“American artist Louise Bourgeois died on Monday, May 31, at the age of ninety-eight. Born in France to parents who made their living repairing tapestries, she moved to New York City in 1938 and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. She gained attention for her provocative artworks late in life and is often most recognized for her giant spider sculptures known as Maman. The Maquette for Facets to the Sun is a small piece from 1978 in the collection of American Art. Here Bourgeois has created the model for a larger work of painted steel that explores the natural world. The wooden pieces have all turned to face the same direction, pulled (like the artist’s need to create) by a force that’s greater than themselves.”

See the piece on their site here.

Image in this post is Bourgeois’s Maquette for Facets to the Sun from the Eye Level post.

Age and knowledge and wisdom and learning are words that seem the best way to describe the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, which I attended last week. Others might use network, or protest, or activism. But poetry comes from people who will age; who gain knowledge, may become wise and are always learning. And poetry was the essence of the festival.

It’s appropriate that a “political” poetry festival would take place in our Nation’s Capitol –where else could it? Festival organizer Sarah Browning, my main man Regie Cabio, and their DC colleagues, are deeply dedicated to community, peace and the power of the word. And despite the occasional logistical challenge of getting one’s body from one place to the next, it felt as if everyone there, even the good people who work at the Thurgood Marshall Community Center, had a great time.

Patricia Monoghan and Michael McDermott, the co-founders of Black Earth Institute, invited me to join them on one of this year’s panel. Along with Patricia, Annie Finch, Judith Roche and Richard Cambridge, I spoke on the panel: Speaking for the Silence/d. Of course, being the gentle contrarian that I am, I spoke about listening — that we who speak are often speaking to indifferent, hostile or simply deeply ignorant audiences and that we have to start thinking of new ways to open ears. We each read a poem before speaking (a last minute request by Patricia M) so I read from my collection, Femme du Monde.

My Matthew Shepard Poem

My students are rightfully spooked
someone their age was left to perish
because he preferred the company of men

My mother tells me of seeing a man lynched
back in the 30′s, in Arkansas, not far from where
I grew up and grew away in the 60′s.

What I know about America is that hatred
crawls through the culture like the cracks
in the San Andreas fault.

Edifices are built to withstand the inevitable
quakes, but the quakes grow stronger..
What ever we dream harmony or a reasonable tolerance
is destroyed in the wake

of men drinking and killing. Their blood lusted
laughter howling through the night.

A Black man in Texas. A white man in Wyoming.
A doctor at his window about to eat dinner with his family.
A nurse on her way to work at a clinic.

The playing field is not level. In fact, there is no playing field.
There are men enraged by change. And women bitter about it.
And people, say
gay, Black, Latino, Chinese, Japanese, Arab, or Jewish
to blame, always to blame.

The ugly men in their same wool suits and striped ties
gibber political correctness, freedom, fairness
and fuck you
every time they claim that these are acts of individuals, not of society.
Each act alone represents

singular aberrant behavior, like murder.
I can hear them say, I mean they actually lynched that boy,
even as they call this one faggot and that one nigger.
And they really, really want women
compliant and girlish
or sexless and mothering.

And if this seems like male bashing, so be it.
If the dress shoe fits, may it pinch like hell.

The panel was rich in information and deep connection to a range of communities. Annie talked on collaboration in her Wolf Song project; Judith on her work with incarcerated girls and environmental projects; and Richard discussed the media’s mindset vis a vis our un-neighborly relationship with Cuba. Our audience was terrific–I got to meet Tracy Chiles McGhee and all the way from NYC, Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Victoria Sammartino as well as other teachers, arts group organizers, librarians, poets all. Patrica M. opened up the room for discussion and poetry and Victoria read a deeply moving piece about the incarcerated girls that she has worked with. It was truly moving.

