On the way to work

Saturday, March 27th, 2010. Manama, Bahrain. 9:45am.

A few other shots from Wednesday

As happens so often when we do Jungle Bookson the road there was a huge interest in photos with the cast, and for autographs. The US Embassy here in Manama printed 500 copies of one of the signature photos of JB and gave them to all the kids at the program. We did many photos, and they signed many, many autographs. Superstars in greasepaint....My favorites, though, still have to be Jason, Alice and Maleek in full costume giving very serious and thoughtful interviews to a television journalist, on camera, in full make-up...

The 8 ball of Justice

It was, by any standard, the match of the Century. Tuesday night. March 23^rd, 2010. The Amusement Center. Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain. The Al Safir Hotel. Rarely has the sports world seen an assemblage of talent to compare with that which filled three tables at the Pool Hall in the early evening hours Tuesday. Grace and presence matched only by an uncanny inability to hit any ball into any pocket on anything approaching a regular basis. “Lucky Liz” Gahl and me against the reunited sharks of Shepherdstown, WV fame (summer of 2009, Goose Route Dance Festival), CD2’s own Daniel H (for hustler) Zook and “Killer Kate” McDonald. In a series of games that could, but for the Grace of God, have been going on even now, we scored and we scratched our way into legend. In a cliffhanger of game two, with Liz’s undefeated record (5-0) at risk, I did the only reasonable thing any self-respecting Director would do under the circumstances.

I cheated.

With the energy at the table focused sometimes on the game, sometimes on the spectacle of the two other CDE games going on, I took advantage of the trust I have earned from these people over the years and pulled ball after ball from the well, and put each back on the felt. The only thing that slowed me down was that there were no more striped balls to place. Under different conditions I would have walked over to another table and gotten more, but fair was fair. And besides, in that sad moment when Daniel looked at the landscape of the table and said "wow. We have six and they have only two," it was time to show mercy, if only to avoid somehow getting a cue ball to the temple when the truth was revealed (which it was).

Of course, in the Karmic justice of the world, with victory by ill-gotten hands within my grasp, truth, justice and the America way stepped in. I hit the 8 ball in the wrong pocket. On a shot that defied description. All on my own. The stuff of legend.

There is justice in the world; at least for a moment in Manama on a cool spring night.

Sorry Liz.

I tried.

Jungle Books Outreach Show - Manama, Day 2

This morning at 10 we had the chance to do our first program here in Bahrain, a hybrid version of Jungle Books that lay somewhere in between our concert program and our outreach show. The audience was some 270 children from around the country with varying types and levels of disabilities. They were a great, great audience and for us a wonderful way to get our legs under us as we get into five days of consecutive performances.

Here are a few shots from the day -- from getting ready to leave for the theater to the post-show press conference that you really had to see to believe.....

Outbound (3.21.10)

There is a way parents walk with toddlers, those two-arm, stiff-legged little walks with arms held high and a father’s legs parallel to his child’s, locked in place like a single four legged creature from some fantasy film that only happens in the home that turns a cabin in the air into a cabin in the woods. Watching it from the center aisle as it goes by, and where you can see only the top half of the Dad yet know instantly the full scene as though you’d suddenly been granted X-Ray vision, you feel at ease, surrounded by family.

That’s what it is now to travel with these people who have become, in these years, family. For most of us it’s the start of week six on the road, and the fact that the last time we were overseas together was nine months ago is rendered irrelevant by the bond within. We’re happy to be together, happy for the adventure and for the chance to be in each other’s company again in a way that you cannot find a parallel for in the studios at home. We know the experience, we know each other, and when you see us, even though you see only part of us, its as though you had suddenly been granted the same X-Ray vision of seeing father and child in the long corridor of coach on Qatar 57. It’s a family thing.

Kathryn, my most constant traveling companion in this past year, the person with whom I spent two weeks in the Middle East in October under such different circumstances, is at my right, lost in “Up in the Air,” which I watched about 8 hours ago on my own little 10 inch person viewing screen. The last time we were up in the air together we were flying from Amman to Damascus, heading to the last leg of a time meeting and talking with people in the displaced communities of Iraq, trying somehow to take in and to recount the experiences of people’s whose circumstances were in many ways beyond what we could bear. They are people who still sit near my shoulder, voices that do not go away, lives I have felt completely inadequate to support even with a 35 minute dance called “Wishes of the Sailor,” which was derived from those two weeks. Ghosts, really, and that fact makes it all the harder to bear. There is a worry, nagging like those ghosts, that all that pain we took in has led only to the catharsis of artistic creation for us, and done nothing for them. That’s hard to live with.

