Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction

At every parent-teacher meeting we ever attended between 1996 - 2010, a huge pre-occupation was TV and the Internet. The elephant in the room those days, was sex and pornography. Have Internet, will surf porn - was the general (perhaps unfounded) anxiety of parent and teacher alike. One school went so far as as to disable Facebook and blog access from the school server. Suffice it to say that the students were expert little hackers and  found a way to access Facebook despite the block.

To provide a student response and allay adult fears, we organized a Children's Forum on the Internet & New Media at Rangashankara in 2009. Our partners, Centre for Internet & Society and IT for Change, helped to facilitate a debate among the children on New Media and then put together a presentation, using SMS, Podcasts and Youtube, to which adult care-givers - both teachers and parents - were invited. The dialogue between the children and the adults in the audience was a revelation. While the students spoke articulately about safety, technology and being savvy with Internet usage, the adults stuck to their guns about monitoring. It was pretty clear that the issue in question was the same old one - trust, or the lack, thereof. 

Now there's a new elephant in the room vis-a-vis New Media - short attention spans. Sex now seems as wholesome as pie, innit?! Read on...

                                           Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction

Yes, we want an education! But without the thought control!

Last week when I blogged about the way in which theatre is used in the Indian schooling system, I said that I wished students would revolt and say to hell with this (the Annual Day Play Syndrome) and devise their own new works about their lives and the world as they see it.

The same week, young students in the UK protested against the education cuts in their country. Can a youth revolution be around the corner and will India allow 53% of her population to steer her forward?

                                                                   Riot Girrrls

Announcing! GROOVE WORKSHOP at Infinite Souls

Learn the finer aspects of modern music and jazz from Asaf Rabi (Israel) & Konarak Reddy (India)

The Ministry of Stories

Great ideas to get kids writing & creating

Frances Booth was one of the first storytellers to try out the Ministry of Stories, which is based on Dave Eggers’s centre in San Francisco. Photograph: Yemisi Blake



A video of Ministry of Stories

Two Ideas

I offer you two ideas...

1.       In the Deccan Herald, dated 8^th November 2010, an interview with the Pandavani artist Teejan Bai, who had just performed her  Draupadi Cheerharan at the Rangashankara Classical & Tribal Theatre Festival.

“As an artiste, my duty is to just perform and leave the rest to God.”

2.       In the New York Times, October 31^st 2010, an article on a massive street art exhibit called The Underbelly Project.

“Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station. The dank, cavernous hall feels a lot farther than it actually is from the bright white rooms of Chelsea’s gallery district. Which is more or less the point: This is an art exhibition that goes to extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general.”

I’m making this personal.

I’m using these two very interesting ideas to refract events and phenomena in my world. To me, the flagrant corruption of the sort we are seeing today points to a complete departure of values and absence of morality. I use both words carefully, not having much faith in either family or traditional values and fearful of morality being part of the chastity/virginity gang, who I mistrust even more than family values. I refer instead to something that is perhaps overarching and fundamental to our existence on this planet - practiced values such as civility, honesty, dignity, cooperation and solidarity with the marginalized or under privileged. Values that would make it unbearable to illegally accumulate anything. Inconceivable that you could dip into public funds, take from war widows, optimize personal gain over community growth and so on.

Assuming there is something of worth in these values one would imagine they would be part of every child’s education, right?  So what are we doing to facilitate this education of the heart?

As a theatre artist, I often interact with local schools. Sometimes in order to facilitate a workshop, sometimes to judge an event, often to teach a class, screen a film or do a lec-dem. And then the ball drops. About three times a year I get invitations to direct an “Annual Day Play/Founder’s Day Play”. The inverted commas are because its part of a contagious Bangalore disease called the Annual Day Syndrome. While a whole year can pass uneventfully, without so much as a nod to the NCERT National Curriculum Framework*, everyone gets into a lather about the Annual Day Play. Two months prior to the big day, scripts and cast are cobbled together, parents (or these days, corporate sponsors) dish out generously for grand costumes, auditoria, lights, PA system and the children are routinely yelled at so that they learn their lines and are par for the course. The latter basically involves not speaking out of turn and doing what the adult in charge thinks is the “right” thing vis-à-vis performance.

