in Hong Kong" and now I see where it left the land and journeyed the sea to the port and store (usually toy store) in which I found it in mid-Manhattan.

The way we terraform land, and bend it, will never cease to amaze me. Here is the map of Hong Kong harbor in 1845. Below it, a portrait view of largely the same scene, just higher in the air, today (the joy of an iPhone at 6am...)

In this moment we are just passing through, Jason Ignacio and I, from Hong Kong to Guangzhou to teach and talk at the eight Annual Modern Dance Festival in Guangzhou, now the largest contemporary festival in China -- a very different China from the one that wanders my childhood. It is one I have been curious to know all my life, and yet for all my travels I have never been to China. Technically I still haven't. That's for tomorrow. Today is for Hong Kong.

Green water

2011-07-17T06:51:00.001-04:00

Sunday, July 17

Bern, Switzerland

Its raining in Bern. A lot. But in the skylit atrium of the Allegro Hotel the jazz duo (sax and upright acoustic bass) are playing American standards with lyric lines about "blue skies" and "sunshine" -- and the tag line of "lets call the whole thing off." Its funny, because my first memory of Europe, after landing in Frankfurt after my junior year of college, was that there were jazz bands everywhere. The lingua franca of Europe -- or at least of German-speaking Europe, seemed then, and seems still, to be jazz. And its good jazz. Straight-up, right on the money jazz.

Childhood allusions abound. Its all about trains here. And, as a child, I was all about trains (and dinosaurs) all the time. The brand was always Marklin -- the perfectly made, endlessly durable (even with me around) miniature scale railroads that ran the length of the apartment on 86th and East End. Lord forbid you close a hallway door and disrupt and disconnect the rail line that ran from my bedroom to the far end of the living room, with a determined stop kitchen-side to take on Ice Cream.

Boarding today after the flight in from Dulles to Zurich and looking out from the second level window of the spot-on-time train was a walk into the notion that life really is a movie, and that it runs in the glass windows of your field of vision all the time, like an endless array of screens snapping you back-and-forth from today to yesterday, way, way back and, sometimes, way, way forward.

The engines which dominated those model railroads of my yesterday were hard at work outside my window on the Intercity rail from Zurich Main Station to Geneva Airport. The tiny workhorse red diesels which now seem almost always to be marked "cargo," the strangely cigar shaped electric engines dragging long strings of passenger cars I coveted as a kid, the trestles and the tracks -- all of these were floating past the windows of my car (the floating part was probably just jet-lag at work, but, hey, its fantasy).

Overhead the rain patters away at the glass like an oscilloscope -- reflecting and radiating the sounds of the sax and the plucking of the bass. Disney must have been in Bern in a jazz-soaked deluge when he thought of the "Toccata and Fugue"sequence for "Fantasia." The wait-staff, from the waffle-makers to the hostesses to the bus-boys walk with that snap to their step that says "I love jazz."

Today and tomorrow -- my two brief summer days in Switzerland -- are about tour planning for October with the exceptional team at the US Embassy here. In a country known for its organization pulling a major tour together to take place about 75 days from now is not a small task -- but its a great one. Wandering the town is a bit impractical right about now barring a broad and wide umbrella, but the soundscapes and the scenery solves the problem of how to prepare and from where to draw inspiration.

I remember the inspiration of those small red trains and those enormous tall trestles, the reinforced-with-lego-blocks and books and toy boxes trestles as they rose from the ground to the coffee-table, physics unheeded and the practicality of obliterating an entire living room in pursuit of the ultimate construction forgotten.

One night, deep into one of my Mother's legendary all-night cocktail parties at 535 East 86th street, long after I was supposed to be asleep, I remember cranking up the power on track two, the track for that little work-horse red engine, and sending it forth into the Living Room just to see what would happen. Power on I snuck down the hall and took station behind the cement support column that stood strangely in the front hall (it was a 26 story building after all, so something had to be holding it up), my childhood friend and sweetheart Amy at my side, to see the outcome of a railroad at work in the midst of a five-sheets-to-the-wind gaggle of adults.

We got to our post as the train rounded into the Living Room unnoticed. My Mom always insisted that if I built it she'd leave it, but that it had, as she said, its time and place. As the engine and its load headed up that trestle one thing was clear -- it would never survive the encounter with the glasses hard-on the track. But then that was the point, wasn't it?

Cresting the top it went straight into the forest of glass and, as the first of them went over, the room got very, very quiet. Things went spilling, slopping and slipping onto the table, a little Noah's flood all my own.

You could even here everything spilling -- it was that kind of quiet. And then, inevitably -- the same way as the sound of rain on the skylights in Bern, you heard the familiar refrain " PAUL! GOD DAMMIT!"

That was always the cue to scramble -- but as Amy and I bolted for the bedroom (why we thought that would save us I really never have figured out) I remember seeing something just pouring over the lip of the coffee table. We'd created our own little river by the rail bed. But the color was wrong. It was supposed to be blue. Or clear. This stuff, whatever it was, was green. "Wrong color" I remember I heard in my head. "Next time I'll have to fix that."

Today, on a great trestle high over a great full, flowing river on the outskirts of Bern, heading to two days of meetings about art and imagination, I looked down into that water and learned that we'd been right all along.

Better than imagination lay reality. The river was running green.

In the Lost Sacred Inka City of Machu Picchu

2011-07-04T17:49:00.001-04:00

Minsk, Belarus | July 5, 2011

During the week of June 26th Company E had the opportunity to take its art -- and its cameras -- into the Sacred Inka city of Machu Picchu to film and photograph. FilmWORKS Creative Director Francisco Campos-Lopez and Artistic Director Paul Gordon Emerson filmed and photographed with Associate Artistic Director's Jason Garcia Ignacio and Kathryn Pilkington, and founding company members Amanda Engelhardt and Rob Priore for two extraordinary days.

