FIRST ENTRY

David Gonzalez

I am writing this on my birthday — always a good day for looking through the pages of my biography; the past days filled in, these present days more or less sketched in, and the future with its untold sheets waiting for ink. The City of Dreams project at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center is a new joining of the three main rivers in my life: music, spoken-word/poetry, and community service.

When I first began talking with the team at CSPAC a year ago I was impressed with how seriously the center was aiming to connect with and enrich the community in and around the university. After many years working in the trenches of arts therapy and arts education I was encouraged by the center's vision and generosity - I thought, "these are my kind of people." Every serious artist is grounded by, and inspired by, grassroots relationships - sure we love the grand stage, but we also know that it is direct human encounter that feeds the soul as well as the process of art-making. The way the residency as CSPAC has been structured over these months achieves a good balance between the grit and glory of being a performing artist. Lucky me, I get to create a new piece with some of the finest Latin jazz musicians in the world, and hang with a hip crew of multi-lingual, nine-year-old jokesters.

Mary Harris Mother Jones School.

Every year I visit between 50 and 75 schools throughout the country, and, though it pains me to report this, I have to tell you, (as if you didn't already know), we live in an utterly segregated society. Rare is it to find a school that has what I call "flow" - an easy racial/cultural/social mix where America's true colors really show. Mother Jones School has flow. I am working there with the third graders to excite them about the art of storytelling and to help them find stories in their own family histories that they want to preserve. Each of my three trips to the area includes two or three intensive sessions with the kids. I began with a performance of Cuentos: Tales from the Latino World - a set of creation myths from Cuba, Puerto Rico and La Republica of ‘da Bronx. The stories are told with lots of Spanish words and repetition so that the Latino kids feel deeply recognized and honored, and the non-Spanish speaking kids feel included and "given-to." It was a delight to see the kids from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras leaning over to help their classmates with vocabulary - quite a switch from the typical. And of course laughter is laughter in any language.

After the show we met in the library for a hands-on "playshop" that touched on the four principal elements of storytelling: story, words, voice, and gesture. The kids were then asked to interview a family member about an "important and real" story from the family history. The next day they came back in and reported what they'd found: tales about the emergency room, about crossing the border into America, about relatives lost and found, about dancing with the devil - really, now that was intense. I'll go back to the classroom in a couple of weeks to pick up where we left off, and to listen to more from their oral history project.

Community Events

Another part of the project is for me to visit a variety of community centers, mostly in Hispanic areas, for poetry readings and discussions. We had our first in early October at the Langley Park Community Center with a group of recent immigrants who were attending an English class at the center. I got a charge out of this experience. Poetry is simultaneously a distillation of language down to essences, and at the same time it leaves much to interpretation. It can be tricky for native speakers, let alone for folks who are just learning to negotiate basic social and commercial transactions. But poetry speaks to the soul, and these English learners struggling with a new language and a new country, suffering the hardships of poverty and loneliness, were primed for the dialog. I read poems about my family, about Pablo Neruda, about mercy. We took time to translate the lines and, more importantly, to discuss what they meant. Finally, I read Jose Marti's La Rosa Blanca in Spanish and together we did a reverse translation into English. It was a surprisingly rich and rewarding night. More will follow at various sites around the area.

City of Dreams

Two years ago I released a spoken word/Latin jazz CD titled City of Dreams. I called it a set of "love poems to New York and other imaginary landscapes". We received lots of good press but I never felt fully satisfied in performance - the typical format of "poetry over a groove" left me wondering what more could be done. With the generous support of the CSPAC commission I've been hard at work these past months developing a rich new stage presentation which I hope will bring the music, text and imagery of my imagination to a new, more compelling level. Working with the brilliant young composer/arranger/keyboard artist Daniel Kelly, along with the ever-powerful Bobby Sanabria, we've re-arranged the original music for a larger ensemble, written new parts, new music, new poems, and added video. I have been exploring the use of video in two of my recent pieces (The Frog Bride and Double Crossed), and wanted to go further into it. Through mutual friends I came into contact with Casey Meade, documentary filmmaker/video artist/VJ. VJ? I had the same question. Casey mixes images the way a DJ mixes tracks. We've been all over New York shooting tape. He'll mix those images along with live video from the performance and project onto a large screen. I think of Casey as a jazz poet for the eyes. We are presenting City of Dreams for the first time at La MaMa, the famous experimental theater space in the East Village from November 11 - 14th.