I was living with my folks the last time I saw the Ring Cycle on PBS in the US.  I made my parents endure several hours of it before they said, enough!  After all I had hi-jacked the TV for several nights.  And I was in the middle of Siegfried, and well, maybe…..  actually my mother came to me and said, “Are you really enjoying this?” with a hint that she’d probably prefer something else.  And actually, then, without the absence of distraction–I was inside the living room of an active six person house with dog–I don’t remember much of the Ring Cycle at all.  I do remember telling my mom that we could change the channel.

I know, high recommendation eh?  But it was a small tv, on a fuzzy station, in a mad house of six people and dog— it wasn’t the Yukon Arts Centre, with its HD and surround sound.  It’s giant screen.  And it wasn’t hunky Bryn Terfel, the Wotan of this Ring Cycle.  I’m unabashedly crushing on Bryn Terfel.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to going through my first RING CYCLE in its entirety!  As a fully realized, aware, culturally-interested adult (without a dog).  I want the t-shirt that says I got through it.  I may ask Triple J’s to make some!

Anyway, a FREE movie begins the cycle–it’s Wagner’s Dream: the Making of the Ring Cycle at 7pm on Saturday, May 12.

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Because we are offering the Ring Cycle and because I’m kind of the defacto host of these Met Opera’s, I needed to know more about it–so I looked up the story.  It’s freakin’ amazing!

It might sound familiar: A ring forged that will let the wearer rule the world, dwarves fighting for the ring, dragons that guard it, doomed lovers— seems like Wagner’s Ring Cycle might be  The Lord of the Rings with music.  It’s not true.

Though there is a strong case that Wagner and Tolkien both got their source material from the same places–German and Norse mythology and sagas–what they crafted is very different.  And with all proper credit to Tolkien, Wagner’s opera has just as much amazing storytelling as the tale of hobbits and wizards.

Tolkien’s Trilogy of books starts off with a prelude book, The Hobbit, just as Wagner’s trilogy of operas starts off with Das Rheingold.

The Story:

The story begins innocently enough—mermaids in the Rhine river singing.  An ugly dwarf comes along to try and woo them, and they laugh at him.  When he asks about a golden glow on top of a mountain, they reveal that they are to guard that glow–that it is gold and that particular gold can be shaped into a ring to rule the world.  They don’t mind telling him–because whoever wants that gold has to first renounce Love forever.  But they underestimate bitterness they’ve induced in the dwarf–and he spurns love and steals the gold!

So our story starts off with a choice:  Love or Power?  Which will bring more happiness.  To a spurned dwarf, all that’s left is to get power. He leaves to forge the ring that will rule the world.

High up in Norse Heaven, Wotan and his wife, Fricka, are having some reconstruction work done on their house.  But they don’t want to pay for it–not really.  They’ve promised two giant construction workers (nice) Fricka’s sister, Freia as payment.  That would satisfy them.  But Fricka’s not so sure giving her sister away to two giants is a good thing.  Not to worry, Wotan says–he’s had Loge, his brother, out searching for a better token to give the giants.  The giants get done, crack open a beer, and ask for their payment: Freia–the very picture (and Goddess) of Feminine Love.  Freia doesn’t want to go.  Freia’s brothers appear to save their sister.  Wotan doesn’t want to break the agreement.  He tries to stall long enough for Loge to get there.  Alas, Loge comes back and he can’t find anything that mankind wants more than love–(Wagner seems specific about “feminine love”, ah well).  The giants want their Freia.  Loge does say that only once in the history of mankind did anyone give up Love for something else—and that was that dwarf, who stole the gold and made a ring of power.  Well, the giants are all over that!  They make a new offer—they’ll accept the ring instead of Freia.

Seems like the desire for Love again takes a back seat to desire for Power.  (Of course, the giants were never going to get Freia’s love, just as the dwarf was never going to get the Rhine Maidens’ love–theirs was just the desire for sex, or Lust.)