Told throughout the filming that "no one has ever been granted this kind of access before" Company E found its inspiration inside the ancient walls and pathways of a city deserted almost 500 years before....

Mid 50s: A West Side Story

2011-07-04T14:32:00.001-04:00

Mid 50s: Bound for Minsk, Belarus to choreograph West Side Story

There is a sense, as there always is in mid-flight, that time and distance have no meaning any longer, transcended by moments of suspension, carried into rare air and the demarcation line of earth and space. You see it through the window, that thin blue line, and are made to understand that strength and frailty, too, live separated only by tiny sequences of metal and rivets strung together and the keen eye of a pilot and the programs he deploys to keep you within that blueness. Call it a tipping point you hope very much not to tip, a teeter-totter that doesn’t.

It comes to mind not because of physics or fantasy. Within it are images of balance that we seek and yet seek to destroy as well – living on the edge, tripping beyond it. These are the places logic tells you not to go, but passion provokes you far, far beyond. Call it what you will, it's the thing that drives us to do what we should not if we want that little blue line to keep us safe.

Yet though we rarely go there ourselves, we seek it out in others, in stories, in fantasy, in ideas and dreams. We look for it in other eyes, in places where passion is the purpose, the point, and where we can, at least for a moment, taste and touch what is beyond our courage so often.

When I was in my early and mid-teens, when basketball was my obsession, I went over to the West Side, down to the mid 50s seeking out courts where the game was really played hard. Hells Kitchen was a real name then, and I remember the tangible fear of walking down streets where it was evident I didn’t belong. Holding that worn out Wilson basketball in the crick of my left arm, bent elbow nutcracker-ing it to my side, sweat from July summer afternoons licking the nape of my neck and ears, I would walk west off the 1 train until I came to the courts, courts which would reveal themselves behind high chain-link fences and the odd, urban echo of the balls bouncing – no, not bouncing – being beaten hard into the ground, a kind of vengeance behind each dribble, a dare to the ball to come back for more. “FRAZIER!” A great pass, a wicked pump fake and Clyde was invoked. “PEARL!” – the sound of a freeze-you-in-your-shoes move, a spin at the hip, a defender laid out. It was all Knicks all the time over there. Those were the glory days of New York Basketball, and whether you loved Willis or Dollar Bill or The Dream (Dean Memminger), you never, ever wanted to be anyone but a Knick. Didn’t matter what side you played on, you were a New Yorker and everyone else was the enemy.

At courtside, waiting to get a game, you had this strange sensation, if you closed your eyes, that everyone was the same. Black. White. Latin (not a lot of Latin ballplayers on those courts at that time); white kids wanted to be The Captain (Willis Reed) as much as black kids wanted to be Mike Riordan (before he got traded to the Bullets for the Pearl), the deadly jumper at the last second taking the game. And everyone invoked the same Gods of the game – it was like soldiers going into battle and praying to the same God to stand by them. Someone was going to get favor. Someone was going to get whacked.

In those, days, on that asphalt, there was one guy we all wanted to be. One Knick who epitomized the game as it was meant to be on those courts, the guy who took the toughest player on the other side and just beat him senseless all game. People would talk about him – not kids like me, other NBA players – in a way that made you think that they were just afraid of the guy. His name was Dave DeBuschere and he was the Knicks enforcer. He played what we called BIG D – big defense. It wasn’t that he was a dirty player. I never, ever remember seeing him shove a guy or hit someone late after a whistle. It wasn’t like that. It was that he was relentless. No one got by DeBuschere. You just didn’t. On the West Side people said “he played the game right.” I remember him talking in an interview about his stomach muscles being so sore after a game that it was like they were going to cramp. It was different over there, on the West Side. It was about defense, about standing your ground. You earned respect for getting knocked down and getting up and keeping your mouth shut.

For me, as the littlest guy on the court always, the only way I got respect was to get hit, or to take a hit, and just live with what came. I remember getting hit so hard by a kid determined to just go through me (he was at least 8 inches taller than me) that my feet just left the ground. I heard it more than I felt it, and I swear the guy didn’t so much go into me as through me – an Agent Smith kind of morph where he came out on the other side and left me absolutely flat on my back.

We lost that game. Bad. Really bad. Like, I’m not even sure we scored – that kind of bad. But at the end, when I went back over to the side, along the chain-link, the guy who had taken me out came over to me. I think I figured I was about to get punched in the face for something.

“What do you weigh, man, like 50 pounds?”

I had no idea what to say. Like I said, I figured my teeth were about to be rearranged.

“This isn’t your neighborhood. You can get in it just by walking the wrong side of the street and you so little nobody would know nothing. Why you here?”

I said something about just wanting to play the game – some dumb response to impending doom.

“Well, OK. I can’t do nothing for you outside this fence, but when you’re in here, you’re OK. Anybody gets run down like you do all the time and gets up for more can play – at least until you end up in the hospital or something.”

“OK.”

Not altogether sure what had just happened I started to sit down and wait my turn when the guy called out to me. “Hey – little man – Little D – we’re down a man. Why don’t you come get in this game with us.”

These are things I haven’t thought about for a long time, memories about being too young, too stupid to understand that a basketball wasn’t a halo and couldn’t protect you from trouble late at night in Hell’s Kitchen. But I never, ever had any trouble from anyone. Maybe I was too little, or maybe it was because I just was so obviously out of place nobody cared. Maybe the kid who ran me over, and who called me Little D from then on, was looking out for me. I don’t know. Maybe it was just luck.

