thank you, rafael

Today I interviewed the new artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, Rafael Bonachela, for Dance Australia magazine. The top job at SDC had been vacant for a year following the tragic death of Tanja Liedtke, who was a left-field, inspired choice to replace Graeme Murphy, the founding director and visionary force who over thirty years, with partner Janet Vernon, made the company the creative powerhouse it is.

Bonachela was chosen from an impressive international field, and is – to the Board’s great credit – another inspired choice. The work he created on the company earlier this year as a guest choreographer, 360degrees, was the choreographic highlight of the dance year, and the man himself has all the charm, warmth, passion, humour, tact, and intelligence he will need to survive in the job and to make the company his own while respecting its history.

We had a lovely chat, then went and watched the last 20 minutes of company class. Afterwards, on our way back to the publicist’s office we passed another studio, in which another class was being conducted with a very mixed group of students. “Is that the open class?” I asked, and when Rafael assented I commented that I’d been half intending to come down and do class there. “Oh,” said Rafael, “come and do company class. There’s plenty of room, why not?”

Now I read this back, and it does not come anywhere close to conveying that moment. Class, for a dancer, is a physical and psychological fundamental: challenge and security. I haven’t done any of the open classes for two main reasons: 1) they’re not cheap (especially if you’re used to being paid to attend class rather than paying), and 2) a professional dancer (even a creaky ex-pro) in such a class is something of an exhibit; it’s difficult not to perform, which is the last thing you want to do in class. A good class is a meditation, a very inward thing – preparatory, not performative. In company class, however, no-one wants or expects a performance, and the luxury – no, the privilege – of that regular discipline in a safe and supportive space, for free, is more than I ever expected to be offered again.

I think Rafael didn’t understand why I was nearly overwhelmed with gratitude; I’m sure he didn’t realise it’s been about 15 years since I was doing regular classes. But I felt like I’d been ushered back through a magic door – the same door through which I had long since passed, and which is supposed to be of no return.

Later, at home, I talked it around with myself. Aren’t you too old? Hasn’t it been too long? Won’t you just make a fool of yourself? But my heart lightens at the mere thought of it: daily class – not that it will be daily, really, around my various commitments, and not that it won’t hurt, and not that the timing is any less than rotten. If I could, I’d do two weeks of daily barre at home to tone up first, but by then the company will be breaking for the Christmas holidays; it’s better to cruise in now than to rock up with the new company members in February as if I were actually a contender, or thought I was. And as for making a fool of myself, hell – it’s never stopped me before.

So here I am, blogging breathlessly about what must seem like nothing much – because, dear reader, if I don’t write it down, if I don’t put it out there in black and white – both the invitation and my own reaction; that startled, tremulous, intense eagerness – I may not believe it tomorrow.

And I have to get to class :)

spring cycle

Oh dear.

Who the blazing hell are you and where did you spring from? And don’t get pert and give me Pakistan via Saudi Arabia you know that isn’t what I mean. Oh I’m scared. I’m right scared and it’s got very little to do with where you’re from, boy.

Man.

It’s ‘cos of who you are, and who I am.

God help me (it sucks being an atheist) I can’t do this. Please let me not do this.

(*sigh* …As it happens that’s the very prayer that began my journey to atheism)

[whispers] …but I close mine on his hands his eyes his hips his smile

– the heat in him

Oh dear

…

What do you want from me? Pretty sure I’m in trouble either way. Big trouble.

Your family will hate me, so this can’t be serious, right?

As if!

when you’re so goddamn young (why do I do this? why do they want me to?)

And, grand boutade, you don’t fall in love anyway, right? Never have, anyway…

and will surely marry a nice girl fairly soon, maybe a friend of a cousin…

I am staring down the barrel of heaven and/or disaster and I do not like these odds.

But you’re not half intense, are you?

And me, I’m cool as a fucking cucumber, yeah?

[shivers]

[LOL]

Oh dear… :)

women travelling, women writing

I’ve been reading the Virago Book of Women Travellers and godsalive but I’ve got itchy feet. Fifty-two intrepid dames roamin’ an’ writin’ – indeed rewriting – the surface of the earth, from the early 1700s to the end of the 20th century. Some were prim, some were scandalous, some were ecstatic, some were sarcastic, but their combined visions and the concerted expression thereof have been an exhilarating read.

I picked that book up at a stall on the King Street footpath, Newtown, just as I was finishing another woman’s memoirs of a travelling life – Anything But Ordinary: the nine lives of Cecile Dorward, by the lady herself and journalist Ron Davidson. Cecile was born in 1911 to a European family in middle-class London, her childhood was happy enough though her education was sketchy. She married an English professor of philosophy, and they bought a canal-boat and traversed the inland waterways of England. But the professor left Cecile a childless widow in her early forties, and she spent much of the rest of her life in a succession of campervans, traversing several continents including Australia, where she settled in Perth, whence she made regular and gradually shorter excursions till her death in 2004 at the fine old age of ninety-three.

Unfortunately, the glow of her undoubted spirit, intelligence, wit, and charm is somewhat dimmed by rather turgid prose and occasionally downright flat-footed syntax:

“This amorous attitude by Italian men towards me, when I was just a few days short of fifty-nine, was extraordinary. It was not even as if I were wearing my chestnut wig which made me look ten to fifteen years younger and made some men in cars honk in excitement. Men are easily fooled I mused as I drove towards Rome, now only two hours away.”

