Bizarre Bazaar?

‘Tis the season for Holiday Gift Bazaars. And because there are only so many Saturdays in December, they tend to cluster – almost every church in Vermont seems to be bazaar-ing on one of the next few Saturdays.

Tomorrow, Saturday December 1, I’ll be helping my own “church”, Neskaya, with its 4^th annual Holiday Gift Bazaar.  It may seem bizarre that a node on the network of light, a place so outside the mainstream of American life, would indulge in such a mundane enterprise as a Holiday Bazaar.

This is Neskaya on its 10th birthday, a few years ago.

It is, of course, a bazaar with a difference. One of the main features, remarked upon and cultivated by Kayla Dauphine, the organizing angel of the location, is that since the open area of the building – the dance floor –  is roughly circular (I say ”roughly” to save space and give the general idea – it’s actually dodecahedral), the stalls are set out in a circle. Why does this matter? I know that the marketers among you are already visualizing the result. Heads down to examine and enjoy the offerings on the stalls, shoppers fail to notice when they complete a circuit, and continue on, round and round, some of them forever, like the man marooned on the Boston underground in the old Kingston Trio song. Thus they linger longer than intended, spending and buying more!

This bazaar will include free refreshment: chai and cookies, and a strolling minstrel, Anja Daniel, stalwart of the Circle dance community, weaving in and out of shoppers and vendors.

Me, Julia, as mad hatter at
Neskaya bazaar 2010.
I'll have just a few hats there
tomorrow.

Why does a New Age establishment like Neskaya, a circle dance and movement center in Franconia, New Hampshire, indulge in such a plebian exercise as a bazaar? As always with well-planned and executed projects there’s more than one reason.

Firstly, it is a fund-raising exercise. Stall holders are not charged for space, but invited to make a donation to Neskaya proportional to their profit for the day. Voluntary donation rather than set fee is typical of the way Neskaya, and much of the international Circle Dance network, functions – it’s a facet of the “gift economy” in which people give according to their means and receive according to their needs.



Linda will be there with a
vast array of goods from Bali
and other exotic places.



Secondly, the bazaar is a vernacular way for Neskaya to connect with the population. Any passer-by, any shopper in Franconia, Bethlehem or Littleton, any reader of the local newspaper, can readily understand and connect with an announcement or poster that proclaims: “Holiday Gift Bazaar”, and they might come along.  The bazaar is designed, like the very successful free evening of community circle dance held by Neskaya in Franconia Town Hall last August, to reach the general public on their own terms and in their own language, to introduce them to Neskaya and to integrate Neskaya into the mainstream culture and social life of this incomparably beautiful part of the world.

Oh, did I mention that Neskaya sits nestled into the slope of one of the White Mountains, its surrounding trees decked with frost and icicles and redolent of balsam? The blessed balsam scent of winter celebrations will engulf this low-lander later today when she pulls up in the circular driveway and thankfully emerges into the cold clear air to view the sun slowly descending like a golden coin into the treasure chest of silver clouds masking the horizon.

Untold riches lie for the taking in this place and I, for one, am eternally grateful that I have been privileged to dance my way under the parabolic arches and into the world of Neskaya.

And after the bazaar? After the shoppers have departed, the tables are folded up, the floor is cleared? What then? Why then we dance, of course!

www.neskaya.com

October Poems and Images

October

By Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Spring and Fall To a young child Gerard Manley Hopkins MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves, líke the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Áh! ás the heart grows older         5 It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name:         10 Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Pina - a movie worth the watching

Caught the movie "Pina" in the Colonial Theater in Bethlehem, New Hampshire (now there's a town to visit - more about Bethlehem later!)

The movie, made by Wim Wenders, is about the German dance choreographer Pina Bausch.  Wenders set out to make a documentary about her work three years ago, just before she died very suddenly and unexpectedly of lung cancer, so what was going to be a celebration of the work of a living artist has become a eulogy.

