Cork, S.Ireland
I met ___ a photographer from Lithuania. She photographs dance and we were here @ the Firkin centre to see 'La Rencontre'. She would like to learn Flamenco and I said about my travels through Spain in search of the flamenco spirit. We talked of community arts, she wants to bridge communication between Eastern and Western Europe. Evie met some people that ___ could work with... I'll email and tell her...
I had my new blue coat with my flowers and butterfly, red, pinned to the lapels (8 euro from a charity shop. The lining is ripped but it is beautiful) like an armadillo in a dark crystal with my backpack black slouchbag and brown paper bag. My little brown cloth cap had done its best to keep the cold wind off my head. I blustered in, calculating where best to sit, discretion of exit and potential of view. Smiled at the woman who had told me yes, this seat was free, and said I needed to be able to leave to catch my flight back to london. She needed to be able to leave too she told me, to get back to the convent. She is a teacher she told me. "You can have a coffee you know, over there!" she said gleefully, conspiratorial - "Is it free?" Yes, and so I got a coffee and a small red wine and precariously balanced by looming bum into the chair without spilling the coffee too much.
The nun loves dance, it is in her soul she says, it moves her. The other nuns laugh at her she says (smiling) when she goes off during mass to experience a performance somewhere. One time she was so impressed she taught some of the movements to some students and they expressed them during hymns in church. You could have heard a pin drop, she said, in the silence of the reaction. She was very alive and glowing. A vibrant gentleness, of innocent magic to me there. "How wonderful" I laughed and clapped my hands together.
She had seen one not so long ago, a contemporary dance that the choreographer had devised when she was sixteen in response to some minimalist musician, it reminded the nun of the sparsity of a Samuel Beckett play. And of madness, like someone falling apart... All tiny tensioned movements that jitter your body as you watch and taughten the mind. It weighed down her heart I read in a way. She did not understand it she said, well she understood the emotion but could not grasp the poetry. Classical, balletic flow is a language she is more prone to relate to. I suggested that her preference perhaps offered more resolution, holisticism in a sense in its 'narrating' and as such i think now, more hope. Where one zoomed in on a psyche's angst and indulged in its imagination the other contained it as a drop in a river flowing...
[A memory now, as I write, the Dead River Trail, Waukegan, Illinois, USA 1993 (?)] Anyway... she agreed. She replayed the performance to me, condensed, as she had to her convent fellows and made them giggle, as did I, at these mental videos she was sharing with me. And no doubt with the ones that I was sharing with myself. As always. Our stories collide and dance with each other. She had a beautiful open face, and sparkling eyes... She crept out at around the same time as I did, and we moved on into our separate worlds.
"How great it is that I've met somebody here. Someone to connect with," ____ said. Her father is an artist in Lithuania. He exhibits in Germany, but people do not seem to 'get' him here in the west. Eastern art is so different, ____ says, she would like to open the western mind and eye to it, build a cultural dialogue between us. She is sending me some of her photographs. She wants to open a gallery but of course has no money and no time to make it, so I suggested she squat an empty building and set it up as a community arts project. If she finds people to build on it with it could perfectly be a doable enterprise. So it is great that as I was meeting ____, Evie was meeting some others just up the road who have already set up such a place in Cork, running for 12 years, and the time is right for them to move on to a fresh endeavour and for their paths to meet, for west to encounter east.
Choreographic encounters all
I had my new blue coat with my flowers and butterfly, red, pinned to the lapels (8 euro from a charity shop. The lining is ripped but it is beautiful) like an armadillo in a dark crystal with my backpack black slouchbag and brown paper bag. My little brown cloth cap had done its best to keep the cold wind off my head. I blustered in, calculating where best to sit, discretion of exit and potential of view. Smiled at the woman who had told me yes, this seat was free, and said I needed to be able to leave to catch my flight back to london. She needed to be able to leave too she told me, to get back to the convent. She is a teacher she told me. "You can have a coffee you know, over there!" she said gleefully, conspiratorial - "Is it free?" Yes, and so I got a coffee and a small red wine and precariously balanced by looming bum into the chair without spilling the coffee too much.
The nun loves dance, it is in her soul she says, it moves her. The other nuns laugh at her she says (smiling) when she goes off during mass to experience a performance somewhere. One time she was so impressed she taught some of the movements to some students and they expressed them during hymns in church. You could have heard a pin drop, she said, in the silence of the reaction. She was very alive and glowing. A vibrant gentleness, of innocent magic to me there. "How wonderful" I laughed and clapped my hands together.
She had seen one not so long ago, a contemporary dance that the choreographer had devised when she was sixteen in response to some minimalist musician, it reminded the nun of the sparsity of a Samuel Beckett play. And of madness, like someone falling apart... All tiny tensioned movements that jitter your body as you watch and taughten the mind. It weighed down her heart I read in a way. She did not understand it she said, well she understood the emotion but could not grasp the poetry. Classical, balletic flow is a language she is more prone to relate to. I suggested that her preference perhaps offered more resolution, holisticism in a sense in its 'narrating' and as such i think now, more hope. Where one zoomed in on a psyche's angst and indulged in its imagination the other contained it as a drop in a river flowing...
[A memory now, as I write, the Dead River Trail, Waukegan, Illinois, USA 1993 (?)] Anyway... she agreed. She replayed the performance to me, condensed, as she had to her convent fellows and made them giggle, as did I, at these mental videos she was sharing with me. And no doubt with the ones that I was sharing with myself. As always. Our stories collide and dance with each other. She had a beautiful open face, and sparkling eyes... She crept out at around the same time as I did, and we moved on into our separate worlds.
"How great it is that I've met somebody here. Someone to connect with," ____ said. Her father is an artist in Lithuania. He exhibits in Germany, but people do not seem to 'get' him here in the west. Eastern art is so different, ____ says, she would like to open the western mind and eye to it, build a cultural dialogue between us. She is sending me some of her photographs. She wants to open a gallery but of course has no money and no time to make it, so I suggested she squat an empty building and set it up as a community arts project. If she finds people to build on it with it could perfectly be a doable enterprise. So it is great that as I was meeting ____, Evie was meeting some others just up the road who have already set up such a place in Cork, running for 12 years, and the time is right for them to move on to a fresh endeavour and for their paths to meet, for west to encounter east.
Choreographic encounters all
posted by tara at 11:14 am
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