The magic of an iPhone at sunrise over Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong on a Saturday morning in July....
Friday, July 22, 2011
Jet Lag: Strange Magic
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.
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| 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.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Green water
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.
Monday, July 4, 2011
In the Lost Sacred Inka City of Machu Picchu
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
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.”
“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 95th 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.
He pulled out the album, a red cover with a fire escape staircase and big black block letters on it.
Monday, June 13, 2011
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.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, February 14, 2011
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.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
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.....
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