Spirit, adorned by body

I’ve been passing out programs at Performing Diaspora at CounterPULSE the past couple of weekends, and I’ve been looking at people’s faces as they walk into the theater space – they enter a little distracted, shuffling up into the risers with a mild, unquestioning acceptance. And they leave transformed.

It sounds dramatic: that people’s experience of the performance shows on their faces. But it’s been one of my tasks as an intern to look people in the eye and listen to their words – we’ve been gathering interviews for our blog -- and with really very few exceptions, something about the work they’re seeing takes them into their own head. Makes them think. Makes them stumble for the words. With something so visual, so visceral, it makes sense that they would eventually resort to well-worn words of admiration or appreciation, and that’s what I usually get in the interviews. But as I’ve said: I’ve been looking at their faces. And I’ve seen them change over the course of two hours.

I’ve changed too, over the course of these performances. As of last night, after seeing Colette Eloi’s “Politics of Poverty” clash grief and celebration, I immediately began to negotiate my experience of that work with Adia Whitaker’s “Ampey!” from the weekend before. It could be too easy to compare these pieces – each dance looks at poverty and African American identity with a hard eye, skillfully and steadily jumping between grief and joy without a lot of warning. The movement required a lot from the dancers, and the experience of the movement required a lot from the audience. Watching, you’re as breathless as the performers, but for entirely different reasons. But the pieces are SO different that it almost seems strange to compare them. Colette inflicts wounds and then finds a way to heal them. Adia still isn’t sure where to look for healing, but she has a sense that before she can heal herself, or the audience or the dancers and the history that she explores, she has to sit with that grief. Stay awhile.

I spoke with Adia a couple of weeks ago, and she talked a lot about myth: what she had imagined Africa to be, and what it really was, once she finally visited. This is what she had to say about her experience of making the piece.

As much as Adia’s work represents a journey outside of herself in order to find the message she’s trying to communicate, Colette’s piece believes in sharing whatever her dancers already hold inside (Call it identity, or call it history. She doesn’t even bother with the words, and instead goes straight for the movement, the muscle memory). I wish I knew the name of Colette’s soloist – the woman who first enters the stage contorted and refuses to offer herself relief from the knocking of her knees, the twisting of her hands and face. When we see her again, she is buoyed by the strong, clear voice of an onstage accompanist. “Spirit, adorned by body,” the accompanist sings, repeating. It’s a call, and this dancer’s movement, a response. Whatever this dancer carried inside of her, her body was a nearly perfect vessel for carrying it outside of herself, and into the audience. Her spirit, and her skill, filled the room. The audience, all of us, sat silent, absorbing, absorbed.

That run to the ocean had a way of setting my mind back at ease

To listen to it, you'd never know that I had the pleasure of purchasing a botanical print for my bedroom today...To listen to it, you'd think I'm making a habit out of unhappiness.

++ AIR is everywhere ++

Feeling a bit adventurous and giving the audio blog a try... Give a listen!

worth my Salt

It's official! Come September, I'm Maine-bound, to take a 15 week crash course in Radio Documentary.

With fall fast-approaching (and Portland on my mind), I've found myself thinking about Maine as it "is" and not as I'm used to remembering it. Telling the difference between the two is practically impossible. I have four years worth of memories, distilled through a 3 year separation. Has there ever been a state more clouded by nostalgia? (Except, maybe, this one I've chosen to call home for now.) It's a minefield of sentimentality, and I'm trying to work up my bravery to approach those myths and de-fuse them.

I have to say: it's not going well. With the exciting news comes the inevitable question of my interests: "What kinds of stories will you tell?!" I begin to blather almost immediately—discussing economic strain and redevelopment woes. Maybe I address the question of immigration, or bi-lingualism in schools…but it's passionless, flat, when I talk about it. I know it's too soon to worry, but I'm already having a hard time really asking the questions I want to answer.

And so I'm trying to think small, not about the broad sweep of social stratification, but the roadside stand where I bought my bike my senior year at Bates, the pancakes I ate on picnic tables at Nezinscot. My cheeks flush with the thought of contra dancing again. I'll take a trip up the coast, and instead of gazing longingly at the sea, I'll drop eye contact with the horizon, and not even bother with the breaking waves. I'll look at the hard smooth rocks, the sea glass around my feet. I'll think about all those bottles, most of them purposefully broken.

Saving

Legs folded, deep in the slump of a mid-day work-week, I looked up from my plate of baba ganoush to see a family picnicking not too far away (their legs folded in solidarity). Their gestures to one another were comfortable, but still animated, and I envied them their nonchalance. Caught up in what was clearly an engaging conversation, their thoughts drifted away from their 2-year-old daughter, who took it upon herself to make friends with other park goers. She bypassed me (I probably looked too bitter, too weary for friendship) and headed straight for a man stretched out on his back, asleep. He did have an aura around him—unraveling backpacks piled unevenly around him like so many offerings to his continued solitude. People had been keeping their distance. He looked grizzled, happily lonely. Too young to pick up on--or to care about—such implicit social pacts, this little girl walked straight up to him, and began talking. With feeling.