To save his sister-in-law Wotan has to go get the Dwarf’s ring.  The giants carry Freia off as hostage till they can get the ring.

Well, they find the dwarf making slaves out of other people–using the ring to amass more gold.  He’s also contracted a magic helmet, that renders the wearer invisible, or a shape-shifter.  Through clever con-artistry they are able to nab the ring and the gold.  The dwarf curses the ring—whoever doesn’t have it will want it, whoever does have it will be too anxious to sleep, and will eventually be killed.  Curses be damned, Wotan doesn’t want to return the ring—but when the giants claim that all the gold must stack up high enough to completely shield Freia from sight, Wotan finds that the payment to get Freia back is short by a smidgen–the size of the ring–and he must give up the ring to the giants.  He relents and gives over the ring and the gold and the magic helmet.  They bicker over the gold and the ring and one giant kills the other.  And so begins the story of the ring.

That’s just Das Rheingold!

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As you can see, Wagner wrote the Ring Cycle to turn on complex emotions–a desire for Love, a desire for Power.  Each of the stories in the Ring Cycle complicate this simple dichotomy more and more until it is tangled.  Those who want love can be bought with power.  What is good can be outbid by what is powerful.  Or maybe one desire trumps another.  And betrayed in love?  Oh, that person becomes more powerful the more scorned!

I’m excited about the Operas.  They appeal to the fantasy loving side of me, but also the reader/viewer who wants to see deeper emotional chords being struck, and more complicated plots.  I want to see less bang for my buck and more thoughtful exploration of character.  I think you got it in this opera–in this story!  I will write more when I know more.

The singers will do a great job–the set will be the interesting, twisting hardware that it sets out to be–but the story, the story from over a hundred and fifty years ago–still captures the imaginations of viewers, opera lovers and not opera-lovers alike.  They come for the story!

Maybe you will too.

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All operas are shown with ENGLISH subtitles so you never lose the story.  All operas (except for the free short movie) will have soup available for a small donation.  Operas shown at the Yukon Arts Centre:

SAT, May 12, 7pm : Wagner’s Dream: The Making of the Ring Cycle—FREE

SUN, May 13, 1pm: Das Rheingold

TUES, May 15, 5pm:  Die Walküre

THURS, May 17, 5pm:  Siegfried

TUES, May 22, 5pm:  Götterdämmerung

CRAFT YOUR RING!    FORGE YOUR SWORD!    MAKE YOUR DEALS!     SLAY YOUR DRAGONS!

Here’s a recreation of The Last Supper at Johnny’s Cafe on the campus of Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. April 20 2012.

From Left to Right: Daniel VandeBunte, Kit Graham, Hannah Chee, Annie Bultheis, Seth Wilson, Emily Diener, Joe Gibson, Walter T. Runn, Kaile VanOene, Linda Anderson, Cotter Koopman, and Peter Rockhold. With great thanks to all participants!

  How do you write about your “faith”?  How do you describe the indescribable, the ineffable, the otherworldly? the grief or joy or miracle or peace or disappointment that you have because of your faith?  Everyone can argue about the value or lack of value in “religion”–and it’s an easy connect-the-dots to create your own pictures of what organized religion has done in the world.  It’s harder to write about personal faith or your personal interactions with religion–what keeps you going, what happened to you that you know no one would believe, about the anguish of trying to live in a real, faulty, fragile world, when others ask you to strive for peace, patience, happiness, even joy.

This writing workshop will explore how people write about these very personal experiences, or their thoughts about faith and religion and its very real presence in their lives, or the lives of those around them.  We’ve had students write about their relationships with their parents, their children, their grandchildren, experiences in nature, in confronting others who aren’t on the same page.  We have had students who are believers, non-believers, unsure, people of various faiths.  All faiths are welcome–come with what’s important to you, open to what is important to others. This isn’t a dogma class.  It’s not a class to teach you from the top down.  It’s for you to teach us from the ground up through your experiences, your writing.