Whatever the reason, it was certainly the place I learned to take a hit. Here, in the first days of July with a new Company and new dreams to stretch out to, and old hits to step beyond, it’s funny that that one day is what comes to mind.

I’m on a plane, at 35,000 feet, just a few days removed from filming in Machu Picchu, heading to the opposite side of the world in just about every way. And in a darkened cabin I’m trying to understand why that memory, of all those that could come, is the one that is present now.

A few weeks after my day as Little D I was up at my Dad’s on 95^th street. We didn’t see each other often, and so when we did there were always many questions about what I was doing with my time and my world, about what I cared about and why. My basketball obsession made no sense to my Dad. He listened, he tried to understand it, but you could see by the look in his eye that it was parental affection that made him interested, not the game itself (and that was OK).

For some reason I told him the Little D story.

He was quite for a moment when I finished it. I remember a cigarette in his hand, the sunlight through the window making everything hazy and Marko, our Collie, chewing on something on the carpet.

“What street is the court on?” I told him.

After a few minutes (or at least they seemed like a few minutes – Dad had a way with that) he got up and walked over to one of the shelves housing his endless, elemental record library. He squatted down to the second level and scanned the labels, right index finger tabbing right, ticking away at the spines in such a way that it sounded like a train running a track, cigarette in between his teeth, until he got to the place he was looking for. He glanced over at me, a little out of the corner of his eye.

“Its time you listened to this,” he said. “They filmed the movie version of it blocks from the playground you were in, where Lincoln Center now stands.”

He pulled out the album, a red cover with a fire escape staircase and big black block letters on it.

“It's a musical named ‘West Side Story.’

Peru Journal: Water's Edge

2011-06-13T20:48:00.002-04:00

Peru Journal: Beginnings - Monday, June 13

The beginning of the end of CityDance’s performance life unfolds in a setting at once so logical and yet so startling. In this year of change and transition, of incredible opportunity leavened with heart-breaking endings, it makes sense somehow that we would finish our time together before the folding of the Professional Company of an organization Tara, Doug, Johanna, Teri, Ted and I founded one summer afternoon in 1996 and the beginnings of a new Company so far from home.

The road has always been our friend, a place of packed houses and huge publicity, of people stopping the dancers on the street, of engagement programs that light you on fire and partnerships begun humbly but built with such strength that they last for years and lead to journey after journey to distant lands. Here in Lima photographs of the Company are everywhere. They are, literally, the poster children of the Festival. They are the image on the poster, the logo for the festival, the art in the bookmarks and the banners on the street. They fill the newspapers and bound from the pages, the name CityDance Ensemble in 60 point type across a half a page.

In images Alice and Maleek and Delph and the Company which has moved on is bound together with the Company which is here, and we are tied so tightly together. Alice is 25 feet tall outside the ICPNA Cultural Center, leaping into the sky. Jason and Delph, Maleek and Giselle – they’re flying through space together with Rob and Kathryn and Noelle. It makes you deeply proud, and takes you far from the sense of loss that hangs in the air in Washington.

We landed last night in the early evening, going through the usual craziness of travel – of tarmac delays and white slips of paper that must remain in your passport that invariably fall out. Yet it was easy going, really – a good omen for a great tour.

To fly to Lima from Washington is to go almost due south, over the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Pacific on a single eight-hour trip to the Southern Hemisphere and the endless political geography that has defined so much of the last 60 years. Over Cuba and Columbia, over Ecuador and the vast geography that is the Amazon as it begins its endless journey from the East face of the Andes. Looking at the map at 35,000 feet you see the satellite view -- but with the water drained from the ocean and its sub-surface mountains and valleys – the fault lines clearly exposed, a plate tectonics relief map of the landscape of the earth and the geologic war zones that define the Ring of Fire.

And to land in Lima, in the late evening of June, where it is winter not summer, where the humidity is thick and cool and enveloping is to realize that we live in the only moment in all the history of time where its possible to do that – to go in hours on a journey that redefines seasons in the same time frame as most people’s work-day.

Now, here, on Monday evening at a table built literally into a mountainside, where the Company is in a moment of bliss, away from the drama that envelopes all of us in Washington, you hear two things – Spanish rapid fire and the endless, echoing sound of the Pacific slapping against the long, low shallow sand. Fifteen feet in front of me the earth falls off 200 feet to the ocean. Yet someone built a restaurant here, filled the floor with pebbles that rustle under your feet as you walk to the edge, and stand in the darkness hearing the ocean sing. I am reminded endlessly that we are capable of miracles. It's a bittersweet reminder.

One of the members of the Company said a moment ago, “we need to enjoy every moment – it's the end of an era.” That’s hard to take in – that this magic and the joy it brings the world over is fading to black.

Jose, the young man who made this entire trip possible because of his love and faith in the Company said “people are coming this weekend to your shows – and they are coming with expectations.” That’s the challenge you live for – to exceed expectations, to dance beyond yourself, to find a pair of eyes in an audience and see them transported even for just a moment to a place that, until that moment, only you yourself had ever seen and imagined.

The air is settling in, a hint of fog floating above the Pacific. It is, for a moment, harder to see. But here, in the far southern hemisphere, that will pass.

Kazakhstan Journal - Images

2011-05-17T02:02:00.008-04:00

May 14, 2011

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Were it not for the language barrier, the entire course of today's work would have seemed to have been identical to the countless ones I have done in the US for my own company, and for so many others.