See what I mean? Great material, clumsy arrangement. I turn back to the Virago anthology, to Margaret Fountaine’s reminiscences about her own travels in Italy, around 1880, catching butterflies and men:

“Almost like two children together, I and this dark-eyed youth would chase the glorious Charaxes Iasius… quarrelling and disputing sometimes in hot discussions, while the music of the beautiful language in which we always conversed would add power and grace to our words.”

Rhythm, romance, drama and precision. Likewise, consider a few lines from the delectable Maud Parrish, describing her unsuccessful attempt to get a divorce in 1890s San Francisco:

“As I rose to leave the courtroom, the fine old East delegation” – her husband’s family – “sneered a bit too much for my little five-foot-two mother who was born and raised in California. She knocked a couple of teeth down my still husband’s throat… Soon the whole courtroom was in an uproar… I heard a skull crack with a noise like a batted baseball. Even a heavy chair slid off a bald head in a way that made me wince as I held my hand over my eyes.”

Now that’s tone. Parrish ran away to the Yukon, where she worked as a dance-hall girl, so her story just gets racier and racier; by the turn of the century she was running a gambling house in Peking. Her memoir, Nine Pounds of Luggage, was published in 1939, and was the only book she ever wrote. I’d love to read it but it’s out of print. Amazon lists a couple of copies available for about US$150 – feel free to band together for my Christmas present.

In the meantime, there’s plenty more in the Virago. For example, the crisply sarcastic tones of a woman known only as Mrs F. D. Bridges (those would be the initials of her husband, with whom she was travelling), whose journal records a visit to Salt Lake City sometime around the late 1870s:

“Persecution is proverbially good for a Church, and the Mormons had plenty of it, and throve accordingly.” She is scathing about polygamy and the terms of a Mormon marriage: “”Till death do us part,” is easy of comprehension; but here you may marry for “Time and Eternity,” or you may enter into a matrimonial engagement for “Time,” or “Eternity,” or you may unite yourself in Celestial marriage to some defunct Saint; or a widow may, with the consent of the Church, arrange a marriage for her deceased husband with some eligible deceased friend; and at last I got puzzled and came away with the impression that in Utah a man may marry his own widow.”

Or Mary Kingsley’s droll description of an encounter with a crocodile while navigating a West African swamp in 1894:

“On one occasion… a mightly Silurian, as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance. I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled into the very middle of the lagoon, hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance.”

Or, for contrast, the feverishly transcendent tones of Isabelle Eberhardt, who abandoned her aristocratic Swiss family to wander North Africa, a convert to Islam, dressed as a man, outcast, drug-addicted, paranoid and destitute. She died in a flash flood in 1904, aged 28, but during her last months she was keeping a diary:

“How long will I be able to hold out?

How can one explain the fact that at home, where I had warm clothes, an outstandingly healthy diet, and Mummy’s idolatrous care, the slightest chill I caught would degenerate into bronchitis; whereas here, having suffered freezing temperatures at El Oued… having travelled in all kinds of weather, while literally always getting wet feet, going around in thin clothes and torn shoes, I don’t even catch a cold?

The human body is nothing, the human soul is all.”

And savour this cracker of an opening line from Emily Hahn, writing for the New Yorker in 1937:

“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.”

Ah, they just make me want to toss my to-do list, give my real estate agent the finger, grab my laptop and jump in the Kombi.

you don’t see the half of it

My god but it has been wild around here lately. Until this year I never posted private blogs; there have been five since mid-May. The unspeakable poetry of my private life.

And you didn’t think I had any ;)

zensiren parties hard

Last night I went to a fancy-dress party, under orders to come as ZenSiren. I met the hostess a couple of weeks earlier, at another party shortly after my recent cabaret gig, and when she heard about my performance alter-ego (who didn’t actually appear at that gig but nonetheless came up for mention) she immediately told me about her upcoming gathering of non-humans and invited me as ZenSiren. I demurred that ZS didn’t really wear much more than blue body paint and a few more or less strategic bits of net and strings of beads and jewels, but that only made her insist most charmingly.

So I did. And it’s richly entertaining to find that there are quite harmless behaviours that still retain the capacity to shock, and even momentarily to scandalise. I was a hit, but absolutely everyone there looked utterly fabulous – we found cause to celebrate the discovery that there are indeed plenty of Sydneysiders who love to dress up, and do it well. The party rocked from dusk till dawn. I got to bed around 6am, and didn’t get home till after 6 this evening.

Sometime around 3am, I stepped onto the wooden ramp between levels in the garden, my foot slid from beneath me and I landed flat on my back, my head hitting the stone step hard. Being in performance mode I pretty much bounced back up again, startled but unhurt, and headed on to wherever I was going, which was into the house and through the dance space to another room. But the attentive hostess noticed as I passed her that the constitution of my body paint seemed rather more Gothic than she remembered. She came after me and drew my attention to it: I was covered in blood. It streamed down my back and front in impressive rivulets from the cut on the back of my head. The resident St Johns Ambulance trainee went into emergency mode, dealing very efficiently with the crisis despite pilling merrily – checking me for concussion, stemming the bloodflow and monitoring my state for the next couple of hours. Of course I was quickly put into the shower and spent the rest of the night in cut-off jeans and my favourite alien visitation T-shirt, but other than a good size egg there were no ill-effects and I don’t think it slowed me down for more than a minute. I can honestly say I had a top night – loved every minute of it, including cracking my head open.

“a new dawn of American leadership is at hand”

If nothing else, Barack Obama is one of modern history’s great orators.

“…tonight we have proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”

Ah, I wish. Guess it’s all in how you define ‘true’. See a livestream of the whole speech here on his website.