The Opening Concert.
October 4th, 2019.
Goodwood, South Australia.
In the dark comfort of the theatre I sit, and as the music starts an absinthe green syncopation grips me, syncopation slipping into chromatic synchrony as she takes the stage by purple moonlight and we are taken along with her, drunk on a single drop of pure ambrosia. With hands outstretched and palms held aloft, she offers us with gentle gestures, a journey, should we wish it, into a world where speaking is done with the body, and we, silently, accept.
She is a Persian Pomegranate with fruit stained lips, she is a pale moon-bride, promised and promising, with draping sleeves caught on Etesian winds. With time-spanning steps, centuries turn and spin, turn and point, pip toe, tip toe and leaves fall unseen as invisible seasons pass and come again.
She is the Scythian Queen Tomyris. I am Cyrus, and should I die now at your hands I shall have my fill of this life and join you in whatever angelic hell you have fallen to earth from. She is the red veil, the mask that reveals the spirit beneath and those parts of her that are uncovered seem to conceal the secrets too secret to show on stage, where a sword is just another word for mind. My thoughts are cut, her warrior chestplate shimmers starlight bright and her shimmy is the storm of Hades breaking upon the shore of her thigh.
Everything starts in darkness, the heartbeat, the clock tick, the tinsmith hammer stumbles only to strike with ever more increasing precision, she clips and bends the moonlight and through her skin is made visible the heart-blood which cannot hide from us our eternal, communal humanity, naked as we are, adorned as we are in glittering wonder. So like the water, the blood has tides, sweeping away our sins, smoothing our broken bones and mending scars. I say: can you hear the message in our silence? We mean something when we listen like this, with our whole body, we receive something, it is right there, at the tip of her fingertip....I would cry to see such beauty, but my tears would cloud my vision of you.
And then, in the rolling waves of applause, my son says in my ear: Clapping makes my hands soft.
I agree with him, and with all the metaphors that such softness, and such celebrating sounds imply.
Moonlight pours in through my ear again as without fingers you tingle the skin, you shelter beneath your own wings, the opening and closing of which becomes the window through which you let us in, pressed between breaths, north and south wind, hot and cold, you are a siren song, a lure with no catch, just the truth of your body, a truth that in the open intimacy of the stage is the most natural thing of all. Flattering us with bedroom eyes, and teasing with the supine curve of your reclining form, you share something secretive, but not secret, hiding, but not hidden behind your feather fans, and as you step away into darkness, you wave goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello.
In life, as in dance, there is always room for comedy, but I do not know so well how to write about comedy (yet I shall try nonetheless...) She tells a story of a good kind of pride, the best kind, full of humility and humour, with a natural confidence bolstered by the belief in the good things in life. I am not a comedian, certainly not on stage, but I laugh with the crowd at every little joke, every clever gesture. She shows us how costume is an act that we as adults can play as well as our children do, and with equal delight we are pulled along in her game of fighting trousers.
I ask, do we pretend to be angels when we put on the wings of Isis and move beneath an auroral halo of stage light? Is it play pretend, or is it religion? Is it fantasy or fortune, casting us in the roles we play? Believe it or not, we are playing our parts, and whether we were born to them, or chose them freely is a matter for philosophers. We cheer with her triumph, we love to see her, and to see ourselves in her, up there, angelic. Her wings sweep over us and in their shadow we are made brighter, lighter, a seated crowd of seraphim, cherubim, and cheeky laughing spirits of delight.
She is a woman who knows what she wants. She knows how to step to, step up, whip and drive the beat, she can out-cool the street, and there ain't no-one who can say other-wise. She can jump an inch or jump three styles, she can call it, name it, sing it out, diss it, kiss it goodbye and come time to drop the beat, she already skipped ahead.
I've waited 2 years to see her dance again, and it would have been worth it to wait 1001 nights. Tradition is born anew with her every gesture. The curve of her spine, the smile in her eye...I wish I loved anything the way she loves dance, the way she loves herself, the world. Her arms could encircle the sun.
*
It is a limping, stepping, skipping dance
a blindfold race through time
through cities bright and cities dark
and in my hand a glass of wine
and I salute the crooked ways
the messy, broken, wayward days
of youth and age and even sleep always
if we survive the coming dark
and when the dawn-birds sing and hark
the coming day
the unknown way
we'll go skipping, stepping, blindfold limping,
crying, singing, fighting, winning and all the ways
we keep on trying,
to play the two against the one
to dance the moon against the sun
so we will find out one by one
by three by six by nine,
one day we will run out of time
until then we will dance
the skipping, stepping, tripping, falling
and the ever present,
rising
up again
that is the song of all our pain
and laughter.
*
She is the temple she dances in, she is the moonstone crown priestess of the half-time drop beat. She, like the shaman of old, she the inventor of a synthesis, the receiver of wisdoms, of teachings, of traditions, she the transmuter of an elemental drama as fundamental to the human race as it is to the formation of mountains and the burning brightness of stars. She brings the temple with her on this pilgrimage of dance.