Yet there was something fresh -- different -- in the unfolding of this photo session. As with so many other instances and encounters, the five hours of shooting with Samruk had a different air to it. It took me in directions both immediately familiar, and in ones with a twist, a Kazakh twist that made the time fly by even as the dancers themselves similarly flew by.

A remarkable day with remarkable dancers....

Kazakhstan Journal (May 13, 2011)

2011-05-17T01:45:00.003-04:00

Kazakhstan Journal: Thoughts on the Passage of Time

Almaty, Kazakhstan

May 13, 2011 (happy birthday Ann)

From the vantage point of a country literally on the other side of the world the passage of time and the thoughts it generates is quizzical. The weather here in Almaty, where on a clear day the high, eternally snow-capped mountains of the Tien Shen range to the south are as near as the leaves on the trees above your head, changes moment to moment. It snowed in the foothills on Sunday as Kathryn and I and a gathering of the dancers from the Samruk Dance Company wandered a few hours outside this gracious city of enormous boulevards and deep-hued green trees, the thick trunks reminding you that they have lived far longer than you have, and likely than you will. You have a sense that the forest, the ancient, eternal forest, would reclaim this land in a matter of a few years if humanity vanished from its endless task of holding back the land.

The rains come daily this time of year, whipping in and out, causing a cascade of water to flow down deep man-made gullies which are guaranteed to break your ankles if you fall into one. The entire city slopes south off the mountains, and the water, building up momentum as it hurtles downhill, renders sounds in those culverts like the fast running streams on the mountains above. Where in one moment you wear a T-Shirt and are damp with heat the next moment comes and you don a Winter Olympics jacket suited for long hours by the Luge or the High Jump, coffee in fat mugs keeping your fingers warm and you energy high.

All that causes you to understand time differently. In the mid-Atlantic states time passes in seasons, largely definable and predictable. You age, if you will, a quarter at a time. Such references are lost when the weather whips by you a year at a time.

This was once a city of apple trees. The name – Alma – is apple. Strangely ubiquitous for us that word. Our first encounter with Rachel Erdos, the English-Israeli choreographer who kick-started our encounter with Israeli dance, was in the dance “Alma.” Yet she’s of Hungarian descent, and the word is the same. The orchards here which gave the city its name, and which, as one native to this land told Kathryn and me a few days ago, once filled the air of the entire city with the scent of apples, are plowed under, torn apart to make way for cement and “progress.” The city lost its identity, I think, at that moment when the last sweetness in the air faded and was left to the scent of automobile exhaust, the single most unifying smell of urbanity in the world today.

That, too, is a reminder of the passage of time. If apples are an almost universal symbol of knowledge, be it forbidden or bidden, then its strangely appropriate that this city gave up the name Alma-Ata and became, instead, Almaty. The apples are gone. But the wisdom? That’s a different story. This is a place, in my experience anyway, of deep curiosity. Set so far away from the West, yet not in the East exactly either, it was for so long a sequestered part of the Soviet Union. The opening after the fall is written on the faces which pass by the Café Delia here on a Friday morning. Just outside the window, over the lip of the vanilla latte (number two, Kathryn, for today) a young couple is engaged in that playful teenage love affair that causes the world to vanish. He’s wearing a black t-shirt embroidered in green and pink which says “Caliente! Cuba!” She’s in three-inch heels, working on her third cigarette in the last 10 or 15 minutes. They stand millimeters apart and remind you that whatever it is which divides us, we are, in the end, the same.

Its that reference point which stands out most clearly in the dance studio a block down from me here. Five floors up, adjacent to a NRA-members dream of a gun-shop, the skins of bears and beavers and other mammals dangling from the window display like late-night trophies, is a studio in which that which dancers share is at this moment hard at work. Despite the failure of common linguistic understanding, the utter success of the language of movement lives large within those walls. The company, Samruk, is so utterly reminiscent of my own company, and its battles for survival so common with my own, that you’d think we had the same DNA. Their stories are the same as those of the dancers in Prague, in Tel Aviv, in Santiago and Moscow.

What is shocking is not the differences, but the similarities which seem to pervade the world of dance today. Few things have surprised me more in these past two years than this one simple reality. While I think I had anticipated that every country would have its stories, and that those stories would be vastly different from one another, what I have learned is the opposite. Companies struggle world-wide to survive. They fight the same odds, battle the same battles of funding, of making art worth watching, of keeping dancers fed and fending off the nay-sayers who insist that art cannot be afforded in this time, that companies should fold in the face of cash. In this way its perverse how much alike we all are. That I simply did not expect.

Standing in the front of the mirrored studio, those five stories up, Kathryn and I, on day-one last week, asked the “what do we need to make” question to ourselves and to each other. We had resolved to re-stage a dance – “Han” – which I had done years before after our experiences in Sarajevo in 2006. Yet, after she had taught the solo phrase which defined that dance, it was clear immediately that there was life in the room that demanded something new, not something re-made. And so we set off on a new journey. That journey was in that way utterly unplanned, capricious as the weather and absent of knowledge as a city which has shorn itself of its namesake. But, like the city itself, it was the people in the room that took the steps to make the building of new knowledge possible.

At the end of the first day the dancer who we gave that solo of Alice’s to, a Kyrgyz dancer named I.D, came up to Kathryn to thank her for her work. She had had a brilliant rehearsal showing material, giving insight and guiding them to success. She offered her congratulations for his work.

“Dance is my life,” he said.