Why am I lamenting a clearly bourgeois approach to art that endorses the “sitting room” culture? Oh, please! Because of the dangerous stuff embedded within that makes it less harmless exercise in bad taste and more cultural pruning and indoctrination.

Consider what the process and the end result teach a child:

-          It is all about the exterior; how GOOD the product looks is the mark of its success

-          Performance is everything, so never mind how undemocratic the process might be

-          Art is…don’t be daft, let’s not bring art into this

What do these credos bring to mind? Capitalism? Advertising? Military training?

Huh. Strangely, the school would call it theatre.

It’s a crying shame. Theatre, more than any other art form, offers students the possibility to see life in a microcosm and to play with its many options. To have fun, experiment, seek their voice and fail again and again and again.

I stress the word “fail” because about a year ago, parent told me a story. Her 13 year old son, quite out of the blue, stepped in front of a moving train and killed himself. She never saw it coming. His note mentioned doing badly in a Math paper and a girl who had rejected him. His mother looked at me and said “The problem was he had never known failure.”

Yet we, the adults in charge, continually dismantle the huge learning potential inherent in theatre (and other arts) in order to put on a “show”. Sanjay Iyer (program director of the Kali-Kalisu program for arts education) puts this down to the administration’s overwhelming desire to “increase the prestige of the school” at the expense of the child’s growth. In short, we are dissing what is natural, organic and joy-inducing in favour of an elaborate sham that eventually will not bode well for the child. We are teaching them double speak and to believe in a narrow notion of success that is dictated by external indicators such as wealth accumulation, fame and the affirmation of others. And this child will grow into an adult whose immutable values include pretension, lies and covert activity, basically anything to come off looking good.  Net-Net: An adult who is terrified of failure.

At the Rangashankara Symposium on Theatre Pedagogy for Children (2009), I mentioned in my paper that if we have to extract four core values from theatre, they would be TRUST, PLAY, IMPROVISATION & INSPIRATION. Those would be the exact four values that go missing from the average school experience, where children are encouraged to compete, mistrust adults, stay within the box, intellectually dumb down and eventually have their every natural instinct socialized into submission and subsequent extinction. 

Extrapolate the Annual Day Syndrome to the national scenario. How many students wish to study the humanities these days? Have you ever met someone who wanted to study philosophy or ethics or even literature? Why would they when they are taught that education is for the sole purpose of becoming a cog in the Market Wheel and the Market apparently favours material productivity over a wealth of ideas. All fair enough, except for the huge fallout in those aforementioned fundamentals – civility, honesty, dignity et al.

So when Teejan Bai says she just performs and leaves the rest to God, let us pay close heed. And when a group of street artists decide to curate a show for themselves alone, fantastic works painted onto damp walls that will fetch no money and that will inevitably decay in a short time, let us stop and ask why.

I seriously wish that our students would revolt and say to hell with this crap. Let us make plays about our lives and what concerns and interest us. If it involves death and disappointment and drugs, so be it. If we love Eminem, PS 3 and Rajnikanth, help us locate this love in a larger cultural context. If English is our second language, endorse multi-lingual theatre. But we’ll be damned if we do another Broadway/Westend rip off or Bollywood extravaganza. So shut up and listen to what we have to say. You might well learn something. We are 53% of this country’s population. Best we learn to articulate our own deepest feelings, fears and vulnerabilities rather than continue to mimic someone else’s voice and assemble feeble imitative theatre. Democracy needs our informed voices and opinions, right? Right?

* The present NCF proposes five guiding principles for curriculum development:

(i) connecting knowledge to life outside the school; (ii) ensuring that learning shifts away

from rote methods; (iii) enriching the curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks;

(iv) making examinations more flexible and integrating them with classroom life; and

(v) nurturing an overriding identity informed by caring concerns within the democratic

polity of the country.

Also, that:

Art as a subject at all stages is recommended, covering all four major spheres, i.e.

music, dance, visual arts and theatre. The emphasis should be on interactive approaches, not

instruction, because the goal of art education is to promote aesthetic and personal

awareness and the ability to express oneself in different forms. The importance of India’s

heritage crafts, both in terms of their economic and aesthetic values, should be recognised

as being relevant to school education.

http://www.ncert.nic.in/html/pdf/schoolcurriculum/framework05/Perspective.pdf

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/02/art-unseen-the-underbelly_n_777770.html?ir=Arts#s172515

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/arts/design/01underbelly.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

Calling all Educators!

