Sheik it

So, there I am in Wadi Rum. I have climbed down from the rock where I have watched the sun set behind huge monoliths of roll-topped sandstone, the spindly legs of camels throwing length shadows across the red sand.  I have drunk hot spicy tea from a tiny cup.I have eaten hummus and tabouli and lamb slow-roasted by being buried in an iron pot deep in the desert sand. We have gone for a walk in the dark to look at the stars, until J started frightening me with stories of djinn that had be jumping at every moonlit shadow, and scurrying like a desert rat back to the deep reds and brown of the rugs spread around a warm and fragrant fire.

And then, in what should have been the pinnacle of an otherwise gorgeous evening, the music starts. This is the moment. But can I remember a single thing from my Melbourne CAE belly dancing lessons? No. I get up and jig about for a little while, while a travelling companion to my left flails his limbs so desperately that I have to duck to stop him taking out an eye. I retire from the fray as soon as it is polite to do so, just one more frozen-hipped anglo in a very fluid desert.

Let's Dance

Dancing. I do it, or at least I used to (mostly after application of alcohol), but I don't watch it. Not often. So it was kind of strange to find myself sitting in the dark red interior of Edinburgh's Playhouse having brow-beaten J, M, L & JH into forking out £20 to attend Michael Clarke's new show Come, Been and Gone. I hoped they weren't going to be grossly disappointed. At the time I booked I knew nothing about him. I didn't care. All I needed to know was that his new show was to have a soundtrack provided by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and my patron saint David Bowie, so nothing was going to keep me away.

These tracks are not just part of my history, they are woven into my bones. You'd think in such circumstances disappointment would be almost inevitable. Surely it was impossible for a dance, even if made by the Golden Boy (and Golden Arm, apparently) of modern dance, to avoid clashing all those weighty preconceptions that I already had about what these songs meant, and what they should feel like?

The fact that I know nothing about dance probably helped, but throughout the night I didn't have a single "that's not right!" moment. From the silver-clad lycra visions of the early track to the red legs and slash-backed black and white blazers against an azure background of Jean Jeanie (photo above courtesy of The Guardian), I was mesmerised. Moved to tears more than once, as well. Whether that was because of the dance or my own resonances with the music, I don't know, but it doesn't really matter: if the dance hadn't been so right the connection would not have occurred.

All those lycra-clad bodies did make me wonder though, as I looked around the packed house, whether part of the appeal of dance was that it was the only forum in which one can legitimately perv the human body. The show we trotted off to the next morning would suggest the answer is yes. Daniel K's Q & A played around with notions of art and democracy and consumerism by taking a survey-based approach to dance production, with all the research documented in a very weighty tome distributed to us all, courtesy of funding from the Singapore Arts Council. According to Daniel's survey, 'appreciating the human body' was the most popularly nominated response the audience made when asked what the objective of modern dance was, and the second most important after 'enriching our souls/spirits'.

We saw the same piece three times, once to open, once after having the research presented to us, and once after voting on our preferences for key elements such as music and costume, by the end of which we all knew a lot more about the decision making process of choreography than we did at the beginning. It also did a great job in raising key questions about art and the artist's relationship with their audience. Do they want to be loved? If so, is giving people what they want the way to acheive it? And where does truth and honesty, versus craft and artifice, come in to the whole equation?

I feel an essay coming on. So I will stop and go and get ready to go to Iceland. No, really.

The Art of Waiting

On the plane to Africa, I read the following in Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun (Penguin (Australia) 2008):

"Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting."

Well, I thought, I can dig it. Sounds exactly waiting for the train at Richmond station, back in the day, when I had an office to go to.

Kapuscinski goes on:

"What does this dull waiting consist of? People know what to expect; therefore, they try to settle themselves in as comfortably as possible, in the best possible place. Sometimes they lie down, sometimes they sit on the ground, or on a stone, or squat. They stop talking. A waiting group is mute. It emits no sound. The body goes limp, droops, shrinks. The muscles relax. The neck stiffens, the head ceases to move. The person does not look around, does not observe anything, is not curious. Sometimes his eyes are closed - but not always. More frequently, they are open but appear unseeing, with no spark or like in them. I have observed for hours on end crowds of people in this state of inanimate waiting, a kind of profound physiological sleep:..."

I quote it at length because this is clearly not a passing aside or a throwaway line. (Though to be fair he does note elsewhere that any statement about 'Africa' is always going to be crap because there is no such homogenous place).

It didn't make me feel any better about my trip, though. The guy lived and worked as a journalist in Africa for years, so I figured he probably knows what he is talking about. Fuck me, I thought, I am gonna be BORED.

A week later, I am in a bare and unadorned hall, with a good forty minutes to go before the Conference's closing ceremony. Delegates have been listening to learned people all week, and they are about to hear just one more. There is plastic chairs and concrete, and very little else.

There is nothing to do but wait, but like everyone else I am getting there early, because I saw how the crowd waited before the Opening ceremony, and I am hoping to see a bit more waiting. I am hoping they will wait, spontaneously, in any spare patch of floor, in sync, starting with some simple melodies back and forth across the cavernous room, gradually adding harmonies, layer upon layer, three, four, five...

The film found at the link below is my experience of an African crowd waiting. Possibly it is no more typical than Mr R's, but I defy you to listen without smiling (the vision is crap, but listen to the sound!). Better still, give it a go next time the 5.34 from Flinders Street is late.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPIh038Z3Sc