Peru Journal: Water's Edge

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

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)

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

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

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...

...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)

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)

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)

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

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....