Global Conference on Education in November 2010

Boy with a Suitcase: Cyber-Classrooms

This last month we continued the process of creating Boy with a Suitcase, which is part of a larger collaboration between Rangashankara, Bangalore and the Schnawwl Theatre, Mannheim.  

The artistic director of Schnawwl Theatre, Mannheim - Andrea Gronemeyer, dramaturge - Julia Dina Heße and musician - Coordt were all in Bangalore to experience Indian music, sounds, textures.

For a peek at their experience, check out Julia's blog post:

http://schnawwlrangashankara.blogspot.com/

The German national character is very committed to the idea of aesthetic education and high culture for all. Therefore there is a concerted effort to afford art to as wide a demographic as possible and art, as integral to a holistic education is taken for granted. So an important aspect of Boy with the Suitcase are the outreach actvities that are generated by the dramaturge and pedagogue attached to the project. 

To read more about this as well as Wanderlust: Fund for International Theatre Partnerships:

http://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/cms/en

Thus, the actors and pedagogues will meet with local NGO's working on issues of migration, that being central to the story of Naz and Kryzia and their migration to the "land of milk and honey" in search of the ubiquitous "better life". Stories of migration from amongst the Boy with a Suitcase team will be harvested as will stories from the audience.

As the projected audience is young, we are also creating a cyber-relationship between classrooms in Bangalore and two comparable classrooms in Mannheim. The students will be pen-pals of sorts! Clearly, for this to happen with ease, the selected classrooms have to be cyber-savvy. Thus the two schools selected in Bangalore are Mallya Aditi International School and Inventure Academy.

We made presentations to the two schools and discussed the phases of interaction and the objective of the interaction which is deepen cultural understanding between young people of the two countries. There will be two modes of interaction. 

1) Email between partners (private)

2) Blog posts (public)

Interestingly, while the classrooms in Germany will be watching Das Lied von Rama, a new German production of the Ramayana, the students of Inventure have themselves recently performed the Ramayana so they have enough to start off! 

The first phase of the interaction is called "This is Us!" Both classrooms will respond to questions about country, food, traditions, pop culture and sport. This will be private and via emails. The next phase "Everything is Theatre!" is public and on the blog. The kids will by now, have seen Boy with a Suitcase and will review and discuss it on line. In between there will also be two live interactions between the Boy with a Suitcase actors and the participating classrooms. In Bangalore, we plan to have these at Nrityagram (where we are rehearsing for a month) and Rangashankara.

Check out their websites:

http://www.nrityagram.org/

http://www.rangashankara.org/home/rangatest/

And so on, till the finale which involves all the students, a half hour of Skype and hopefully many new friendships :)

Bass guitar / Improv concepts / Konokol: A Music Workshop at Infinite Souls

Three Renowned Musicians get together to hold a Music Workshop on the finer aspects of modern music and jazz. Date: Dec 18th 2010 at Infinite Souls Artist Retreat. Contact 9845213857

Run To See Jacques Martinez - By Bernard Henri Lévy

Faced with contemporary art, there are on the one hand the grumblers, convinced that art is dead, or uninteresting, or, worse, carnivalesque and in the process of disappearing in an ultimate and derisory parade.

On the other hand are the enraptured, in ecstasy over everything and everyone, confusing art with show, works with performances, enchanted with productions whose characteristic, as Barthes already noted in a premonitory passage in Plaisir du text (1973), is to "exhaust their necessity as soon as they are seen," for they no longer offer "any contemplative or enjoyable longevity."

And facing both, dismissing them back to back as the twin figures of an identical nihilism, are the artists, the real ones. It's not certain one should continue to call them contemporary, so indifferent are they, really, to time, ageless and traversing all the ages, pirating them, piercing them, taking them as a whole and then slicing them into dramatized units and, finally, undoing them: Frize's or Twombly's abstractions, the Chapman brothers' crucifixions, Rudolf Stingel's self-portraits, Frank Stella's birds in relief, Subodh Gupta's metal vanities -- or, today, at the Yves and Victor Gastou Gallery in Paris, the Frenchman, Jacques Martinez.