Here, on the other side of the world, those words, which I caught almost by accident, threw me immediately back to Washington, to the profound challenges there and to the need for courage and strength in the face of those challenges. I knew those words – I hear them every day from the artists I am privileged to work with. It reminded me anew that you fight for those kinds of people with your every breath. They are rare and special and the definition of what it is to be an artist and why art matters and why, in the end, you never, ever give up. People like ID define a vital aspect of the human spirit. The stand tall in stiff winds and take you, and the audience, away from themselves and out of their lives. Like the winds that blow the clouds off the Tien Shen mountains in mid-afternoon, revealing impossible beauty, they tell you what about life, about beauty, and why you refuse to give in. Its inspiring, powerful, and stunning that sometimes it takes going to the other side of the world to see what should be obvious.

Service

2011-02-14T20:19:00.001-05:00

Monday, February 14, 2011

Washington, DC

There is something in life that seems to precipitate huge moments in few days across a calendar year upon year. Valentine's Day was my Mom's birthday. Two years ago yesterday she passed. Two years ago today she was supposed to be in Utah at the Best Friends Animal Shelter caring for rescue animals -- it was her idea of a way to live in service of creatures abandoned and abused by people who should know better and care more. Her humanity was endless, my Mom's. It was always about what was needed, and for her there could be no better birthday than to hold a battered animal, to dish out a needed meal, to encourage an exhausted keeper.

Valentine's Day was the day I got engaged -- Francesca surprised me as no one else ever has when she couldn't get the words out as she asked -- or, more, I guessed. There's a warmth in that memory that nothing will ever touch.

Valentine's Day is the day I learned that one of the most caring, giving and selfless public servants I have ever known in my life -- and I have been honored to know many -- died.

His name was Jeff Coudriet. He was, if titles matter at all, the Committee Clerk for the Committee on Finance and Revenue of the City Council of the District of Columbia. He was the boundless, relentless energy in the room, the guy who knew so much more than he would ever say, but never boasted about his knowledge. The guy who looked you dead in the eye and told you straight what was and what was not possible. The guy who got it done because he believed in you and believed in the fundamental power, and the profound responsibility, of government to make the world better. He did make the world better. He changed mine, and CityDance's. He made it possible.

That's no exaggeration. He made it possible. At the end of the day, when all the ideas have been put forward and the talent laid out like so many offerings at the reception, when someone has to stand up and say "I believe in you and what you do, and I will help you get there," it was Jeff, more than anyone else, who stood for us. Year after year as we realized that no amount of fundraising from individual donors or grants or bank robbing could get you where you had to go financially, it was Jeff, and his boss Jack Evans, who made it happen. They didn't have to. They chose to.

When the bottom fell out for us 18 months ago when then Council Chair Gray finally led a successful effort to eliminate DC Earmarks, I knew that it was Jeff who was the very last to relent.

It wasn't about friendship, though I considered Jeff a friend. It was about service. He believed in the power, in the vitality, in the deep grace of the arts to make the life of a city he cared deeply about better.

That whole conversation is yet again underway, and that idea once again under assault. The emails swelling up my inbox of the latest effort to wipe out NPR and PBS, the desire to make a point by obliterating the NEA and the NEH tell the now familiar story of cynicism in "fiscally responsible" clothing. Its not that. The notion that a civil society does not need inspiration from the talent that swells in our land, and that, even if it does, there is something vile about the notion that we can, we must, all support it is once more afoot. It's not even pennies on the dollar. Its fractions of pennies. Yet somehow even that is too much.

Art is a money-losing venture - maybe it shouldn't be, but it is. Its just the way it it. So is scientific research and the quest for knowledge by the way. There is a message looming in my own organization to the young artists we train every day that a career in the field is well-nigh impossible. There isn't the money for even the most meagre salaries for professionals who amaze and who give real-life and breath to dreams. There isn't the will to stand up in the corridors of power and say "enough." You cannot thrive in the experience of that which you cannot sustain.

Through all of that, through watching the support which had been so fundamental as a differentiation point between Washington, DC and so many other municipalities vanish, there was Jeff, the person who believed. It didn't matter whether there was a day when no amount of care could make money materialize in a recession. You knew that someone in a position of power cared about making a difference and understood that sometimes you had to do more.

When I was on the Hill for those seminal years in my life I found people like Jeff in every corner of the legislative branch. He was someone who understood that service was not about convenience nor expedience. He knew the system and he knew its strengths and weaknesses and he celebrated those and stood by them as he listened and cared and tried to find a way to make better the lives of those who came to him.

The longer I live the more, not the less, do I believe that "one person can make a difference" is in fact a maxim not simply an idea. I see it every day. I see it writ small and I see it writ large. Rarely have I seen it larger than in the devotion Jeff Coudriet gave. The number of lives he touched, and the subtle and vibrant way he touched them are something I know I will never comprehend. I think none of us will because he wasn't that kind of guy. You knew he'd done something powerful for someone when you'd ask him a question and in deflecting it there's be a small smile at the corners. That smile wasn't for you. It was for him and the people he'd done something for.

We live in stunningly difficult times when the words funding and art are combined. Those times, and the vitality of a city we call home, are a bit tougher today.

Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for believing in so many, and for doing so much for a city that needs the care you gave and the meaning you brought to a too-often cliched phrase -- that government exists to serve, and that service has a meaning that lasts beyond the day and into the future.

Sound advice

2011-02-12T09:44:00.000-05:00

February 13, 2011

Washington, DC

At the end of a long conversation yesterday with Chris (CDE rehearsal director and choreographer-in-residence) we got to talking about programming order for the upcoming concert at Montgomery College on February 25 - 27. The discussion is one we have before every show -- and often have both many times before a show and during a concert run, when we have made major changes to show order during runs, or on tour. We've come close a couple of times to changing show order during a show.