We all love her, she wears a rainbow, but it is a mere monochrome shadow beneath her bright and laughing smile. Just because it's trad, don't mean it's old fashioned...they knew how to move it in the old days too, knew how to shimmy, shake and spin...and beauty is timeless. Her hair sways like tall summer grass and we move with her in the delicious summer night as she kneels before us and spins, and spins, and spins...
A duet is an agreement, a sharing of shapes and a bolstering of mutual spirit. It is about support, not expressing starlight, but instead, sisterhood, sharing shapes and steps, not outshining, but holding hands. She is a chorus, a harmony and a parallel universe of equal measures part sugar, part wine, spice and clear spring water.
He speaks through us, we breathe in unison at his eager request, we speak the words that first formed in our mouths as children. We chant HO! We sing, DOUM, TEK. We spin dizzy and clap GA MA LA clap GA MA LA in variable cycles of success and laughter. He springs and leaps, a Spriggan sprite, a Puck for our evening's delight who floats so high when he kicks his heels.
She is black and blue, I hear a bone battle rattle. She is a spirit-speaking-sorceress, she wears the painted mask of a beast that cannot be named and shapes come to life in the shadows around her, broken piano keys, a violin with only one string. She dances a possession ceremony, she shakes with passions I cannot here speak, yet I know. She is pulled up on hooks, dragged down on a rack of invisible ropes like a shibari puppet. We roar to see such passions displayed, to see our own darkness given voice through her.
Someone must have put absinthe in my drink, I think, (though I think that I have thought this before...??) She is a green fairy dancing as if she were born inside an accordion. She proves again that there are 10,000 ways to dance to Baladi. You can speed it up to break-hip speed or you can slow it down until the cycles of the moon seem fast by comparison and the drummer may improvise endlessly in spaces between the beats. There is a slink, a wink, a sly slip and spring-time rill, and shimmering with glimmer glamour she dances us the story of a land far, far away.
She wears Doc boots, which to me support a certain punk attitude, along with denim jackets and messy hair. She stomps with a swagger, shouts with clout, steps in and out and turns again in a dance where perfect rhythm would indicate a weakness of spirit, it's a folk-punk-swing-thing that leaves prettiness behind in the mascara mud and instead marches on into a place where anger can be served as a meal.
Where do you keep your swords? Mounted on the wall, hidden beneath the floor? Or do you wear them on your bare arm? Keep them ready for the moment when they might be needed? She is tall as a warrior, supple as the willow spirit, she is a balancing point counter point between sagacity and a certain savage sensuality. She is a storm of swords, a cyclone name Kalikah.
She plucks the stars from the sky and, stitching them all into one dress, she dances all the years of travel, all the lives she has lived, the phases, the phrases, the styles and smiles, she wakes with us upon this native shore to find that all the moons, suns, and stages of our lives, share a common goal.
*
We share a common goal. This stage is an altar whereupon we place our offerings and whether we play or pray to Dionysis, to Demeter or the Devil in disguise, whether we sing to the Moon, the Sun, or the God that goes by a thousand names but is nameless, whether we know no religion or spirit at all, we find revelation together here in this common purpose: The Dance. The dance, which knows no boundaries, which fuses past present and future into one blissful moment, this one blissful night. We who sit and watch and we who stage the evolution of our art, are together in this temple.
On this warm October evening in a little city by the sea.
*
Eindama
In the spotlight, the scuff-marked stage beneath us, darkness above, we stand at the crossroads of culture, caught up in a wave of humanity so vast we cannot know its edge. We tumble, grain-like within the sweep of this movement, this moment of history, in this curling, coiling music that is the sweet score of our lives. All I can see is you, framed by shadows leading to hallways leading to mysterious rooms alive with decades of magic. We are products of that magic. Our eyes lock and there is a wonderful sensation of puppetry, of being moved by a living mind not my own, as if you and I hold each others strings. We are bound together by a promise, it is the promise of this moment. For this moment we have danced and played all our lives, this moment and all the other moments of the performer's life. We limp and stride and shuffle and skip and in our moment in the spotlight, in that beautific glow that shines from all directions and paints us in colours to make the sunset jealous, we are...
What are we? We are but human, garbed in cloths of human making, dancing to rhythms described and danced by the ancestors of our ancestors in far-away lands, and we are moved, as they were moved, by the drum that skips the 10th beat, by the voice that calls aloft, by the poetry of our longing, of our wandering.
Yet there is joy in it, yet there is life unassailable, hope inexhaustible and if this joy be within our grasp, then what calamity could overcome us, what wound could overwhelm us, what loss could take from us the urge to dance and to play and to sing? To create is to transform and we are transformed by our creations, consumed by them, like wood to fire, like sunlight to trees.
We become what we create.
You and I, in that bright spot, enshrined in the darkness of the theatre.