What you can expect:

While this is a 13-15 week experience, it’s done in modules, so that you can come and go as you have to.  We’d like to see a committed group of 15-20 people go through the writing education and the writing workshop so that we can have a core group.  However, this class has been taught before at WUC with a core of ten and some of them will be joining us again.  My hope is to build trust in the group, so that you will trust us with looking at your writing.

This will be my third time teaching this class–and it is always one of my favorite courses.  WUC is asking for a $50 course fee if you decide to take the course to reimburse the Herb and Dorreen Wahl Fund, a generous fund that allows WUC to bring affordable, creative experiences to the church and the surrounding community.

The first six or seven classes will be focused more on writing technique with fun exercises to get you writing and trying different methods.  We will read works by contemporary writers like Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andre Dubus, Stephen Gould, John Updike.  (These are all inclusive writers, but for the most part seekers with an inclusive Christian background).Gradually, we will be looking more and more at your writing–as we hope that you will begin to share your stories, fiction and nonfiction.  In March, there will be Saturday afternoon opportunities for longer workshops for those who are ready to submit works to be workshopped.

Come Friday, Feb 10, to the Whitehorse United Church for an orientation meeting, with food.  We’ll have some brainstorming sessions, you can chat with prior participants, and get to know what the class will be like.  The official class will begin Feb 17th and run through Mid May.  A fully detailed schedule will be available that night. 

Jerome Stueart (the instructor) has his PhD in English (Creative Writing) from Texas Tech University, over 15 years experience teaching writing workshops, and this is his third time teaching Writing Faith.  His publications can be found on this website under Written Work.  If you have questions about the course, feel free to write him at jstueart@yahoo.com with the subject heading “writing faith”–or come Friday, Feb 10, at 5pm to the Whitehorse United Church for more information.

Filed under: fiction, literature, religion, whitehorse, writing, Yukon Tagged: christian, faith, united church, Whitehorse, workshop, writing, writing faith, Yukon ]]> http://jeromestueart.com/2012/02/05/writing-faith-workshop-begins-feb-10-5-8pm-whitehorse-united-church/feed/ 1 jstueart IMG_1046 I_Want_To_Believe_01 http://jeromestueart.com/2011/11/20/my-short-piece-in-geez-magazine-24-privilege-issue-on-coming-out/ http://jeromestueart.com/2011/11/20/my-short-piece-in-geez-magazine-24-privilege-issue-on-coming-out/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:10:00 +0000 jstueart http://jeromestueart.com/?p=1998 ]]> Ironically, my pastor at RBC suggested I write for Geez magazine.  I don’t think he imagined what piece I would eventually write for them.  But here it is, Issue #24, on “privilege”.  I wrote the fast version of my coming out at church.  I centered it on the idea of privilege–of the privileges I had as a single, white male Christian who had leadership potential and of the privileges I no longer had when I added “gay” to that mix.

The church has to change.  It has to.  It may not change from those fighting it on the outside, but it will have to incorporate change if it is to survive further.  It faces irrelevance, it postures with discrimination, it plays favorites, it values money.

Not all churches–no.  (When I say a statement like this I have to stop and say, Thank you, churches that are moving more towards inclusion, social justice, focusing on issues like poverty, the environment, civil rights.  You do exist, but I wouldn’t, yet, call you the “Church”–as the “Church” tends to be the monolithic Catholic Castle or the Evangelical Juggernaut.  One day, you will take on that mantle–you will be the “Church” and it will have a positive ring.  You will convince other churches that focusing on discrimination is not the answer.)

Anyway, there it is, in Geez #24.  If this brings you to Talking Dog, welcome.  There’s lots there, I hope, that will spark conversation.  If this entry leads you to Geez, welcome to Geez.  There’s lots there that will spark conversation as well.  It’s a valuable, important magazine carrying on “the” conversations we need to have happen.  It is intrepid, bold, and unflinching.