Program order is an odd thing. Its like -- but somehow far more important than -- song order on an album. The way you string a concert together, especially a repertory company concert, dramatically affects the entire way a show is seen, and can alter totally the success of failure of a concert as a whole, and individual dances as works in and of themselves. Sounds silly probably, but its way, way true.

Yesterday's conversation reminded me yet again that its so often the soundscape, not just (or even) the choreographic landscape, that drives a concert. You would think a dance concert would be dominant in its attention to visuals, but you ignore, or undervalue, sound at your peril.

This is never more true than in a concert where all, or almost all, of the work is brand-new. The dominant dances on the concert program for "Hold Your Breath Until The End" are new ones from Chris and myself (in my case in collaboration with the company). When we got to programming conversations we found we weren't talking about how the dances looked, but how they sounded. Would the way they are shaped by their scores blend - how should they be separated -- how should they be programmed. In my case, at the end of the conversation, I found myself even rethinking my score based on ensuring a rich and diverse soundscape for the entire show. Somewhere around 3am I was still rummaging through my sound library, trying out different ideas, mixing things together, pondering what made a good story in sound to the story on stage.

The successful choice of a soundscape is a funny, intuitive thing. Its a marriage. The good ones last. The bad ones....

For me, for "Conversations" I keep coming back to solo piano -- and a kind of solo piano that feels itself like a discussion, a debate with the movement itself. How does that sound impact what you see?

It used to be that I'd pick my music long before walking into the studio. I think back to "Falling Into the Sea" and dances I made three and four years ago and it all began with the music -- the movement and the narrative all emerged from it. But over these past few years that's flipped on its head. The story is always the start - and so often the movement builds with no sound at all. Its about the interplay of the people in the room and how they touch each other -- both literally and figuratively. And so the challenge changes, and you find that you go in search of sound that does what you need it to do in service of a mood and a story -- and of when there should be no sound at all, when the air is still and its just the eyes that "listen."

My Dad loved enormous music -- whether it was the Mahler Ninth or the Mozart Requiem. And I tried - for about 30 seconds -- to explore that. And it bombed with a capital bomb. It was one of those "play it for about 16 measures and run the other way" moments. The piano -- and specifically Max Richter's piano -- was the pull.

But what happens if the right sound for the dance is not necessarily the right sound for the concert as a whole? Its like making two different dances at one time -- one for the htought of the dance and one for the thought of the program.

Makes for some interesting cognitive dissonance.

Its a journey still very much in process.....

Limited Visibility...

2011-02-09T18:47:00.004-05:00

...Chris (AKA Christopher K. Morgan) is at work on a new dance, "Limited Visibility," for the upcoming concert series at Montgomery College here in DC (well, technically suburban Maryland 'cause McPAC is about 25 feet over the District line). He's been working with Francisco (Campos-Lopez, one of our Creative Directors for FilmWORKS) on both commercials and an Inside Look video MicroDoc. They've really produced amazing stuff together -- and the commercial really shows both Chris' vision and Francisco's gifts behind the camera to their fullest.

Here's Chris's Artistic Statement on the dance:

Continuing his investigation of work that brings intimacy to the stage, Christopher K. Morgan's newest piece, Limited Visibility, exposes what one usually hides from public view. Inviting the dancers to reveal things they might only do in private, the piece is a suite of dances connected in theme and design.

Partially inspired by material he developed during CityDance's recent collaboration with the University of Iowa International Writer's Project, the work uses unconventional lighting sources to define small personal areas on the stage in which the dancers perform. A sleek scenic design that Morgan is creating himself, as well as costumes made with frequent collaborator Kyle Lang, the aesthetic of the piece brings the edge near.

Thought it would be fun to put both here - process and result...

THE COMMERCIAL:

The INSIDE LOOK video:

Hold Your Breath Until the End: The Trailer (1)

2011-02-05T21:53:00.000-05:00

Saturday, February 5, 2011
Washington, DC

It's concert time, and Francisco Campos-Lopez spent the week with camera in hand and editing station on overdrive. Here's the first trailer for "Hold Your Breath Until the End," our concerts at Montgomery College's new Cultural Arts Center in Silver Spring.

Conversations With My Father (a beginning)

2011-02-04T20:51:00.000-05:00

February 4, 2011

Washington, DC

My Dad died 14 years ago. But I still talk to him. Late at night, when the world is winding down, when the house is quiet, the air still, when sound travels around a room with a clarity that makes you think it can exist only in your imagination, I find myself, well, talking to him. Night was always his time. He didn't understand morning. I'm not sure he ever understood daylight. But 3am? Always. That was his hour. Its when he was so alive that you could feel him walking -- pacing, prowling -- around the house even though the door was closed and your lights long since out. You'd hear his cigarette lighter snap open, the needle drop on the turntable and "boom" Berlioz, or Brahms or Mahler burst through the night. When even New York was asleep, he'd be doing the dishes from a dinner he took three hours to craft and an eternity to serve. A meal at 11 wasn't uncommon.

For a long time after he passed I stopped talking to him. Call it separation. Call it denial. But he was gone. Yet, over the years, memory filters through, the force of the moments which called you to be who you became slip through the cracks that come with time, and, in small ways, he found his way back. I'd be deep into one of his books (my Dad's library encompassed entire walls) and he'd be there. A lesson from dinner would be there. A word at bedtime would be there. A strong, course hand on my shoulder would be there. Memory would be there. Restored. Returned. Found.

In these past weeks, when the challenges of keeping the very art that was the foundation of CityDance alive have grown like monsters in a child's imagination when the wind whistles under the seam in the window, it has startled me how present he's been.