Later that day I heard a bit of Camille Dungy’s talk on Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Black Nature is a profoundly useful anthology that adds a different dimension to the conversation about the perception of nature by U.S. poets. That African Americans deal with the trees, rocks, cattle, sheep, flowers, ecological disasters, etc. should not be news, but for some in and out of the academy, it is. I also met Laura Hope-Gill from Ashville, NC and her colleague Trey Moore who are creating a kind of “poetry emergency response team” for communities that have had a traumatic event. Laura and Trey have some very good ideas and we attendees (age and wisdom here) – provided them with information and more ideas, but also pointed out possible pitfalls.

The final panel I attended was led by Andrea Carter Brown, and related to “historical” poems. I do use historical fact and/or myths in some of my poetry, but others are using facts and documents for their poetry. Scott Hightower’s presentation was particularly impressive because he spoke as a lyric poet (which he most definitely is) and as someone profoundly interested in unearthing the layers of story in the lives of people. Robin Coste Lewis talked about using the documents of her family, Louisianans who had moved to California – and while I didn’t say this, it does strike me that the internal migrations of people’s (Black or White) in this nation from crop failure, war, and social injustice and oppression are rarely told in American poetry.

Martha Collins talked about the development of Blue Front her amazing book length poem and Kim Roberts discussed becoming a literary historian: finding where Whitman lived while he was in DC, etc. and then writing about that. In discussion there I brought up two things: one that poor people often do not tell anything about their lives because of the profound difficulties they faced, and, the panel represented the first post- Jim Crow generation. We folk in our late fourties are the last American generation to live under legalized segregation. This is a complicated but healthy time in many ways for our Republic – sh*t is out here for all too see. How we work it through, well that’s why the Festival exists, I think – to give us more tools for gaining greater health in our ideas and ideals.

It was a great pleasure to present, and attend. Now back to the work of finding income to sustain my life, making poems, and doing what I can in this world.
Peace

Patricia Spears Jones is an African American poet, playwright and cultural commentator. She is author of Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press) and editor of Think: Poems About Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat (www.bombsite.org) and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York Women Poets (out of print). Her poetry is anthologized in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days; Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African American Nature Poetry; Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn, Poetry After 911; and Best American Poetry, 2000. She writes the “Cosmopolitan in Brooklyn” column for Calabar Magazine and is a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine, both published in Brooklyn, NY. Mabou Mines commissioned and produced ‘Mother’ 1994 and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting, 2007.

She has received grants and awards from the NEA, NYFA, the Goethe Institute and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and residencies at Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA), the Millay Colony and Bread Loaf. She is a fellow at the Black Earth Institute, a progressive think tank and was elected to the VCCA Fellows Council. She works as an arts administrator; poetry and creative writing instructor and fundraiser. She has taught creative writing workshops at Sarah Lawrence, Parsons School of Design, Naropa University and Pine Manor College’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference, as well as St. Mark’s Poetry Project, where she was Program Coordinator 1984-86, and for Cave Canem.

All photos by Jill Brazel

“In class’s Saturday night discussion on “The System Doesn’t Work,” I got frustrated by the general sense of helplessness among the artists participating. Although they were quick to point out that the entire system only exists because of artists (something I take pains to highlight in very clear terms in my book), they seemed reluctant to accept that changes to the art market system were their responsibility and within their power.

…offered up two examples of artists who had changed things dramatically through their efforts. First is Damien Hirst who sent shivers through the commercial art gallery system by taking his work directly to auction. That example was dismissed as being something only an artist with Hirst’s starpower (an admittedly small fraction of artists working) can do. The fact that the ripple effect of that star’s actions still has potential to change things for all artists seemed to go unrecognized, probably because what that change might be remains unclear. There was also a resentment in the discussion about how the art stars are the only artists with any power. I utterly reject that defeatist notion, and so does history.

The second example I noted is in all the history books, and the impact it made is very clear. At the height of Abstract Expressionists utter domination in the US art market, a group of very smart younger (non-stars at the time) artists dethroned the Ab-Exers…not through some clever manipulation of the market system, not through calls for new regulations or new laws, but instead WITH THEIR ART!!! Most notably, Jasper Johns mocked abstract expressionism with (among other works) his canvas titled “Painting with Two Balls” (see above) so effectively that along with similar efforts by Rauschenberg and Stella, etc. it essentially disemboweled the dominance in the market of Ab Ex work.”