I would marry Geez magazine if it looked like a bear and loved me back.

*apologies to Kevin James, pictured, who is not gay.

Photo by Cathie Archbould

Friday evening, through with a long string of shows at YAC, I got to go on a mini-vacation.  I went to Boston Marriage at the Guild.  You’d think you’d be “show”ed out, with all the cool things happening in Whitehorse, but Boston Marriage doesn’t feel as if you’ve gone to a show.  It feels like someone snuck you into someone else’s living room to watch.  And it’s refreshing and touching and funny.

The Guild, after a few plays where characters yell at each other, comes up with a love story, where the leads may bicker at each other a bit, but who resoundly care for each other at their heart–and their sniping isn’t just regular sniping.  It’s David Mamet sniping.  That’s like the Caviar of sniping.  Okay, for comparison, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was hot salsa sniping. Sharp, angled, hook-like and a bit cruel.  Mamet’s language is so rich and perfect–it tastes way too expensive for your mouth (which is why hearing it from Katherine McCallum and Moira Sauer makes it even funnier–they know how to wrap their tongues around every word-morsel).

So I laughed, and laughed and laughed…(cringing) and couldn’t stop.  I was surprised that they didn’t stop the play to let me finish.  But they couldn’t–and when they went on, well, it compounded the laughter–and now I was laughing at new stuff, on top of the previous funny lines, and my laughter got worse.  I was very lucky I didn’t pass out, though I think Moira and Katherine both probably would have liked it if I lost just a teensy bit of oxgyen along the way.  Not that I ever covered up a line.  Not that I ever was so loud others couldn’t hear the jokes.  In fact, in FACT, others were laughing just as much as I was.  (But, they weren’t wearing red and they were sitting farther away–hence a more acceptable laughter.)  The whole room shook like puppies in Christmas box.

So, I’m just telling you that a) when you go to the show, don’t wear red and sit on the front row and laugh like a hyena, and b) notice the sets designed by Arabella Bushnell, who plays the maid, and who is the focus of some of the funniest lines –the whole Ireland business bubbles in my throat as I write, and c) don’t think of this as just another show–think of it as a chance to release all that tension from three weeks of heavy work, the crappiness of a whole Winter’s worth of snow and low temps, and a good chance to spy on some folks who are going through a rough patch but who seem to find ways of caring for each other while making it hilarious and d) revel in all that cool vocabulary (there’s a–LOL–glossary at the back of the program) which I dare say will make you want to talk in longer sentences with funny, bigger words.

Yes, yes, laugh like no one is looking (but do it on row 2).

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Costumes rented, we danced up and down Main Street.  We had a great time.  Sarah MacDougall was there, and captured us in a video and put us dancing to her beautiful song, “Sometimes You Lose, Sometimes You Win.”

I already love her CD.  And I was already looking forward to seeing her live in concert.  Now I feel deeply honoured to be part of her VIDEO!!  And I get to be the bear I always wanted to be. I think I was born to be a mascot–what do you think??

Tickets are still available (667-8574, box office).

I would go on and on about a) her music, and b) the existential moment of being a bear, but I’ll let you watch the video instead.

Find Sarah MacDougall’s CD, The Greatest Ones Alive here.

 

 ’Thoughtful, strong, and spiritual”- The Globe and Mail

“This is a real breathtaking and touching record from one of the greatest talents of this era.”- Rootstime, Belgium

“Sarah MacDougall (from Malmoe and now Canada) has become one of the few voices that is separating itself from the big choir of song poets”- Ystad Allehanda, Sweden 5/5 stars!

“A downright intoxicating beauty!” 5/5 stars!- AltCountry.nl, Holland

“Like Ane Brun and Wendy McNeill, we’re not so specific about nationality when we  declare Sarah one of Sweden’s best singer/songwriters” Nöjesguiden, Sweden 4/5 stars!