And her work is breathtaking: extraordinary, provocative, witty, beautiful and ugly. Many of the dance sequences in the movie are set in surroundings that contrast sharply with the flowing garments and brilliant colors of the dancers who move through their dream world of emotional and sexual intensity oblivious of traffic and trains. Humor erupts in the form of a dancer with rabbit ears travelling on a public monorail, or a dancer clad in flowing dress and ear muffs brandishing one of those awful hand held leaf blowing machines.

That last sentence illustrates that an artist or performer never knows what aspect of their work is going to connect with the audience: I happen to have a particular antipathy for those awful hand-held leaf blowing machines but I don't suppose either Pina Bausch or Wim Wenders knew that!

The eulogic aspect of Wenders' work is enshrined in short spoken sequences which are memories of Bausch recalled, fresh from the shock of her death, by her dancers, some of whom worked with her for decades.

To my eye, every one of the dancers featured was beautiful, and in this situation, every one of them was tragic. Modern dancers are a sub-set of Homo sapiens, with their slender bodies, etiolated necks and dreamy eyes. In the spoken sequences, each was filmed alone, head and shoulders only, with their words spoken as commentary, the visible face not speaking, just looking unspeakably sad and pensive as their memories of their mentor drifted by on their inner movie screens.

"Pina" didn't satisfy those of my friends who wanted a biography of the choreographer, but factual questions can be answered by a quick Internet search and the experience of the movie itself was not a narrative but a transcendently strange and beautifully animated collage.

Catch it if you can!

http://www.pina-film.de/en/about-the-movie.html

PS: "Pina" is available in 3-D but the Colonial doesn't rise to that!

Castles in the Sand

I developed my construction skills as a child because we lived quite near the sea. (In Britain one says "sea" not "ocean".)

During summer, a couple of times a month, my mother would drive the family to spend a day at Lavernock, just outside Cardiff, and I'd spend much of the day excavating in the sand, building castles, digging moats, canals and pools and  frantically reinforcing my sandy barricades as the tide inexorably eroded them. I knew they wouldn't last, but I built anyway.

Andy Goldsworthy would understand the concept:  he builds breath-takingly beautiful ephemeral environmental sculptures. My favorite appears in his 2001 movie "Rivers and Tides" where he struggles to complete an ice sculpture for the rising sun to pierce, in the sure and certain knowledge that that same rising sun will melt his creation into oblivion. He built pyramids of stone below the high water mark and left them to be dis-assembled by the rising tide, filming their collapse.

And now the younger generation has changed all that. It was with total oblivion that my grandsons Dodger, 10, and Rascal, 9, spent hours last Friday constructing an intricate landscape of castles, bridges, moats and pools at Sandbar State Park on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont. Lake Champlain. No hint of a tide. Their construction was never in any danger of being inundated by a tides; there are no tides. They builtwith no sense of urgency or impending doom; they built to last. Their work may yet survive.

I remembered when first I swam in fresh water. I was 13 when I dived into that river in Switzerland. The clarity and lightness of fresh water was a revelation. Each splash was a fountain of pure crystaline droplets, unhampered by the thick suspended solids of the sea. It felt clear and pure and light, unlike the sticky cling of salt water.

Dodger and Rascal know nothing else: our childhood realities were different. Theirs was the unhurried leisure, and mine the consciousness of impending disaster. So are characters formed. 



Sandbar State Park, Vermont, July 27, 2012



Julia's Dance Circle

My latest news is that I’m actually going to be leading a circle dance circle again soon. I’ve signed up with the recreation department in La Quinta, California, to offer eight evenings of circle dance, starting March 19, 2012.

It’s been a long time since I led dance, so I’m a bit rusty, a bit creaky around the grapevine joints and the step memory. I’m working hard to get up to speed and I’m convening a practice session Thursday March 8 at my home in Cottonwood, so if you’re around, please join me - 7pm, or 6pm for dinner!

