links for 2008-05-15

May 15, 2008 | | Comments (0)

links for 2008-05-13

May 13, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Goodbye, E


Ethan

When we were younger my cousin believed in reincarnation. I hope that if he wants to come back, he will.

See you next time, Ethan.

May 09, 2008 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

links for 2008-05-09

May 09, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

My Friend Clare Will Dance Tonight

So, a friend of mine, Clare Byrne, will dance tonight as part of a series of work she is doing. She let me see -- she invited me, actually, which was REALLY COOL -- to a press preview she just did of the performance she's doing tonight, May 9, 2008.

I know that dance is maybe the most ephemeral of arts. (Not including fruit fly aerobatics, but still. Who does those now? Nobody is who. A lost art.) The truth is that it vanishes while you're seeing it, and can't be recorded. Joe not long ago did his own choreographic notation (why, heaven knows -- do the Inuit need words for "seal-gutting postures?" one hopes not) and was barely able to reproduce even his own work. And I know that it's usually too much for me.

I will be straight with you: I have only gone to see Clare dance, unless you count Chicago!, for, like, the last 20 years of my art-going life. No other dances. I don't even watch Ballet of the Stars. Or whatever it is on TV. I do watch Ice Dancing during the Olympics. Well, I did. Until that Turgenev and Trotsky thing, with the mazurka.

Do you know what I liked about watching Clare dance this time (as opposed to four years ago)? She laughed. She has a beautiful smile, and a lovely laugh, and I have known her since she was, well, younger than we are now. Almost 20 years. No, wait: 20 years.

I won't tell you what it was like to see her dance, because I don't know the words that described what i saw. I know how I felt -- I felt included, and charmed, and free to interpret her interpretation as I chose. I saw her dance in a room in Lower Manhattan, flooded with mean bleak evening light, down on Lafayette Street. She was kind, carrying us (in her audience) into her allusions in a cupped hand. She showed us Lancelot, and Guinevere, and Arthur. She talked about witchery, the white witch and the green. She could have sat on the floor, crossed her legs, and pointed to the knights and then talked about how they lived at the same time (contemporaneously!) as their pagan subjects. She might have talked about how witchery survived (Miss Le Fay, your cue! PLEASE!) right up into that period, and beyond.

She could have laid out for us how witches are reviled because they live the lives of earthly, instead of the sublime. She could have talked about the brew they make of daily things, instead of the divine. She could have said, look -- witches make things happen by saying words, by making vile broths of DAILY ITEMS, by moving their arms and legs and rolling their eyes -- like this! and THIS! -- and she didn't do anything like that, not once.

She just did what they would do if they could dance. (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! MISS TITUBA! STAGE RIGHT!)

The exercise of art is the exercise of bridging a crevasse with legs spread out and open. I remember when Joe was old enough to see that a picture of the moon referred to the moon. That was a short bridge. Clare, with legs that could snap you like a toasted matchstick, skinny little monkey boy, bridges much more. She bridges now, right now, in the room with her breathing hard and feet bared against the floor, with her story. What's the story? King Arthur, the foundation story of Anglo idealism. (But she's Irish....hmmm...) There you are, the story idealized, told and retold until she can tell it with tubes of cupcake icing. And she bridges it with us. Our feet in shoes; our muscles in tweed; our faces in repose. Which, mind you, she did.

There I was, watching Clare, and I thought...look at what she is willing to do. She has gray hair, now, Clare, a little here and there. So do I. We're middle-aged. She's had the grace to forget when I gave her advice that made Polonius look sage, when I was 21 and she was, well, less. Finally, thanks to the magic of proportion, we're the same age. (More or less. A lady never says.)

She was willing to let herself make a sound when her feet struck the floor. She was willing, even, to talk about what she did to learn the performance that she did, to catch our eyes from the stage.

One of the things we talk about, in my business, is not being something that could just be on TV. We talk about making contact, and in a small room, it's easier than a big one. Clare said our names, the ones she knew in the press preview. She included us. We sat right there with her, at grade.

She even included the audience. She included the supreme unpredictability of an audience member, asked him to join in, and then interpreted it her own way, another layer, another spiral in the shell to try to understand. She set a minor rule on him, placed herself in a position of perfect vulnerability (SNOW WHITE, LINE ONE!) and then let herself back into the performance through the keyhole she asked him to cut.

It's hard to imagine giving so much of myself to a performance. I work a great deal onstage. It's very emotional to give the work onstage, but not so emotional to create it. We don't let people see our hearts in my trade, and nor would they wish to.

I was very moved at the willingness Clare has to find powerful reality in her heart, to transfer it to choreography at great risk (is this what I am saying? I can imagine her sometimes thinking) and then to perform it with tiny and gross graces. I was charmed by the corporality of the work she did. I liked to hear her toe on the floor, and to see the icing on her chin.

I liked that it was a real, veined and callused foot that slid from a purple fabric tube -- when there was a purple tube -- and that every part of it was genuine. The performance carried with it the ambiguous passion of individuality. Clare knew just what she was saying, but not necessarily the meaning of the words or even the language with which she said it. I could hear every word that she read aloud with her toes.

May 08, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

links for 2008-04-27

  • The Great Stinking Clue
    It is a testament to how pathetic I am that this is among the most interesting articles I have ever read.
    (tags: durian)

Apr 27, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

links for 2008-04-18

Apr 18, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

links for 2008-04-17

Apr 17, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A first sign of spring

The spring peepers are singing, the snowdrops are blooming... Img_3798

...and the roadkill has thawed.

Apr 14, 2008 in Birds, Outside | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

links for 2008-04-12

Apr 12, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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