“A near perfect collection of memories of love”- Allgigs.co.uk 4.5/5 stars!

Described by the magazine Rootstime in Belgium as ‘One of the greatest talents of our era”, and listed as the “2nd best gig” by the major UK newspaper The Independent,  becoming the #1 most played artist on Canadian Galaxie Folk/Roots radio, Canadian/Swedish Sarah MacDougall is an upcoming artist who is getting known for her honest and poetic songs, blistering guitar chops, passionate performances, and unique astounding voice. She has been earning rave reviews and topping major music writers top ten album of the year lists as a songwriter since her official debut album Across the Atlantic (2009), all the while producing and engineering her own music. Born in Sweden, 24 hrs Vancouver called her ‘one of the most promising exports out of Sweden since Abba’, Swedish magazine Nöjesguiden recently declared her “One of Sweden’s best singer/songwriters”. The debut Across the Atlantic got four-star reviews in such notable publications as Q magazine, the Irish Times, No Depression, and the recent album The Greatest Ones Alive has been gathering 4 and 5 star reviews since its release in August 2011.

Sarah’s songs have been chosen for onboard entertainment on Lufthansa airplanes twice, on the Fox TV drama ’15 Love’, on an ad for Roots Clothing , and she’s been a semi-finalist on the International Songwriting competition with her song Crow’s Lament. She has performed live on the Bob Harris BBC2 show in the UK, played several Canadian and International Festivals,  performed with such notable artists as Mary Gauthier, Todd Snider, Kimmie Rhodes, and toured with Po’Girl.

THE GREATEST ONES ALIVE was produced in Vancouver and in Whitehorse with the help of Matt Rogers (Mark Berube, C.R. Avery, The Fugitives), and Bob Hamilton (Kim Barlow, Gordie Tentrees, the Breakmen). It features ten melodic, beautifully written, epic, and touching songs that showcase the growth in Sarah’s songwriting and performance skills. It covers themes such as storms (literal and metaphoric), success, growing up, love, friendship, and dying. The album also showcases the musical skills of Tim Tweedale, Shawn Killaly, Patrick Metzger, and Matt Rogers, with guest appearances by Bob Hamilton, Meredith Bates, Annie Avery, Awna Teixeira, Kim Beggs, Kim Barlow, and Gordie Tentrees.
Sarah MacDougall is one of the hardest working Canadian artists today, and she won’t be stopping anytime soon. THE GREATEST ONES ALIVE proves that Across the Atlantic wasn’t a fluke. Sarah’s voice and songs have the power to ‘make stones weep’. (Q magazine)

(all quoted material from Sarah’s website)

Thank you, Sarah!  May our lives have many moments of dancing bears in them.  

Raven ordering McDonald's Drive-thru, photo by Jerome Stueart

Check out this photo taken yesterday, October 21, outside of the Whitehorse McDonald’s.  Ravens are getting so smart they’re ordering through the drive-thru. The Yukon has very smart wildlife. 

Of course, I’m not sure what this says about McDonald’s food considering what ravens eat. 

Check out this guy’s expression as he realizes what the raven is doing…

So I devised Hidden Histories. 

Hidden Histories is based on the premise that lots of histories have been hidden over time—and that gay history, while the most completely submerged, is just one of many.  The curriculum asks that you start off the new year with a framework, but that you don’t have to change any of your curriculum.  The framework, and subsequently turning your students into little detectives, will bridge the interim for you.

The hardest thing facing California teachers, in regards to this law, is that most people, including myself, have never heard gay history.  So requiring teachers to teach it will be difficult unless you teach them gay history first—and provide them some ideas, lesson plans, curriculum. And giving them only till January to comply is hard… I think you should rather that the schools devise a Teacher training day in the spring, to come up with curriculum.

Anyway, over there at the other blog, I gave my ideas–and hopefully people will feel free to use them.