We’re over Turkey now, and the nifty 3D screen shows us heading directly towards Beirut, where the first part of the journey to meet the refugee community began in the early days of October 2009. As always, watching the miles go by and seeing the cities we are breezing over, with names like Tarsus and Aleppo, I am lost in the history of them, and at how cavalierly we bound over them, a journey of 13 hours that a century ago could have taken 13 weeks and been filled with endless challenges is now simply about comfort and convenience, as impersonal as an evening on the couch. I spend much of my “chatting time” marveling at Qatar Airlines and railing at Delta, and feeling somehow unpatriotic in the process. As a traveler the startling difference in quality between these two airlines is a travelogue unto itself. It’s the first time I’ve ever said “thank God” for a strike – in this case the British Airways strike that changed our travel plans from BA to QA.

In 1910 there were perhaps 50 countries in the world. Now we’re just shy of 200. At some point an hour or so from now we’ll fly over or hard-by Israel for about a second-and-a-half before crossing above Jordan and into the airspace over the incredible vastness of Saudi Arabia. I am reminded of how tiny Israel is, of how the pre-‘67 borders left it at one place only 8 miles across. At 537 miles an hour it takes less than a minute to over-fly it. What must it be like to live with that precariousness? How do you find balance and rationality in a world when your entire country can be bisected in 50 seconds by a commercial airliner?

Our view screen flashes the location of Mecca every few minutes in between its in-flight geography display before zooming out to a Moon’s-Eye view of the earth and our path. We are returning to a world at once familiar and eternally unknowable, the woman behind the veil (never turn the souls of your shoes upward enough for someone in the Arab world to see them. It’s an insult. At home, growing up I used to strain to emulate my Dad, who would sit with one leg cocked at the ankle or shin atop the other, confident, strong. Here that same hubris would have exactly the opposite impact).

The most direct route to Qatar would have taken us over Africa, but that’s a route never traveled. It’s probably many hours longer to fly over Europe than to fly over Africa, crossing the expanse of the Sahara, over Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, but our trip to the desert Island of Bahrain takes us over the Alps. Is the choice of route practical, or is there something subliminal at work here?

Bahrain.

The word, in Arabic, means “Two Seas.” The first is the salt sea surrounding it; the second the pure, sweet, fresh water of legend that gave it its magic. That water is almost exhausted now, pulled out of the ground and into my showerhead in hotel after hotel, into the tap, into the gardening hose that creates lawns where sand belongs. The endless prices of “modernization” at work again. Desalinization anyone?

Bahrain lies deep in the legends of Gilgamesh, the very definition of ancient in human societies. It was the Garden of Eden itself, as archeologists are determining even today. Yet as is so common in this part of the world, its history is a poker game of changing hands. Its sovereignty was granted only in 1971 from the UK. There’s always a bit of a disconnect in the dichotomy of civilizations which founded civilization (there’s something about a civilization going into “decline” two thousands years before Christ that’s a bit jarring to the American ear) having to struggle in the late twentieth century for their independence. And for Bahrain, which grew influential and stunningly wealthy with the first oil strike in 1935 – the first in the Middle East – the future poses so many questions. 10 – 15 years from now the oil that feeds their economy will, according to many projections, run out. A country of 730,000, smaller in size than 189 other countries or territories – smaller than Hong Kong, only 3.5 times the size of DC, with 38% of its population non-Bahraini, will end a 100 year-run as a different type of Garden of Eden, a garden not of fruit but of fossil fuel, the nutrition of the industrial age. What then? Will the smallest independent state in the Gulf, the first and to date only nation in the Arab World to hold a free-trade agreement with the US, slip into irrelevance? It’s hard to picture, and ironic to consider when you also take in that it’s a remarkably pro-active nation. Open, forward-thinking on many, many levels. More than once in my conversations with Washington diplomats or people “in the know” the mention of the word “Bahrain” has brought a smile --- an acknowledgement that “they’re doing it right.”

Filling up the gas tank just before hitting the Dulles Access Road Sunday afternoon there was that momentary flash thinking about the fact that the fuel in the car that got Julie and me to the airport might well have originated in a well in the place we were heading to – a 7,000 mile journey for the refined remains of plants which died millions upon millions of years ago when this entire part of the world was thousands of miles removed from where it is today and lush. Tens of millions of years sucked out of the ground and consumed in 100. Makes you wonder, again and again, what will be in all the places so familiar to us now a century hence. Alicia’s baby was born last Thursday. What will her world be when her first child is born, or when she becomes a grandmother for the first time?