Who is Jacques Martinez?

A Niçois, first of all, as much as a Frenchman, since his adventure as a painter began in the shadow of César and Arman, his elders, in the vicinity of what was called the Ecole de Nice.

A European more than a Niçois, for he paints -- and thinks -- in an imaginary space ruled by the rigour of Zurbaran no less than the illusions of Mantegna or the heroism of Matisse continuing, in the last days of his life, in Nice, the interminable history of painting.

He is a modern, especially, and definitively so (I once edited a book he wrote called Moderne Forever), one whom no tantrum of the avant-gardes, no pathos of the end, no disillusion nor return to supposed "true values" ever kept from thinking that painting has a history, and that, for example, after Cézanne's bowls, jugs, and other pitchers, it is difficult to paint still lifes the way one did before.

For his current exhibition is an exhibition of still lifes. It is an ensemble -- drawings, photos, but especially sculptures -- of gigantic squashes, of moulded bronze colocynths that one would describe as drawn from the "antivegital vegetation" (in other words, reinvented, revived, produced and, in short, thought of vegetation) that Malraux depicts in his description of Picasso's atelier.

And there is in this manner of re-appropriating an old gesture, of making it live and giving it new life with his fingers, in this way of playing with a genre without necessarily validating all the codes (I am convinced that, like Baudelaire in a famous letter, Martinez doesn't believe for a second that "the soul of the gods lives in plants," or that his "hallowed vegetables" are "more valuable" than his "soul") and then, when the fruits of this game have taken on a form that is just about sure and are available, so to speak, to the eye and the hand, of casting them in bronze (that is to say, in a matter that, since the age that bears its name, supposes and implies a belief in the lasting nature of things), there is at the source of this endeavour a wager that, in these times of regression, derision, and, often, of imbecilic booing, lacks neither appeal nor virtue. 

One cannot count on Jacques Martinez to sing the bad pean to the «death» or «decrepitude» of art, this « thing of the past", like the Sunday Hegelians -- he doesn't believe in it anymore than he does, say, in the death of human beings' desire for transcendence.

One can joke, without him, about the vain paradoxes of "ephemeral art," this silly oxymoron -- whose "happenings" and other "installations" can, in any case, take on meaning only in a view of a definitively desolate world.

The Martinez of these "Bodegons" (the word for his colocynths, in Spanish) thinks that the relation of an artist to Time is always a hand-to-hand combat, sometimes a victory, often a defeat -- but that worse than defeat is, obviously, the defeatism of those who would resign themselves to the aesthetic tourism of the post-moderns.

He thinks, as Bataille did of Manet, that the only great art is "incongruous" or, better still, "disrespectful" -- concretely, disobeying the order of the world and of nature, inventive, unfaithful, insolent. And this is the entire meaning of these ironic homages, such as sculptures of bottle corks, or of bunches of screwdrivers (César, Arman, and others), of elongated forms or those in the shape of a mushroom (Chardin) or of a squash which has become a gourd (with a wink, again, at Matisse).

And if there is a conviction that has never left him, in the thirty years that I have observed and commented on his work, it is that art exists, not to repeat the world, but to recreate it--the soul of the gods, decidedly, inhabits, not the plants, but the artist

Changing Education Paradigms: Sir Ken Robinson

This is an absolutely critical animation to view, for parents and all educators.

Divergent Thinking

For Josefina...by Reema Moudgil

I met Josefina Baez a few years ago in an encounter that almost did not happen. I was a free lance writer who did not fancy taking rattling buses out of Bangalore to meet people she did not know. I resented easing out of my desk and my skin to go anywhere except where I absolutely had to. I had not stretched myself in a long time and I was fine with it. 