Best reason for this teaching LGBT stuff in classrooms:

“Within the typical secondary school curriculum, homosexuals do not exist. They are ‘nonpersons’ in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations. The lesson to the heterosexual student is abundantly clear: homosexuals do nothing of consequence. To the homosexual student, the message has even greater power: no one who has ever felt as you do has done anything worth mentioning.” -Gerald Unks, editor, The Gay Teen, p. 5.

On stage, there is a sense that Mump, a bit rule-bound and dictatorial, is trying to be a mentor to Smoot, or a father-figure.  Smoot, on the other hand, is young, innocent, full of whim, silly even, more uncontrollable–like a child.  His voice even sounds a bit like Elmo from Sesame Street, though he can easily scowl at the audience and berate them just as much as Mump.  But the two clowns cry together, miss each other, play together, and are true friends–even if they play doctor and (unintentionally) hurt each other.  It’s not Laurel and Hardy I think of but Abbot and Costello.  Or even George and Gracie.

Our audience was completely charmed by these two–and I laughed through the whole thing—there’s really only a few moments that you can stop laughing.  Sometimes you are laughing at what the clowns are doing to other members of the audience.  The Audience serves as the fourth member of the show, and completely unpredictable.  John and Mike, afterwards in the talkback, referred to what the Audience does at their shows, as “gifts.”  They don’t know how the audience will react, but they take whatever the audience does and uses it in the show.  This is why the show is different every night.  Sure there are several “acts” they go through–but the audience determines paths they will take in the act.

Yes, there are some grotesque moments, but comedy and the grotesque have often gone together.  Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein comes to mind as comedy exploring inside Horror.  We all still laugh–in fact fear makes us want to laugh all the more.  Movies that play with death, or that use a dead body as a running gag, or that find humor in zombies (see Sean of the Dead). Saturday Night Live’s spoof on Julia Child severing her own finger while doing a live cooking show–this is what they mean by grotesque, or even horror.  Mump and Smoot really don’t go beyond that barrier towards horror.  There is nothing so realistic that it makes you gag.  Thug, played by Candice, is perhaps the scariest of the three, and she doesn’t say a thing–which is why she’s kinda scary.  She’s completely unpredictable.

However, they take some roads in other directions that I don’t recall seeing in other clown shows, or comedic duos: Clowns with spirituality.  Mump and Smoot have a home world of Ummo, speak Ummonian, and worship Ummo, their god.  They have a strong belief–and in this they speak about belief and spirituality in society.  Mump and Smoot are believers, and I like the way they reflect on spirituality.

I like the way they reflect on love and friendship too–how these clowns care about each other–even if they do it grossly.  They are friends together in a nightmare–and their world is weirder than ours, but their care is authentic and real.  If these had been horrific clowns we could not have bonded so well with them. We cared about them.  We tried to save Smoot from his own curiosity, calling out to him from the audience–yes, you get so bonded with the clowns that you are calling out from the audience as naturally as you would call out to your friends; we chastised Mump for his treatment of Smoot, and he snackered at us from the stage.  We worked together as an audience to be part of this wonderful show.  I loved being a part of this show, and I think you will too.

“Mump and Smoot are the latest wrinkle on the existential fall-guy, the Everymen buddy-buddies alone at the edge of the world. With their horned caps, bulbous noses and pancake eye masks, however, they are closer to big-tent Laurel and Hardy than new-age Vladimir and Estragons…” – New York Newsday

Edmonton Sun called Mump and Smoot a “national treasure.”  And I think they’re right.

They are in Whitehorse for two more nights—I urge you to not let this one get by.  You’ll have a great time in the audience.  For its use of blood, children will not understand what’s going on, but teens will LOVE it.  Teens get in for $5.  Adults are loving being a part of the show.  It’s a great uplifting night out with friends or partners.  This show definitely has a heart, and if you wait for it, they might show it to you, even if it is a bit wet and dripping.

There are maybe twelve dances in the 80 minutes, and each one provides a chance for the viewer, the audience, to participate by bringing their own meaning to the dance.  Perhaps this was intentional; perhaps not.