It took several seconds before he stirred, several more before he sat up, disbelieving. In the manner of her family, she gestured as she spoke, to the trees, to the sidewalk. She look at him bluntly, waited for his answer to whatever slew of questions she had just posed. I watched nervously, expecting anger of his part, or a facet of the same bitterness I felt to be outside, only halfway enjoying the sun. But he drowsily responded, apparently to her liking. She continued to talk, to gesture, and he watched her patiently, waiting for his turn to respond.

Her parents had noticed her disappearance, by this point. They turned abruptly, spotted her chatting happily and watched her, waiting for a break in her speech, a good moment to catch her attention. She saw her parents call her back, and after taking just enough time to prove her indifference, she turned around and barreled back to the picnic blanket.

We get older, we lose things: pocket change, earring backs, favorite sweaters. We’re frustrated first off, and then learn to deal with loss as a way of becoming lighter, of shedding things that weren’t even necessary to begin with. We like to make this idea work in the abstract: we think of the things we lose as distractions, trappings—“everything thing we really need,” we think we gain as we grow older. We can make the choice to hold on to everything worth saving.

I like that idea of being lightened by what’s lost. For the most part, it’s kept me from going crazy over whatever’s misplaced, irreplaceable. But the clear-eyed curiosity that led that little girl away from her family, that sparked (what appear to be a highly engaging) conversation with someone unknown to her, is something I wish I had saved. That’s what’s at the root of this urge to tell stories, but I’m older, and more cautious. Given the opportunity, I’m not sure I’d have such spirited comments on the trees, the sidewalk. I’m not sure I’d be willing to stride past a barrier of backpacks, confident that neither they, nor an uneasy attempt at sleep, are cures for loneliness.

a life more ordinary

Embarrassingly, the moments directly following this year’s “Best Picture” Oscar montage found me in the kitchen, red-faced, and crying over the fact that somehow, in my inadequate movie-viewing past, I had missed Ordinary People. Just irrational enough that I felt the need to move it right to the top of my list. (After the time it took to track it down, it wasn’t rented painlessly--the smart-ass video store guys had a thing or two to say about it’s relative inferiority to Raging Bull, which was “robbed” of the Oscar in 1980…)

And so last night was the night I laid (at least those) inadequacies to rest. After 2 hours of a film about therapy, it makes sense to talk out my feelings about it.

What I watched last night picks up on what I’m loving about certain radio pieces right now: when, and how, we "hear people out. " With so much scene-changing of our own, with so many interruptions (many of them self-imposed), how do we learn to just let people work through what they’re thinking, to finish what they started? We like to think we’re listening to people when they discuss something difficult, we like to think we’re giving people the time they need, but we cut in when it's awkward, or we see an opportunity for ourselves to speak, or when it makes us uncomfortable. We’re constantly editing our own conversations for the best result. We do it in the name of keeping the conversation lucid, but increasingly, I'm becoming an advocate for indulging people occasional incoherence.

With the constant fear that listeners will “turn the dial,” radio-makers have relaxed into creating flawlessly-edited stories that are undeniably interesting, but predictably revelatory--a style tends to create reality instead of reflect it. I’m more and more drawn to the radio pieces that are conscious of that fact and that make some specific changes to reverse it—keeping the less-than-perfect cut, the off-mic quote, letting people speak as they come across, instead of how you wish they’d sound. By encouraging people to keep talking, the revelation happens on its own, and not through the grace of good editing.

Now is as important a time as any to let ourselves, to let each other finish what we started. Not to edit our long awkward silences, to avoid the urge for polish, for professionality. In life, just as in Art, the revelation will happen on its own.

dinner dates, roommates...

Brandishing a bunch of red romunculi (a congratulatory gesture for launching this blog, finally), Meg showed up right on Jess and David's heels. Still adjusting to this new kitchen, and my new housemates, but if anything's going to shorten the distance between all of us, it's a dinner date.

Cooking together, eating together--we've done it enough times for it to feel unexceptional. But I have a fascination with the fact that it's a rite we carried from our families into college, and from college into our lives now, our City lives, where we make comfort anywhere we can get it. Our time, our energy to reach outward to our families, our far-flung friends--it's dwindling. We approximate home with those closest to us.

And this is ultimately what we do for one another: we read articles aloud, chop fennel for large, shared salads. We brew the coffee, set the morning alarm. We send one another out the door, we wish one another good days, or good nights, and we mean it. But we cannot follow one another to work, we can’t take on each other’s troubles to ease them (even though we listen tirelessly to the sadness that never quite seems to go away).

This is why, despite our convincing re-creation of a family, it’s impossible to make it true: we can only read so many articles, pour so many cups of tea, before we’re out the door, back out into the night. Alone, again, taking the long, quiet trip back to our dark, empty rooms. We produce our own keys, we turn on the hall light.