In a madly chaotic bus station, I almost missed the bus to a farm out of Bangalore where Josefina, crazy child, dancer, fun yogi, actor and spontaneously wise Guru to all those who know her was conducting a soul workshop. When I did take the bus..I was still questioning my wisdom about doing this story. When would I reach? How would I find this place? When would I get back? To cut a long story short, when I got back home that evening, I did not know that my life was going to change. Something had shifted within me during this visit. I had taken an initiative after a long time to go out of my comfort zone and life was going to reward me. But this piece is not about me. Kirtana Kumar who was hosting Josefina and Dipti Nair who was heading Sunday Herald then were responsible for orchestrating this story, excerpts from which I post here..

"At Infinite Souls, boundaries blur and the sun, the earth and the sky become one. A banana orchard shimmers in the afternoon light. Brown rice and organic vegetables cooked in a wood burning oven are beings served. Little cottages lie at the end of long pathways. A performing space for actors has at the moment lent itself to a Chinese calligraphy workshop. In the meditation space, a guest has made a beautiful rangoli with ash, tea powder and rice powder. Birds chirp and pet dogs sniff new arrivals.

Here, in this soulful retreat, two hours away from Bangalore, theatre personality Kirtana Kumar is happily playing host to ten remarkable women who are participating in the fifth International Ay Ombe Theatre Retreat. Like Infinite Souls, Ay Ombe Theatre too exists in a world of no boundaries. It is a collective theatre movement that ``swims in endless possibilities,'' explores stillness, energy, textures of wide ranging narratives, the local and the political and all colours of the individual and the collective experience. This year, it has brought together artists and performers who will take back the seed capital from the retreat and invest it in their diversely different lives and crafts.And the glue keeping this disparate conglomeration together is a common  passion for the unknown and the gently powerful presence of Josefina Baez (Dominican Republic/New York). An actor, writer and the director of Ay Ombe Theatre, Josefina  has a deeply spiritual side and not just because she has a Himalayan yogi for a Guru or because she reads spiritual literature from all religions and gleans from them, the essence of a limitless, inclusive God. She is a backpacking yogi  without a map. Someone who can spend years learning Chinese calligraphy from a master and then spend time in India  to learn classical dance and yoga. 

She says, ``Spirituality is a practical discipline for me. Religion is just a label but philosophy is about how we can use our consciousness differently. You are your personal lab and its up to you to work in it. My methodology of working in the retreat is not just theory. The credo is ``don't just hear it, swear it.'' We meditate, we work, we laugh and push ourselves physically and mentally. And when you can get beyond the exhaustion, you reach another zone which is transcendent.''

She adds, ``At this retreat, we are all creative women with different strengths. The point is to discover what we can do together with our differences. The focus of Ay Ombe Theatre is the sacred, sovereign individual in the context of the collective.''

The power she radiates comes from physical, mental and spiritual discipline in art and in life. Baez comments, ``The growth of an artist or an individual can not be quantitative. I want to grow here (touches her heart). I don't want to collect people in random workshops but work with people, whose eyes I can look into and find something.''

Anna, the youngest of the participants adds, ``She teaches me as a writer to use the most essential words, to be not grandiloquent, to capture the essence of a moment. To be quiet, not wasteful in the way I spend my energy. I have learnt from her that art is an inner and outer craft and that it is about balance, details, not frills.''

Another participant Andrea responds,``Taking something from within and putting it into your craft is not easy. I learn from her to be alert and present in the moment and to keep my energy pristine. A lot of actors are not careful with their bodies. I also learnt here from other participants that things are always connected. Disciplines are always interconnected.''

Josefina's work as a writer is coloured by the unrest in the world but she remains centred and says about the recent events in Mumbai, ``Terrorism is about having your own way and trying to control or intimidate the other. Yet, so many of us do the same in our own lives. With our spouses and our children and friends. We want to change the world? Let us first just change ourselves.''

 I stayed occasionally in touch with Josefina after she left for what I imagine is a Manhattan loft and somehow the ceremony of being constantly connected because we were 'friends' did not seem necessary. True friendship, I have learnt over the years is not about how often you talk with someone. It is about what you talk about. We never talked and yet she was there through a shared ailment, through moments of doubt and fear and pain with messages that never seemed contrived but lived. 

Josefina's heart is visible in everything she does and says. There are no defences, no walls, no fencing with words, no, "I can teach you so much and you, my child, need to grow up,'' games. She sees everything, the spoken and the unspoken  and she lets you see everything, her own struggles, her mortality, her imperfections. She does not want to be perceived in a certain way. She wants to share and is possibly one of the most authentic spirits I have ever met. Someone, who is real, from the core upwards to the crazy tufts of hair she sports. 

