Category Archives: the performer

Jan13

beautiful

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Ngonda Badila is Lady Moon.  Her song, Speak to the Light, is one of the most lovely pieces of music that I have ever heard.  She sings it during the performance of Xmalia, the show created by C. Ryder Cooley.

The first time I heard it, I did not think that the sound was coming out of a human body, it was so etheric, so wildly beautiful.  When I watched her performance last weekend with Ryder on trapeze, it moved me to tears.

You can listen to it online, but better still, you can see and hear Lady Moon in person at the upcoming MCLA performance of Xmalia on January 25 at 7:30 in North Adams, MA.

 postscript:  This week The Journal is about callings.  How we feel them, and a few ragged ones of my own.  Breaking into Blossom starts next week.  This is an online class about moving into an improvisational life, about lessening the commute between what you think of as creative and everything else.  I hope you will join us.  You can register here.

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Jan9

finding the light

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Photo:  Jeffrey Anderson, from RIDE with Escorial and Deanna Pellecchia

I spent the weekend in the theater, directing Ryder Cooley’s production of Xmalia.  For the past number of years, my theater has been the arena, dancing with horses.  It is good to get back inside for a bit.

The theater is a good place to look for light.  Literally, figuratively.  My focus with this production is to find the light within the dark themes of extinction and mourning.  To bring each of the performers into their individual, specific lightness of being.  And doing that in such a way that the shadows are also revealed, the spaces between, the interstial illuminations.  That is how the work can surprise us with little moments that shake the heart, as well as the big ravishing ones.

How are you finding the light?

 

 

 

 

Jan7

war horse

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I went to see the film War Horse last night.  In a blog following the horse slaughter debacle, I had expressed a hope that millions would see the movie and be moved to act on behalf of the horse.  Sadly, I don’t think this movie will do it.

I had seen the play several months ago. There is something infinitely more moving about the relationship of horse to human in the theatrical production.  Not just the relationships between the human actors and the horses, but also the breathing animation of human bodies inside the horses, creating each of the subtle equine articulations of these marvelous puppets.  The horses feel more fully there because of the intricate, detailed attention to how they move, breath, respond.

And the play does more to engage us in the horror of this war that took the lives of 8 million horses and 35 million humans.

The horses in the film are beautiful, no question.  But there is something stomach turning about seeing a real horse run though “no man’s land” becoming hideously entangled in barbed wire. Here I would have to agree with Kat Murphy:

Maybe the puppets used in the Broadway play eloquently expressed the horror of beautiful, dumb beasts brutally done to death, even more expendable than the millions of young men wasted in WWI. And perhaps a puppet Joey racing across no-man’s-land, mad with terror, to fall tangled in barbed wire worked as shattering metaphor for the nightmare of war. But movies can be cruelly literal; it’s living horseflesh we see beaten, maimed, dying in Spielberg’s endless outtake from “All Quiet on the Western Front.” There’s no masking the smell of slaughterhouse.

But hey, in the very next scene after Joey’s gut-wrenching steeplechase, enemy soldiers join forces to cut him out of the barbed wire, cracking wise and milking the moment, as hushed as church, for every drop of schmaltz — served up on Joey’s bloody back. Trust corn to take away the sting. That corn, followed by a prolonged, self-indulgent descent into bathos, turns the suffering of an animal into a cinematic lie (the exact opposite of the sanctification of the battered donkey in Robert Bresson‘s “Au hasard, Balthazar“). That lie feels like the callousness of a child, unable to grasp what pain and death mean to other living things.

 The difference for me is between feeling manipulated versus awed and moved.

Jan5

the archival warrior

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Photo:  Nick Novick from White Dreams, Wild Moon by Paula Josa-Jones

I have been culling my digital files.  And the day before I went through my costume archive.  Emptying the trash is a theme.  I want my waters clear, not muddied by what I no longer need.  Not even what I thought I might need some day, maybe, just in case.  I feel like an archival warrior. The digital files are easier.  One click.

The costumes are harder.  I remember who wore them, the feel of the movement that they held, the passionate conversations that resulted in their creation.  I have probably ten large plastic bins.  I emptied two.  You never know when you will need those Creon headdresses, or a pig’s nose . . .

In my digital culling, I found this, written about ten years ago.  It was from a letter to a friend.  “I read this morning in the book In the Lap of the Buddha by Gavin Harrison, that Chogyam Trunga Rinpoche talks about the idea of warriorship as that which is sad and tender, because with those qualities the warrior can be very brave as well.  ‘For the warrior this experience of the sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness.  It comes from letting the world tickle your raw and beautiful heart.'”

I feel like this sifting review is just that:  looking at the ways the world has tickled my raw and beautiful heart.  Letting that in again, in a feeling way.  I found, for instance, the words that I spoke at my mother’s memorial.  Sad and tender.  A couple weeks ago, Pam wrote a piece called my mother’s ashes about finding a heart shaped ashtray that she had made for her mother when she was eight. There’s the fearless part.

I am interested in the way that memory and memento shape what is blooming here, now.  I wrote a Journal piece about that last week called “An Archival Being.”  This week I am taking a dive into what Pico Iyer, writing about Graham Greene, calls “fundamental trembling.”  Another ragged little memoir.  (If you subscribe this week, I will send you last week’s Journal free.)

Speaking of Pico Iyer, I also found this jewel:  The Joy of Quiet.  I think, actually, that may be what all of this culling is about.  Stillness in all of that movement.

What are you holding?  What are you releasing?