for Darryl Berlin
At an open rehearsal of the LINES Ballet Company several years ago, I asked the choreographer, Alonzo King, if the dancers were free to improvise in performance.
“The moves are all completely choreographed,” he replied, “although each dancer has a unique way of moving and can be flexible in the moment.”
I’ve noticed, though, that over the years he has been using more improvisation in the training of his remarkable company, and I can see the difference. The choreography is still set, but the imaginative freedom with which these amazing artists dance has, in my eyes, become even more subtly expressive. It feels like their bodies are responding to a deeper beat, down where the hidden content of dreams resides. It is familiar territory to me as I have been reaching for that in my own work, wanting to teach what I learn to anybody willing to go there with me.
In these times of breakdown and threat, I cannot imagine a technique more important for us all to learn, and to learn fast!
Albert Einstein once said that only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible. He also said that creativity was intelligence having fun. I love that!
I watched intelligence having fun this week up at the farm. My landmates had an hour to get ready for a Halloween costume party but still hadn’t figured out their costumes. Sara rooted up a corny old dress and an oversize blue wig, but Darryl was still lounging around the kitchen muttering something about the Wizard of Oz.
“At the end of the movie, don’t they find him behind a green curtain?” he asked. Sara and I shrugged. “Yeah, that’s what I remember – OK, how do we rig up a green curtain?”
I laughed at what I assumed was a joke.
“And how are you planning to hold this curtain up?” I teased.
“We’ll figure it out,” he replied, returning from the barn with a length of rubber tubing and some pieces of bamboo to create a round contraption to sit on top of his head. Cutting and twisting and drilling followed as I watched this ingenious structure take shape.
Sara went searching and came up with an old green curtain stashed in the back of some closet, I measured and cut it to size and we hung it on with shower-curtain rings stolen from the bathroom.
Within a short hour Darryl was an invisible but chuckling Wizard of Oz hidden behind a round green curtain hanging from his head!
“They’re going to guess you’re a hotel shower,” I commented to this apparition walking out the door a bit later.
“They did,” he told me the next morning.
Attempting the absurd he achieved what had seemed to me impossible, it took less than an hour and we all had a blast in the process. Darryl was living proof that with a few basic skills and a wild imagination we can bring levity into even the most mundane of tasks, and make them work!
For example, I like to play at ‘smoothies’ in a game I call ‘the DNA game.’ You start with a banana and a slosh of almond milk and get a bland white mixture – sort of Western European – but add a touch of maple syrup to it and you can imagine some hanky-panky way back between a native Cherokee, say, and an early White colonizer.
Then pour in a cup of orange juice and the mixture gets sort of ruddy – Middle Eastern, maybe? A bit of applesauce adds tones of yellow-ish and you’ve got Chinese, Japanese; a handful of berries, and the mixture could be East Indian, maybe even Mongolian. A dollop of peanut butter for protein adds light brown – Philippino – and almond butter makes it a bit darker and you’ve got Mayan, North African. Darken it still more with squares of chocolate and cocoa powder and you’ve got the whole African continent!
Delicious!
All it takes is a good blender – and over the generations we sexy humans have been very good blenders!
I giggle and my taste buds register the spicy sweetness; my heart registers a new feeling; my soul recognizes the possibilities inherent in a multicultural world. How much fun is that?
It’s happening more and more when I walk out my door; I cross paths with Sonan, a Tibetan who lives around the corner and Asok, a Bengali who lives across the street from him. I walk up the block with Kerry, our African-American mailman on my way to Susanna’s place – Suzanna, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, before she died, was one of my best friends. I stop to chat with Michiko who was born in Tokyo on exactly the same day my husband Herb was born in Germany, and then go into our neighborhood grocery where Sidi, the grocer I’ve known for years, confesses he always wanted to be a Math professor and go back to Palestine.
It’s all a big improvisation, learning how to live in our constantly evolving smoothie – I mean, world.
My brother, a farmer in Vermont, is even more of an improviser than I am. For example, if I take scraps of cloth found here and there to sew patchwork quilts, he gathers scraps of wood and turns them into buildings!
Well, sheds, he’d say. My favorite one is the sugaring shed behind their farmhouse at the edge of a field, close to one of the maples they tap for sap. The shed is little more than three walls and a metal roof, but as he will tell you proudly, “There’s not one right angle in the place!” He re-works it every year, shoring it up after a winter of snow-loads, hammering new pieces in here and there as cunningly as you please.
For decades it has been an ongoing artwork which he likens to a newborn foal learning how to stand up straight, listing a little to the right, then to the left until it finds its center of gravity – for this year, at least.
“It’s good for another hundred years, easy,” he tells me with a grin.
I’ve been around during sugaring season many a year when the sap gets boiled down in sawed-off metal tubs over roaring fires of scrap wood that burn night and day for as long as the sap is running. Normally, snow is still on the ground and the nights are clear and cold, but it is warm in the shed as fragrant steam softens the air and there you are, standing in an impressionist movie of all the senses, totally happy. An extension cord from the house provides all the light you need to keep stirring and pouring the thickening syrup, tasting (of course) and, if kids are present, dripping a filled ladle onto a patch of clean snow for popsicles.
That’s what I call living, and in my heart of hearts I know it can save us.
Getting simple. Making it up. Having a good time with your neighbors while doing what you need to do.
Really, making little holes in a tree so it drips its nutritious sap? Whoever dreamed up such an absurd notion, and made the impossible possible?
Who? The Native peoples who would have starved by the end of winter had they had not found an unlikely source of nutrition – that’s who!
Oh…
This just arrived in my inbox from Adebayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian poet who lives with his Indian wife and children in Chenai, India, which is now under floodwaters:
“When our hearts break, that is how they intend to accommodate more space – more room for the impossible.”
May it be so, and may he and his family be safe.