I had not met her in over three years and then just like that she was in India and yet, somehow we could not meet. She was far away, doing all the crazily wonderful stuff she does and I had work and no respite. I kept wishing that we would meet and today, while walking back to the office in the evening after a snack with a colleague, there she was, dressed in denim dungarees, copper coloured bangles, hair tufted, walking past me on  MG Road! 

We almost brought down Barton Centre with our screams and in the 40 minutes we stole from the day to talk, I felt I had never really missed her. As if she has always been there and always would be. Josefina never asks or says mundane things. She does not ask how you are. She wants to know how your heart is :).  She talks about how she does not deal with anger but passes through it! How the only healers we need in our life are ourselves. "We have to care for ourselves, everyday,"  she says. And how the only way to live life is to stop looking over the shoulder, let the mess come up to your elbows and work through it because it is all beautiful. All perfect.Yes, even the imperfections. She has been bereaved twice in the past one year and yet in the few minutes we had together, she taught me how to appreciate my life more among a few other things, too precious to be shared. And then she was gone, yelling out of an autorickshaw, holding her heart, waving. And strangely I feel no absence. Because, those who touch our life become a part of it for all times to come.

A Student's Feedback :-)

Hi Miss Kirtana, 

My name is Mallika Makkar and I took part in Miss Josefina's workshop at CIS. May I just start by saying it was one of the most phenomenal experiences ever! I truly think that Miss Josefina Baez is an amazing teacher, but more importantly, an amazing person. The ways in which she taught us concepts like discipline and control were definitely very unique compared to the 'traditional' methods that we, as students, are so used to. 

Also, thank you very much for your kind comments! It really gave me an added boost of confidence. 

Thanks and regards,

Mallika Makkar (:

Time Out Article

Canadian International School takes the first step

Boy with a Suitcase

Later this year, we begin the process, here in Bangalore, of creating a play called Boy with a Suitcase by the British playwright, Mike Kenny. It is a part of a larger project called Wanderlust where state theatres in Germany work with theatres in other countries. In this case, Bangalore based Rangashankara forms a unique collaboration with a theatre in Mannheim, Germany called the Schnawwl Theatre to create theatre for young people. It will be directed by Schnawwl's artistic director, Andrea Gronemeyer, and I will be the assistant director.

Boy with a Suitcase tells the story of Naz and Krysia, two young people, who find themselves on a journey to another, unknown country…

Essentially it is a story of immigration. Of having to move away from your familiar; of having to find new co-ordinates that help define your life.

Coordt, a young German musician, will come to Bangalore and imbibe her sounds. He will walk down Avenue Road, record the sound of temple bells pealing over the traffic, of cows mooing while people talk, of vegetable vendors and honking autos and film music blaring. He will then improvise with other Bangalore musicians to create a sound track for the play that will tell a story of memories and of journeys.

In February 2011, all the actors, both Indian and German, will rehearse the play in Nrityagram before the premier in Mannheim in April.

What I love about the project are the outreach possibilities. Talking with children who have migrated from their home towns. In Bangalore it could be children of construction workers from Bidar or hotel workers from Kundapur. In Mannheim it could be the children of Turkish or Indian parents.

Another outreach idea is that we forge a cyber-link between a group of students in Bangalore and in Mannheim. They will be cyber pen-pals of sorts! And discuss differences and similarities. What it means to migrate; to travel to new countries, learn new languages, meet people who eat different food, watch different films, listen to different music.

Check out Rangashankara and Schnawwl Theatre at the following links.

http://www.schnawwl.de/index.php

http://www.rangashankara.org/home/rangatest/

Check out a previous production of Mike Kenny's Boy with a Suitcase by Barnstorm Theatre Company in Ireland.

http://www.barnstorm.ie/production.php?pid=38

Nadine Gordimer: In Defense of Freedom

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/31/nadine-gordimer-fighting-censorship

From Don Ross's Blogrant: Playing with the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic

http://www.gobyfish.com/BlogRant/Entries/2010/6/24_great_time_with_the_neubrandenburgPhilharmonic_at_schloss_marihn.html

Sharing

1

Last night we had the Sharing.
¨At Sunset¨
A lecture demonstration
with bits of Dominicanish, some of Comrade,
Bliss ain´t playing, research findings & reading,
humming/singing with Praveen on guitar.
And a rich dialogue led by Ram and Malika
(Bangalore´s coolest theatre artists) and the audience.
The dialogue possibility lingers.
A lot to listen to.