Someone up to the left in the cabin a baby is wailing at the change in air pressure, compressing its tiny eardrums and disorienting its infant sensibilities. I know just how it feels.

We’re over Damascus now.

Solastalgia

In today's New York Times there's a remarkable article about the "ecological unconsciousness."

Here's a paragraph from it, and a link to the whole article:

"In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” A neologism wasn’t destined to stop the mines; they continued to spread. But so did Albrecht’s idea. In the past five years, the word “solastalgia” has appeared in media outlets as disparate as Wired, The Daily News in Sri Lanka and Andrew Sullivan’s popular political blog, The Daily Dish. In September, the British trip-hop duo Zero 7 released an instrumental track titled “Solastalgia,” and in 2008 Jukeen, a Slovenian recording artist, used the word as an album title. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rainfall patterns; and refugees returning to New Orleans after Katrina."

Here's the link to the full article.

Paul Taylor's "Images." Episode 3: The Oracle

The third installment of the "Inside Look: Images" series looks at the solo "The Oracle." CityDance's Elizabeth Gahl and Mr. Taylor's restager, Patrick Corbin, talk about the solo both from within and without. The challenge of taking on a great solo is as rich as the one of crafting it, and both involve the soul of the artist.

Staging "Images" by Paul Taylor: a beginning

On January 12th, 2010 Patrick Corbin, who today directs his own dance company but is also one of the most gifted of all the many generations of dancers of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, began the process of staging for CityDance Mr. Taylor's elegant 1977 work, "Images." The dance, which has never before been staged on an outside company, is deeply graceful and yet, as is so often the case, has layer upon layer inside it for the artist, the viewer and, in particular, the dancer.

This is the first episode in CityDance's multi-part video documentary series leading up the Company's March 12, 2010 Washington, DC premiere of "Images."

The documentary was filmed by Paul Gordon Emerson and Shannon Schwait, and edited by Ms. Schwait.

Staging "Images" by Paul Taylor: Part two

CityDance's Jason Garcia Ignacio, who is cast to dance the soloists role in the "Horses" section of Paul Taylor's classic 1977 work, "Images" talks about preparing for the part, learning the steps and understanding the meaning.

Wishes of the Sailor (a beginning)

November 7, 2009
Washington, DC

Art has a relationship to society on every level. It comments on it. It draws from it. It challenges it and on occasion confronts it. Performing art does this very differently than fine art or literature because its in the moment. The impact has to be drawn from the viewer then and there, with a resonance that is both immediate and, if there is enough to the work, expansive over time.

CityDance this week embarked on the creative journey of a subject at once simple and overwhelming. The subject, in the present tense, is the condition of the Iraqi refugee community. In the past and future, it is the condition of humanity which creates refugee situations, the consequences to those refugees of displacement, and the impact on societies around the world of absorbing, denying, interning or attacking those communities.

To comment on something so immense is humbling, daunting, inspiring. It asks you to be at your best while at the same time demands that you not be consumed by the scope and the pressure of saying something worth the saying. So often in choreography that challenge is the hardest.

Over the next month this will be a journal about the experience of making a work called "The Wishes of the Sailor." The title comes from a proverb shared with us in a hotel in Amman, Jordan by one of the many, many refugees Kathryn and I met in our two weeks in the Middle East at the beginning of October with a group of artists put together by Intersections International, an interfaith group out of New York which had the courage to ask art to speak to humanity and to politics in the deep wish that we might be able to bring attention to a subject lost to the media and to America.

"Wishes" is a collaboration on many, many levels. Its not a work of mine. It could be, but I didn't want that. Kathryn came to the Middle East as a part of that delegation because I needed another voice, another dancer, I trusted to take in these experiences and to create. That duet has become a undectet (first time I ever heard that term, which means a group of 11) with the entire company,our rehearsal director and choreographer in residence Christopher K. Morgan and in Israeli dancer, Ayelet Yakutiel, stepping in to contribute. Sharing with them the experiences which generate "Wishes" has been a journey in and of itself, something we began on Tuesday with singer/songwriter Amikaeyla Gaston (who was with us in the Middle East) sharing experience and setting a tone and a context.

This is simply an introduction. Much more to come.

There are older posts here if you are interested which were written while Kathryn and I were away which can bring you into the journey.