FOURTH ENTRY

When pressed with a deadline I always remember Duke Ellington's words, "Don't give me time, give me deadlines!" It is true — there is nothing like a deadline to stimulate the creative forces. I've spent the past few days getting ready for the final two projects of my residency at CSPAC; the storytelling festival at Mother Jones School on December 2nd, and the presentation of City of Dreams on December 11th.

City of Dreams

Casey Meade, the fine young video artist who is creating the projections for City of Dreams, brought me to his studio in Brooklyn the other day to review his work and make adjustments for the performance in College Park. If one picture is worth a thousand words, and if our eyes/brains can register 24 separate images per second, that equals 24,000 words per video second — a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but you get the point that video/film is a powerful medium, and a tricky friend to performance poetry. During the performances I was looking at the audience, and not the screen, so I needed to sit with Casey to check out his work. We choose to watch the last of five performances from our run at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York two weeks ago. The question we had in our minds was, "How is the video functioning to enrich the communicative power of the poems?"

It was a delight to see scenes that we shot a month earlier on the streets of New York edited into the mix. Some examples: a super-sized Mac Gollehan, our trumpet player, slowly consumed by fire during the poem Cry Out Phoenix (see text below), the image of master drummer, Bobby Sanabria, playing and singing an Afro-Cuban sacred song set within the kaleidoscopic transfigurations of an array colorful prayer candles shot at La Original Botanica (spiritualist shop), the hyper-speed red and white night lights of the Cross Bronx Expressway. These images, (and many others), were engaging, potent, amplifying. Some images didn't work quite as well. There were points where the poems were in conflict with the video screen, where a spoken image needed "space" to be absorbed but there was another absorbing image on the screen. There were a couple of places where the video images went on too long — where less would have been more, and places where the video and word could be in stronger relationship. Discussing all this Casey and I were content with the result, but more importantly, grateful for the process of discovery. This is new territory for Casey — he is a documentary filmmaker, and VJ for hip hop artists and concerts, so working with live music and live poetry in a theatrical production is a new challenge for him, and I am delighted to be bringing him into this world. For our performance at CSPAC we are aiming to simplify the content while sharpening the intent of the video projections.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones School Residency

The BIG day is coming. There is nothing like a deadline. The third-graders are pumped. The teachers are busy. The festival is coming! We have just two days to put the final touches on the festival: to review the stories that have been chosen, to listen to the kids, to chose kids to coach, to select the tellers, to teach microphone technique, to rehearse, to perform. The kids who don't get to perform will be asked to do all the "behind-the-scenes" work that go into making performances a success: technical support, house management, promotion, documenting, prepping the space, cleaning up, and being an attentive and appreciative audience for their classmates.

The Festival has six principal aims:
1. to encourage the kids to be excellent communicators
2. to help them appreciate the power of language
3. to help them understand the value of family storytelling
4. to help them overcome inhibitions
5. to participate in a shared experience of art-making
6. to learn the basic elements of the craft of storytelling


I invite my blog readers to come to the festival to hear these young tellers show what they have been working on, and especially to lend and ear and clap enthusiastically at their wit, wonder and audacity!

Aesop's Fables, Family Tales, Inventions, Magic, Adventure!

Cry Out Phoenix

Beat your wings Phoenix,
resist,
it is natural.
Flames are so appealing,
such brilliant metaphors, from afar,
but you are falling Phoenix,
falling,
gravity has made your feathers heavy,
it has soaked your blood,
and weighted your will.
You will burn,
and die.
It must be said.
So resist,
cry out,
yield to terror and cry out Phoenix,
it is natural.
If you didn't
we would doubt the image
we hold of you
soaring in the azure world,
ablaze above the sun.
Cry out Phoenix,
you are dying,
and the promise of rebirth
is a meager balm
against the fire's rage.