Mia came. I was sooo happy to see that little one.
My favorite singer-screamer-dancer-smiler.
But since her performance is well known to her parents,
she was entertained outside the working space.
Do you think she blinked for this?
No.
That is why she is teaching me more about the Present.

All went wrong.
All went right.
Performance Autology at hand.
That tradition of being present…no matter what.
So like the old t-shirt says… No problem.
Jasmine flowers and candles on the stage.
This Altar items clear away any unseen gremlin.
Glad for PA!
Glad for the open hearts and minds of many.
Grateful for the possibility of this dialogue.
Kirtana you are a Sunday!
Thank you.
Loved the tiny lights all around the campus.
And the rose tea…and jasmine.
Like coming out from the pages of Comrade Bliss.
The Canadian International School game flowers…
And a beautiful garland that now paint my flat with
Exquisite aroma.

As always…I am curious to know what is the image or phrase
that every person in the audience remembers from last night.
Tell me yours.

2
I did not want to train.
I did anyway.
It was good.
And danced with Cuco Valoy´s Biencito Gomez-
Que no me empuje-que se hace el muerto-
maldita cola-Pa´gozar contigo-Eso no hay que preguntarlo.
Dancing mainly with the Jessica-Esther step and them
the usual JB hip moves (20 years younger).
Laughed and felt quite accompanied.
Coconut oil massage followed.
Na´.
To´.

3
JB in Big Bang.
Yeah
heading to St. Marks Road now.

Journey: Josefina Baez

1

Here.

On the way from the airport

Witnessed by the Knights of Infinite souls

A physical prayer…

Two young skinny men walking

with their back to us

forearms neatly creating  squares.

Perfect.

Just perfect.

A quotidian jewel welcoming

to this Sacred Geometry

where coordinates write Bangalore.

2

Surprising no jet lag symptoms now.

3

Are mosquitos thinking that I am a tourist?

Ah?

4

You will not believe the eyes

of these kids.

These eyes smile.

I melt.

5

Cuco Valoy is playing

this early morning

right here at the hostel.

Bangalore en mambo.

Yes yes yes,

my physical training today is

heavily  Merengue and Son.

Knees bent.

Knees around.

Up and down.

Side side side.

6

Chai.

Count me in anytime.

7

In front of the football field

Elementary students shout:

¨The lady that moves the shoulders…the lady that moves the shoulders…

One in the group asks:

Hi, how are you?

Do you know Justin Biever?

Do you know famous people?

I answered:

¨Yes. You¨.

The girl at that moment changed her way of moving…

In front of my eyes she became that red carpet photo that we have seen.

¨Did you eat?¨ Asked a boy in the group.

¨I am going now. I am going to lunch now¨

Ooh I thought you could play with us.

I accepted the invitation.

I changed the Dhal for running and laughing

with my new found friends.

8

When do we know we are learning?

How do we know we are really teaching?

We learn…we are transformed.

We are teaching when we are learning.

Go figure.

9

Jet lag kicking hard.

Jet lag hand in hand with a splitting headache.

Need more water.

10

Canadian International Students

Exploring Performance Autology physical training.

Today we started to include our music sound track

(John Coltrane-El Jeffrey-Luis Dias-Caetano Veloso…)

Vocalise-too young to go steady-Say it over and over again-Survivor-La Noche-Suite Folcklorica-How beautiful could a being be…

In our tradition…ay Ombe.

This tradition created today…

The self rejoices.

Masks-Chair exercises-balance-our faithful Neruda´s Book of Questions…

So we continue…

Dressing up creating discipline with joy.

Yeah. Joy.

11

Full moon in Bangalore.

Fasting.

At home.

Really at home.

Even with mosquito net.

Loooove it.

Home indeed.