It's been a mixed blessing, that presence. Every child, no matter his or her age, carries so much which is unresolved about their parents. The good mixes with the bad -- the conversation you treasured intertwined with the one you never finished -- or never had, with the one you intended that death took away.

For most of us, I think, those things lie like stones in a field. You work your way around them, you live your life seeing and feeling them, knowing that there's nothing you can do with them. I have an advantage there. I have dance and a company that understands what to do with life's grace, with its pain and possibilities. A company of extraordinary talent not simply as the physicalization of an idea, but of the idea itself.

Yesterday we started a new conversation -- one not simply with my father, but with all our fathers. A love story for ourselves, with ourselves and with each other. A journey through our lives, and through our hearts with our families, present and absent, living and passed, because wherever they are, they are with us because we are so very much of them.

At a moment when so many things are challenging everything I treasure about what we do, it makes sense I think to find a way back -- back to family, back to friendships. Three weeks from tonight that journey finds its way to the stage.

So much conversation lies ahead.

NEXT: The new commissions (Part 3)

2011-01-22T20:53:00.003-05:00

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Washington, DC

The creative process is endlessly, always startling. This time two weeks ago we were in New York at the Arts Presenters Conference, showcasing and building brand and identity. At this moment two weeks ago I was in the theater with Betsy watching "American Idiot" on Broadway.

Tonight there are two new dances in the books from the winners of the 2011 NEXT Commission. Those dances, by Greg Dolbashian and Loni Landon are remarkable in many ways. For both Greg and Loni I think the most intriguing thing is where the dancers with whom they worked took them. Greg's work pushed Rob and Jason in ways I've never seen for either of them, and we all kept watching Jason and thinking it was a totally unique way for him to move -- and we thought we'd seen everything from Jason. Rob embraced the challenge with an abandon that I think gave Greg room to move.

These dances will be with us a long time.

CityDance Ensemble in Algeria, December 2010

2011-01-17T00:08:00.002-05:00

January 17, 2011

Washington, DC

Finally I had a chance to gather up the images from our trip to Algeria, and to get them online....VERY hard to believe we left the States for this just under a month ago....

NEXT: The new commissions (Part 2)

2011-01-15T18:35:00.005-05:00

Saturday, January 15, 2011

At the end of the first week of the new commissions from Loni Landon and Greg Dolbashian whats clear is that the Company is loving the work and that that work is coming fast and fascinating. Both Loni and Greg are pushing the Company in new and fresh directions, and that always brings out the best in CityDance -- and that isn't just in dancing.

Shannon Schwait is on a roll as well with her videography and micro-docs. The second, shot yesterday, arrives online here today.

For part two of the NEXT micro-docs Shannon talked to Jason and Rob (working with Greg) and Giselle and Kathryn (working with Loni), and followed them through the rehearsal day.

NEXT (part one)

2011-01-14T22:52:00.003-05:00

Friday, December 14

Washington, DC

CityDance has been lucky to have a number of major initiatives come to be in these past 14 years (a number that, as the only person standing for the entire duration of those 14 scares even me). One of my favorites is the NEXT Commission. NEXT is an annual "competition" (hate that term) to find next generation choreographers whose work is still at least somewhat under-the-radar but whom I think will really make themselves known in the years to come.

This year we received an enormous number of entries. I watched every one of them. Twice. And that was before making a cut. The work and effort that so often goes into these just makes that something we owe them.

When it was all said and done, when I was down to about 10, I was sitting in a hotel in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was July 4th and Liz and Jason and I had just gotten into Jerusalem before spending a month teaching in Ramallah. We were in the courtyard of the Gloria Hotel. The sounds, the air, the smells of the Old City were all around. An unusual place to be making a selection about the winner of NEXT.

We hoped to choose two. One, Gregory Dolbashian, had won the year before, but we'd run out of time and resources to honor the commission in 2009-2010. In that year, following Greg and his work, it was clear his voice was growing by great leaps. So we knew he was coming in.

The second choice was Loni Landon, a Graduate of Juilliard and, like Greg, a native New Yorker. Both talented, with very different yet compatible visions.

This week they began working on their commissions. Starting on Wednesday the 12th with time just getting to know their dancers. Both are doing duets. Loni is working with two of the Company's women. Greg with two of the men.

We love to document the process, and to give people a look inside the studio, and inside the thoughts, of the artists with whom we work. Creative Director Shannon Schwait spent the day with Greg and Loni on Wednesday, and her first Inside Look segment is below.

Its a great piece showcasing two inspired artists at work....

Bags - a last story on Algeria. And Christmas.

2010-12-25T07:27:00.000-05:00

Washington, DC, December 25, 2010

6:22am

Jet lag.

Christmas Day is a day to treasure what you have, not what you don't have. Still, there's a story here. We don't have our production bags from tour. Any of them. We took two, and Lucie (the mop). Here in DC, 6 days after leaving for Algiers, they've all gone missing. It's the hangover from this particular tour, a story of the perils of tight schedules, of airlines (Alitalia) not on top of their communication and, still, of perspective.

Wednesday, December 22 was our concert day in Algiers. I traveled separately from the rest of the group on the 19th because I had booked my itinerary independently (fortunately). They had the two production bags. I had Lucie. Lucie made it. The bags didn't. The pursuit of them was constricted by the protocols of Algerian customs and baggage claim. Each person with a missing bag (and on the leg there were four, two production, two personal, neither of which made it either) had to fill out the forms, present their passport and so on and so on. It took 90 minutes at the Algiers Airport on the 20th.