At present, I’m looking only as far ahead as the first session, thinking of focusing on the coming of spring. I’ll start with “As One” by Denean to connect us with the Earth, then “Erev Shel Shoshonim” – the simple version, because it’s about an evening of roses which sounds like the desert cities to me. I’ve been practicing “Jacob’s Ladder”, which is delightful because it changes tempo from 4/4 to 3 /4 halfway through, but I think I’ll keep that one for the second session – oh, I’m looking further ahead already!

And yes, of course I’ll do “Kak pre Balkje”, my favorite lively and oh-so-accessible dance, probably using Jan Mulreany’s idea of  looking out and surveying the land as we turn in a wide circle, or perhaps my own idea that we’re creating the petals of a large flower on the floor.

My practice session on March 8 will be around the time of the full moon, so:

“Under the full moonlight we dance,

Spirits dance we dance,

Joining hands we dance,

Joining souls rejoice!”  (by Karen Beth)

Peace on Earth

My family and I have been dealing with the impact of a sudden tragic death of a young person. We’ve been grieving, telling friends, organising the funeral service and burial and, most of all, supporting one another. Friends and family, people we knew and people we didn’t know, gathered from far and wide to join us in mourning and commemorating this young life.

The priest at Peter’s requiem mass drew our attention to the challenge of world peace, and I found myself recalling the refrain of an old song: ‘Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.’  I looked it up: it’s by Jill Jackson and Mark Miller and dates from around 1955.  I’m pretty sure that I first heard it sung by Tom Paxton in 2000 at the Imagine Peace festival in Amenia, New York. 

 (http://www.wetheworld.org/imaginefestival/)

I think it makes sense: after all, where else can I have any influence on the beginnings of peace, if not in my own life?

My friend Eric, at college, long ago, was determined to make a difference to society, determined to make a difference in the world. He worked ceaselessly in the University’s volunteer groups, proving food for people in homeless shelters, visiting prisons and helping to redecorate senior citizens’ homes. The old ladies and gentlemen loved him; so did the people with developmental disabilities at the sheltered workshop. I went to Eric’s home with him one Easter vacation and was shocked to hear the cruel way he constantly teased his younger brother and sister, ragging them about the size of their ears and feet and refusing to share food or sports equipment with them.  It was long established habitual behaviour, and he was totally unconscious of how it contrasted with his public persona.

Just this summer, at a children’s party, I reprimanded a boy for jumping on top of a little girl in a bouncy castle. As I comforted the weeping child, the boy was genuinely astonished that I should find this unacceptable: ‘It doesn’t matter," he said: "She’s my sister."  He thought it was acceptable to hurt a smaller child because she was his sibling.

It’s not just peace that can begin with me; it’s love, compassion and generosity. And they need to begin within my own family and close circle of friends. What use is it to shine a light in the wider world if we don’t shine it on the people close to us in our everyday lives?  How can we possibly influence the spread of those positive qualities in the world if we don’t practice them at the very root of our own lives?

What we do as individuals matters. It matters on many planes, not least on the plane of our own personal development.

During a recent conversation about the need to preserve one of our most precious commodities, I suggested to one of the proponents of saving water that she could make a contribution by showering every other day instead of daily: ‘Oh no,’ came the horrified reply ’I need to have a shower every day.’

Yes, we need to cut down on oil consumption, but I can’t possibly take the bus to work; I have to drive out to the farm for my organic vegetables; what I do is a) sacrosanct and b) really doesn’t make any difference.

It doesn’t matter if I treat my sister unkindly, after all she’s only my sister; it doesn’t matter if I sneer at my parents, they’re only my parents; it doesn’t matter if I kick the cat, it’s only a cat.

It does matter. It matters to the object of my unkindness, it matters to the world, it matters because life may be short, and most of all it matters because it makes a difference to who I am.

Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me. Let there be love, generosity, kindness, compassion and care for the environment on Earth, and let them all begin with me – where else? Where else on Earth can I possibly make a start?