Click here to view the complete post.

Image in the post is Jasper John’s Painting with Two Balls.

The first 5 months of work on our upcoming show, The Fugitives, were spent entirely at the drafting board. A deconstruction of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, our piece follows Orestes and Electra (the siblings who killed mom after she killed dad) 6000 years (give or take a millennium) after the major events of their lives. We planned everything out. It was beautiful. And it got shot to shit as soon as we hit the rehearsal room. Seeing theatre breathe can suddenly make something that was powerful on paper utterly insignificant; a wonderfully conceptualized journey into a dream world involving a glass of milk refused to look anything but silly when people actually did it.

The Québécious artist Robert Lepage, one of our major inspirations, said “Theatre takes shape in flight, when its meaning and direction escape us, when it becomes a rebellious beast that we’re unable to cage.” I engage in theatre because of this, it’s quality of self-generation. Just three days into rehearsal, almost everything about the piece had changed. Something small in rehearsal – the request for a table – lead to imaginative journeys (a running motif of consumption becomes central and the entire structure of the piece happens around eating a banquet).

As often as not, a single image (a girl with ear pressed to a man’s chest, setting a clock to his heartbeat) or sound (the wisp of wings and cries of crows gathering) will inspire an event in the piece. Theatre is about storytelling–and I do believe that is it’s core essence–but it is also about creating visual poetry. This doesn’t imply lyricism, but refers to the poetic notion that is part of the theatrical experience: a group of people pretending together, experiencing a fleeting piece of art which will vanish when complete. I want to create theatre that lives up to that level of poetry. Which means that the language of our work–whether that be literal, spoken language or sound cues or props or gestures–is just as important to the piece as “what it’s about.”

The danger of working this way is finding yourself with a series of fascinating and beautiful moments and a piece that is less than the sum of its parts. We’re looking right now at two issues in rehearsal. We crafted Orestes and Electra fully in our heads – have we given the audience the opportunity to know these people as well as we do? Have we allowed anyone to care about them? Also, is the piece progressing directly to its inevitable conclusion? Since this is a deconstruction of a classical Greek text, we end up cutting some evocative elements we loved (Orestes obsessively writing in white chalk all over the floor of the black box we perform in) because they are no longer serving the piece as a whole. While I find editing myself incredibly challenging (you want me to throw away what????), it rewards in the end. Releasing an idea into the wild forces you to put faith that more will come along, and, happily enough, they usually do.

I’m incredibly excited for the opening run of The Fugitives February 10-13 and 17-20 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (547 7th St. SE, Washington, D.C.) Tickets are $10. For more information and reservations email admin@LaRinascitaTheatre.com Hope to see you there!

Anne Veal is a theatre artist currently based in Washington, DC. In addition to building The Fugitives, she is working acting in her second project with Tony-Award-winning Signature Theatre. Previously she has worked with the Actors Theatre of Louisville (33rd Humana Festival of New American Plays), The Kennedy Center, Project 1367, Charter Theatre, Capitol Fringe Festival, among others. This summer she, David and The Fugitives will travel to the Prague Fringe Festival. To learn more about La Rinascita Theater visit: www.LaRinascitaTheatre.com.

Rehearsal photo by Ariana Hodes
Fugitives poster design by Kyle Read

Others were beginning to gather backstage and the director decided on a minimal response. “Madame, the part is key to the ballet, why the choreographer made it for his own child! No one but a trained dancer could take those poses, proceed with the requisite bearing, or gesture with the crucial clarity.” The mother hadn’t expected so authoritative an answer delivered in a voice as chill as the London fog, and so she just stood glaring, giving the director the opportunity to walk away. Quickly the young dancer and the recessive parent steered the woman to the exit door.