The dancers, part ballet-part something deeply, bodily organic–they tiptoe, launch, lurch across the stage, always flowing in rhythm to the music.  They are all lovely to watch.  For the first few numbers we feel as if we’re seeing the birth of a civilization, a whole society; toddlers walk across the stage, learn to laugh and cry together, have first few sleeps; ensemble pieces involving the whole company break up the solo, duo and trio dances.  I was most captivated by the two dancers who seemed to be acting out a first relationship—a man who dates the pliable woman, the one he fits into any shape he wants; he is aggressive, demanding, sexual, and she is passive, not quite even awake in the dance.  He discovers how wonderful it is to slide her hand down his face, his chest, his groin; and she starts to fight him, pushing away, and they twist each other back and forth, as she starts finding her own inner aggressor.  They have tortuous sex, or the dance version of it, always moving, stretching, twisting and flexing those dancers’ bodies.  I was captivated too by the narrative I was creating out of the dance–the story I gave that dance, that I’m even giving that dance now in this essay.

We can’t help it.  Human beings, when we see two or more humans interacting with another, we come up with a narrative, a voice over, maybe, but at least a set of actions, reactions, motivations, based on the expressions, the movements that we see in front of us.   Try it at your local mall.  Watch people for any length of time and you give them a narrative.  You can’t help it.

I saw two dancers later in the work, one crying, one laughing, exchanging their emotions, never ever happy at the same time.  They seemed, one at a time, to delight in the other one’s misery.  I thought—man, Chouinard knows human nature.  Some couples just can’t let each other be happy—they trade off the miserability, laugh at the other one in some revolving-door schadenfreude.  They can never be happy.

But in some ways, for me to tell you the narrative undoes the dance.  So I’ll stop that.  The dance is without narrative so that you find what you want in it–but it is beautiful.  Their bodies slowly shed more and more clothing; their faces take on different masks, those of elderly women, those of babies.  One woman wore a four-faced mask and kept turning her head and I swear I couldn’t figure out which mask rested on her face… she just flipped faces as she pivoted and walked across the stage…finally picking up a read book, turning the pages as she turned her faces….  as if every face sees only a part of the narrative, never the whole.  But we all read it together.

The moment when the troupe was nude came with a most disconcerting set of masks–the mask of babies, forcing the audience to see these toned and beautiful bodies as children, and therefore part of a cultural taboo to think of sexually.  Even though the adults had attractive bodies, those baby faces completely squelched any sexual interpretation.  I settled for Innocence as the last act.

The masks–you couldn’t take your eyes off them.  When the faces of the elderly or the babies’ faces were placed on those bodies, you couldn’t help but read them as the face of that body.  It was very funny and surreal.  It’s the eyes.  We hone in on the eyes–and no matter what body is below, we will believe the face.

After the dance was over, the dancers had a talkback and we discussed the idea of Narrative.  At first, they talked about the spontaneity of the dance, that they script themselves new moves and moments based on their day, their own thoughts.  But even they admitted that there is some linear, motivational leap they make themselves in their own heads to get from one action to another, especially in the ensemble pieces.  They hold their own inner narratives about their dances.

We discussed how the dance does invite the reader to create meaning.  I’m reminded of Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”  Keats can’t help himself but make a narrative out of the figures on the urn :

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

“Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought….”  Exactly, Keats!  I felt as if the dance teased out a thought, a narrative, out of each person.

And this, I think, is the brilliance of good modern dance.  Good Dance allows us all to have a collective experience in beauty, and allows us, simultaneously, to find our own individual truths and experience them privately.  It slips in perfectly between our firewalls and gets at our deepest held emotions and truths.  Against our own wills even, we weave a narrative out of beauty.  It is dangerous then to see it–it is an act of courage to watch it.  And it is an emotional act of community to sit and let the dance pull these narratives from us, in public.