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April 2007
European Tour
Our room here at the Doelen Hotel in Amsterdam opens out to a canal that might well be described as the Amsterdam of the imagination. Because the changing weather and the heat that comes with it are a reality in traditionally cool Amsterdam as well, we sleep with the windows open. The hubbub and clamor of dreams and the interior space have now given way to the reality of this charming city’s waking and applying itself. The sounds of bicycles, the stolid chugging of a distant motorboat, construction equipment punctuated by the maniacal cries of seagulls and other water birds establish the place and the time.
The tour has been moving along with all the expected drama and some that is unexpected as well. I hark back to the first public event I gave which was a press conference in Milan. There, in the official splendor of Milan’s city hall, across the square from La Scala, a predictably late conversation with the press turned into something a bit more like one of our too familiar faux news programs inflected towards comedia dell’arte. In mid-answer to a question about the themes of Blind Date, Mr. Vittorio Sgarbi, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs in Milan, took his place next to me. Catching a fragment of the translator’s rendering of my answer to the question about our present Bush administration’s evangelical motivations, as I understood it from Bjorn, the translator and, two days later, La Republica’s dance writer, he objected to my accusation of an American theocracy and roared back that the theocracy is with “the Muslims.” “I would respect you more if you were performing this work in Libya, Iran or among the Shia in Iraq. They are the ones who suppress freedom of speech…”
Mr. Sgarbi took my questioning of the present social-political discourse as typified by the Bush administration as an affront. He felt it was his duty to shout me down in the most aggressive way possible. At one point, I informed the room that I was going to leave if the conversation didn’t turn back to Blind Date and he said, “No I will leave,” which he did with a flourish. I was told later that this is his modus operandi, that he is a showman TV personality, a kind of performance artist who uses his bully pulpit in much the same way that American reality shows pump the ratings and pull press coverage thru dubious and uncontrolled confrontations.
The performances of Blind Date at the Teatro Arcimboldi however were quite successful and we moved on.
Annemasse is a suburb community on the French side of the Swiss border adjacent to Geneva. Regain the Heart Condemned and Wynne and DBR joined us there for the second of three performances of Another Evening: I Bow Down (the first had been a run out from Milan to Cremona with cellist/composer Chris Lancaster substituting for DBR). Here is a brand new, plain-faced, community that revealed itself to us as a hopeful social vision during our time there. Every hue of individual could be seen in the streets going about their lives as the French are wont to do amidst the cafes, cheese and butcher shops, antiquarians, book sellers, etc. The bounteous weekly Friday market spoke loads about the priorities of the French. This modern vision, post colonial, post socialist at a time when the country was gearing up for its presidential elections, was made all the more meaningful thru my knowledge of what it had been 63 years ago when Bjorn’s mother, Dora Amelan, as a member of an underground organization, was secreting Jewish children across the frontier into Switzerland thru Annemasse. At that time, Annemasse was just another undistinguished French village among farms and fields caught in the German occupation. In our “circle” before the show wherein musicians, dancers, Janet Wong, Bjorn and myself collect to focus, I made a point of telling them how proud I was that not only that Dora succeeded in saving lives at that dark time, but that her son was amongst our ranks now as we indulge in the promise that defeating that enemy proposed.
And now, we’re here in Amsterdam, arguably the most liberal social experiment in the world. So many of the hot buttons in divisive issues (Gay rights, Gay marriage, legalized soft drugs, state subsidies for the arts, universal health care, etc) are a fact of life here. Speaking to a journalist for the Amsterdam weekly sometime back she was very interested in the Muslim question in Blind Date. Other than Asli Bulbul’s discussion of the modern Turkish flag, I told her that the work did not really deal in those specific polemics or dissections. I told her that it deals more in the bigger questions for all of us in “the West”. What do we believe in so strongly that we would fight to protect? I asked her if young Dutch choreographers and artists felt so strongly about their liberties and their heritage of progress and openness that they would die for these? Because she was interviewing me and not the other way around, this question went unanswered. Like global warming and the changes that it is inflicting on us, this question of values will not go away and, in fact, grows stronger each year. Blind Date was forged by this line of thought and now finds its life here as well.
-- Bill T. Jones (Monday, April 30, 2007)