On the drive home, the woman remained silent, but once there she reiterated her complaint on the telephone to her older offspring who was away at college. “Can you imagine, she wailed “I’m supposed to be satisfied with pumped-up posing and looking commanding as being dance? You’re majoring in arts, please tell me what your experts there at your fancy university say dance is!”. The college student was used to the mother’s rants, but this time her topic was intriguing. What would Plato say, what Aristotle, or Richard McKeon? Beauty and truth, likely, would figure in Plato’s response, beautiful movement that truly showed the nature of the soul. But what is beauty, what is truth in movement, let alone is there a soul? Plato’s way might illuminate an ideal, but getting a practical answer along that path would take forever. Nor would that pupil of Socrates answer the question of what dance is, all dance, just plain dance. He’d be hot about good dance, skilled dance, but not about the sort of dance a child might do if asked to dance.

The college student was aware of the pitfalls of empiricism. It wouldn’t suffice to ask one child to dance, or even several. A statistically significant number of the world’s children would have to be asked to dance infront of trained observers who then would have to determined what all the exertions had in common. Where, oh where, would the funding for this undertaking come from? In the absence of an angel or a grant, the college student decided to improvise and self-observe.

The first attempt was done to music. This dance had rhythm, the body cupping into itself and opening up, taking on line and yielding it again, repeating phrases of movement but building them too, letting them grow and develop. It took effort, though, not to become enslaved to the music and simply mirror its patterns and form. So the college student tried a second dance, one without music. That was difficult, though, for the movements linked themselves to another sound, that of the student’s own breathing. Exhaling and inhaling established a rhythm as dominant as music’s meter and perhaps even more so. With willpower the student was able to proceed against breath, counter to its pattern, but were the resulting movements still dance or just wayward motion? By accident the student stumbled on something other than a beat that could give the exertions a sense of order. Place and volume became the matrices and made motion seem a dance. If the student’s body took on a squatting, pulled-down stance, one that looked voluminous, every time it came close to one of the room’s corners that generated a pattern and transformed motion into dance. Was it possible, though, to dispense with both time (rhythm, beat, pulse) and space (location, position) and still dance? Could there be a fifth and sixth dimension, such as memory and sensuality, that might be used? And why, anyway, does the mind need a set of coordinates to see dancing?

The student decided to give Aristotle’s definition of dance a chance. That tutor to the young Alexander wrote (or, perhaps we have just lecture notes full of mistakes that one of his students jotted down) about the arts as modes of imitation and that bodily “rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means of the dancer’s imitations”. By the rhythms of the dancer’s attitudes, humans (and animals?) are represented and also shown is what they do and suffer. “The objects represented are actions” for both the actor and the dancer, but a difference between dance and drama is the “manner in which” the object is represented. Dance imitates actions by means of movements that give pleasure to the eyes. Ah, once again, the Greek weakness of insisting on good dance! And, apparently, Aristotle never saw a dancer who substituted space, memory or sensuality for rhythm. So the student decided to use Aristotle’s dialectic on a wider range of experience. Had the great analyst sat in more recent theaters, he might have written that dance is bodily movement “done for its own sake” that engenders a recognizable pattern. The pattern can be in any dimension, not just time (rhythm), but it must be recognizable and the movement must be done for movement’s sake, not for producing consumer goods or waging war or giving artificial respiration. Not ruled out is that dance movement can produce pleasure in the dancer and, when it is well done, also in the observer. The latter has a better chance of experiencing pleasure when watching professional dancers whose bodies, molded by training, diverge from the norm and whose patterns, enhanced by technique, are compelling. As an activity done for its own sake, must dance exclude making Plato’s truth and beauty manifest? Or, Vestris’s virtue? Didn’t that French superstar of a few centuries ago say that to be a great dancer one must be a good person because on stage one can not get away with lies? Ah, idealism! Yes, dance may do that too but at minimum the movement, done for movement’s sake, must generate just a pattern, a recognizable pattern!

