Minsk Journal: West Side Story

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

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)

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...

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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....