Monday finished. Tuesday came and went. No bags. "They've arrived" we were told. "They'll be here at midnight." "They'll be here for you tomorrow (Wednesday)."

Wednesday (concert day) arrived and at breakfast there were no bags. "You have to go to the airport to get them."

"What?"

"They're here. You have to go to the airport to get them." This was at 10am. The concert, scheduled for 6pm, was 8 hours away. We were due at the theater for a two-hour tech and warm-up to get organized for a show in a theater we didn't know with languages we didn't speak. That part wasn't particularly daunting. We've done it many times before. But not, you know, naked. No costumes, no music, no production equipment (floor tape, glow tape, tape measures etc).

We were missing four bags -- two personal and two production. It's impossible to describe the journey from our hotel on the shores of the Med to the Airport. At two AM, with a police escort, its 30 minutes. At mid-day, with the ubiquitous traffic that is the most common-thread in all our travels, in full-force, it could easily be an hour-and-a-half.

As the only non-dancer in the gang (Chris was dancing "+1" because of a shortened cast) the logic was for me to go. So we called for transport -- a term redefined by this tour, thank you very much. That meant a car, at least one person as a personal escort. And a police escort. 20 minutes go by. 30. 40. 50. At 11:30, 6.5 hours before curtain, I'm still at the hotel.

Finally the word is given. In a car small enough that, sitting in the back seat, with two very normal sized people in the front there is literally no place to put my legs, so I stretch out length-wise. The doors close and we start to move. Very, very fast. In the space before the main traffic and roads join we wind through back roads at insane speed. The blue flash of the motorcycle strobes bounce off the windshield of our car. Cars are not meant to be as agile as a motorcycle. But we keep up.

Into traffic. Like a plow turning soil we do what is now familiar and knife into the center, between the two lanes of traffic. The sirens go on. The sound bounces around your head and the cabin. The driver turns up the music. Hamza, our guide, puts on his headphones and, amazingly, dozes off. Outside the window the chase is on. Its raining. The green-suited cop in the front weaves and bobs and we just try to keep up, in a stick-shift constantly changing gears and an engine in "test" mode. Left lane. Right. Then, for a few miles, flying down the berm lane on the left till its cut off and we are in the right lane, then the middle, then the right, then the left and suddenly at full stop before cutting to the right and down the berm again. The lead cop (there's one behind) turns around impatiently again and again, as though to say "what the Hell are you doing back there. Keep up." I chew my gum harder.

We blow into the airport in an hour. Its 12:30.

The bureaucracy of the airport is matched with an opposing force -- Hamza has never done this before. He doesn't know where to go to find the luggage. So we dash about, looking for anyone who knows anything. 15 minutes go by. Then we go the opposite way through customs and immigration, drawing endless stares but no resistance. The Alitalia counter is in sight. "You're in the wrong place. You want terminal 2." "Oh," Sharif, the man at the counter says, "by the way, only two of your bags are here."

"Where are the other two? We were told they were all here. How did they get separated?

"And which two are they?"

"Washington is here (personal bag). Pilkington is here (production bag). One's in Rome (Morgan)."

"When does it get here."

"Midnight." (curtain would have come down five hours before it arrived, and we're supposed to be outbound at 5:45am)

"Send it back to Washington."

"You don't need it?"

"Of course we need it. But not at midnight. Send it back to Washington."

"You're sure?"

"Yes. -- Where's the other bag? (Alvarez - who has been wearing the same clothes for three days)"

He checks his terminal.

"Hmmmm."

"Yes?"

"Tunis."

"As in Tunisia?"

"Yes. Seems they sent it to Tunis."

"Why?"

"God knows."

"When does IT get here?"

"5:45 today. Send someone to get it."

"Can't."

"Why?"

"Cause we're on stage 15 minutes after that."

"Hmmm."

"Can we just have it wait for us here and pick it up on departure?"

"Yes."

We dash for Terminal 2 to get the bags. The clock ticks. Hamza, doing his best, has no idea where to go. We ask more questions. We get more confusing answers. Then, suddenly, we're inside customs again. We grab the two bags."

"Where do we re-file the claim check for the other bags."

"Terminal One."

"Why didn't someone tell us that when we were there the first time?"

"God knows."

We head back down the corridor for Terminal One. Through security, past the metal detectors. A group has formed around Sharif and a colleague. A flight has come in and many bags have gone missing.

A lone figure stands a bit off to the side. He was there before and very, very agitated. He is in an argument with the Alitalia agents, the language shifting back and forth between Arabic and French.

There is a lot of frustration in all the faces.

The clock is ticking.

Hamza pushes through and we make a new plan for the luggage, trying to confirm that the two missing bags are going to make it to Algiers or to DC.

Finally, we bound out of the airport and find the waiting car and cops.

The lights go on. The sirens go on. We pull out.

My face is at this point bright red with frustration.

As we head to the highway, Hamza turns to me from the front seat.

"You saw that man there, the one to the side?"

"Yes."

"He has been waiting three days for his father."

"At baggage claim?"

"Yes."

"Why"

"He's missing."

"What do you mean he's missing?"

"They can't find him."

"Well, not at baggage claim, no."

"You don't understand."

"What don't I understand. He's not going to turn up at baggage claim."

"No. This man, he's waiting for the coffin. He's waiting for the body of his father. They have lost it. They have lost the coffin. They have lost the body of his father. He has been waiting at the airport for three days for the body of his father."

Christmas is about what you have, not what you don't have. We have each other. We have our health and our loved ones. On this morning we open our presents and share our love and live our lives. My first wish this morning, as the sun came up, was that this man has found his father.

We have, even when we think we don't, everything.