The college student, although exhausted from dancing and thinking, phoned home. It was late at night now and at the other end of the line the dominant parent, woken from sleep, said hello with a worried tone. “Oh, its you! And you want to know whether your sibling stood like a dancer and walked like a dancer, whether I saw a pattern in all that business! I don’t care, I wanted to see that kid dance like a dancer!” And she slammed the receiver down.

FINIS (or continue ad absurdum)

George Jackson is.

I agree with Kaufman’s assessment that the Guangdong Modern Dance Company’s (GMDC) section of the trilogy lacked emotional commitment and consisted mostly of pretty movement by nice technicians. However, Kaufman blames Chinese society for the dancers’ lack of expression, quipping “Expressiveness isn’t easy in a society where individual freedoms are still dodgy.”

The performers’ lack of depth resulted not from China’s Great Oppressive Society — a hackneyed cliché which articles like Kaufman’s only help to sustain — but from the same immaturity found in young dancers in any country. The six GMDC dancers on the Clarice Smith Center stage in October are some of the company’s youngest. The dancer bios in the program reflected that most of these performers had joined the company within the last two years. Due to the project’s limited budget, the full company was not able to participate in the US tour. Half of the company, in fact the more mature and experienced dancers, were performing other GMDC repertoire in Europe and Taiwan.

This past July I had the opportunity to enjoy the GMDC section of “Other Suns” performed with the full company in the annual Guangdong Modern Dance Festival in China. In contrast to the version we saw here, that performance of this same piece contained an admirably deep level of commitment and energy. If Kaufman’s goal was to write a more encompassing article about the larger topic of modern dance in China, she could have researched footage, easily available on YouTube, of other GMDC works like “Upon Calligraphy” or works by other modern dance companies in China like the Beijing Modern Dance Company. If she had, she would have found performances of profound expressiveness and emotional depth by performers like Ma Kang, Xing Liang, Tao Ye, and others.

Kaufman asserts that the performance made her consider “the challenges of teasing capitalist narcissism out of a culture of collectivism,” and that this is somehow a prerequisite for better modern dance in China. Not only does this draw a fallacious connection between one dance performance and all of Chinese culture, it also reveals an inaccurate understanding of that culture. Since the establishment of the one-child policy and with rising affluence in larger cities, China in fact is now experiencing what some academics call the “Little Emperor” phenomenon. When asked their goal in life, most young Chinese professionals from this “spoiled” generation will tell you point blank: “To make money.” China today is a culture of capitalist narcissists. This is not what was lacking on stage. Capitalist narcissism does not make good modern dance; experience and maturity do.

The rigors of dance training often produce technical masters who are emotionally vacant, but this phenomenon is not unique to China. Young western dancers can be equally uninteresting to watch as they show off flashy technique before they have gained the depth of expression found in mature performers. Had GMDC’s “A-team” been on stage at the University of Maryland and not on tour in Germany or Taiwan, we would have seen more of these moments from the Chinese side of the co-production. Kaufman’s analysis does a disservice to American understanding of contemporary China, and Chinese contemporary dance.

To see Kaufman’s review, click here. To see Guangdong Founder Willy Tsao’s reply to Kaufman published in the Post, click here.

Alison M. Friedman is the founder/director of Ping Pong Productions (www.pingpongarts.org) which brings together Chinese and international performing artists, scholars and audiences for creative collaboration and exchange. She was International Director of the Beijing Modern Dance Company from 2005 until 2008 when she was hired by Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun to be General Manager of his company Parnassus Productions, Inc. The leading expert on modern dance in China, Ms. Friedman came to Beijing in 2002 on a Fulbright Fellowship to research the development of modern dance in the Middle Kingdom. In addition to lecturing on the art form in both China and abroad, she has conducted research for the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the Asian Cultural Council, and her writing has appeared in Dance Magazine (USA). She has worked as consultant for the US Embassy in China, Columbia University, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as other overseas dance and theater companies touring the Middle Kingdom. From 2003-2005 she hosted a live music program on China Radio International (CRI), China’s largest government-run radio station.