February 2006
Puzzles, Conflicts, Conundrums
Puzzles, conflicts, conundrums... This seems to be the theme of my first "think-out-loud" for this, our newly reinvented website. I hope to be able to update this section every month!
Blind Date is up and running! We are out on the road with the work and that is an invaluable means of testing what it is or what it can be. The Kennedy Center (Washington, DC) and the Zellerbach (Berkeley, CA) were large glamorous venues that affirmed the piece in one way. Venues like the Flynn Theater (Burlington, VT) and the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth (Hanover, NH) allowed somehow a more intimate level of dialogue with the audience. Dartmouth, because the theater is smaller and post-performance discussions in such a space make every word shared more risky. While Burlington saw the first of our planned Panel of Experts forums wherein a community's experts on military, religion/spirituality, activism and culture are invited to respond to Blind Date and the issues it raises. In Burlington the participants were: Rev. Roddy O'Neil Cleary (Unitarian Universalist Minister), Lieutenant Colonel Piper (Professor of Military Studies at University of Vermont), Kathryn Blume (artist/activist) and Marc Estrin (author/cellist/activist). The panel was moderated by Fran Stoddard (television & film producer/director). All four participants made heartfelt comments dealing with the work. However, Marc Estrin's analysis and spot-on impressions of the piece's layers of intentions and meaning were certainly one of the most vivid and illuminating takes on Blind Date I could ever imagine.
Lieutenant Colonel Piper's response, though more reserved and perhaps revealing of how the form of the piece threw him off, was striking for yet another reason. Perhaps it was not so much what he said, but the fact that he was there. It was touching that he, a pragmatist, an individual who experiences the world through rationality, analysis and decisive action, a participant in an established chain of command was willing to participate and express an opinion about a work of art. Likewise this was not an environment friendly to the military and I did everything in my power that he not be forced into the role of "bad guy."
My puzzlement as I try to divine the meaning of that event has something to do with his vulnerability in the face of the sense of community that was organizing itself that night around the experience of Blind Date. He made a cautious though pointed comparison between what he had just seen and the military. He said that just as the complex and accomplished event we had just performed was designed to serve a goal, it probably had flaws each night in its execution. In his view, such is the nature of the military. And, like the dance, mistakes are made. And like the dance it exists for a valuable reason and is too often misunderstood.
Whatever one might think about this comment, it is moving in its humanity. I would never want to create a work so sure of itself, so polemically full of condemnation for any institution such as the military, that it could discount a basic human truth such as the one he alluded to. The fact that Blind Date can be seen as a purely anti-military polemic is dangerous and distasteful to me. Fairness in all things is a supreme - though judging by the heated current debate around issues of morality, spying, power at all cost, etc., much questioned - value. I long for fairness even toward my adversaries - fairness to their values and fairness in our analysis and response to their institutions. Is it possible?
The Seven Against Thebes is in previews, soon to open at the NY Theater Workshop . Will Power has written this hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus and Jo Bonney directs, while I, with the assistance of Andrea Woods and Shaneeka Harrell, am the choreographer. It's a lively, audacious show that is generous in its reach and deserves a broad public.
Will Power is very much of this time in his belief in what I call the "church of the remix." As the hip-hop DJ informs the audience at the beginning of the work:
"I'm sayin' like - I can - rewind you all the way back
To the days of Ghana and Mali
Then press fast forward
You in the ghettos of Killa' Cali.
See, I transform a scratch
Into much more than an itch.
'Cause there ain't no two worlds
That I can't mix."
A strong belief and true... however this idea of freedom comes into a worrisome conflict with the world of the ancient Greeks. This happens when the plotline of Aeschylus's tragedy becomes so clearly set towards disaster that a cry goes up from the hip-hop chorus, representing the beleaguered people of Thebes on the eve of war, demanding that the DJ who has set this show in motion should remix this tragedy and avert the bloody outcome. ...Well, why not?
All cynicism aside, it seems that in art as in life, some things cannot be remixed. And I am not sure if it is Will's intention, but Aeschylus has the last word. When the bloody battle proceeds and both ill-starred and heroic brothers slaughter each other, their deranged father, Oedipus, the symbol of the ancient curse says, "I told you so/You can't get out from under this thing." In other words, the Gods will have it their way no matter what we try to do.
I am left wondering which of the two belief systems, the remix or destiny, can I live with or, more to the point, which one can I not live without?
Bill T. Jones - Valley Cottage, NY
-- (Wednesday, February 1, 2006)
