Glimpses 09 – April 2010

If you speak hebrew I invite you to listen to this 18 minute interview with Shahar. If you don’t, I invite you to listen to it anyway and just let the vibrations move through you. This interview took place shortly after our previous performance.

Click to play the interview with Shahar

We decided to try something new in the performance. We avoided the somewhat obvious use of live-stills. We decided that I would spend the first part of the performance collecting images and then taking the time to edit the images and constructing them into a SweetClarity-like presentation – all created live. A first attempt. As I was shooting I felt distant from the space. As I was editing I felt torn from the space, I wanted to watch it instead of the screen. I wasn’t happy with the images on the screen. I felt pressure. I surrendered to it and threw out all the images I instinctively did not want to show. I was left with a short collection – and that was what went back into the performance space. As I write these first words in this post I still have not spent time with the images (which I intend to do before it is published). It was an experiment that I do not wish to repeat again (at least not in a performance space).

The performance was a first of three visits we made to the center area of Israel from the distant north where we live. This is way more then the usual visit once in two or three months. I expected it to be a taxing month and it was. The combination of being away from home, traveling, spending time at my parents home and in a city landscape, irregular food, inconsistent (almost lack) of practice … all left me quiet and edgy. I feel a friction between myself and my own skin, from the inside… like an itch that can’t be scratched. I spend my days trying to let time pass in peace… letting my energy reconsolidate itself and looking forward to looking forward to getting on the practice mat again.

The backdrop for all this is a life defined mostly by unknowns. The unknows feel more menacing when my skin is itching from the inside. The unknowns are more angering when the itching is stronger. It is also spring, a time of change, windy. My breath is constricted, I barely play the Shakuhachi.

In this setting comes another invitation from Shahar to partake in the next performance. I don’t know. It is what I want most to do and what I fear most of doing. It will fill me with a sense of purpose and expectation from the second I say yes through to the end of the performance itself. But the present is weighing down on me, immobilizing me. I don’t feel well … I am not scared. I know this will pass, I know I will find my way through it, I know my practice will find me once again, I know… All that does not change the present moment – a heavy, agitated, sticky, annoying, itchy, sad moment. My practices have all trained me to be in the present – and so I am. Not waiting for it to pass or fade or change. In it, it in me.

I don’t know what a future time holds in store for me – neither in life nor on stage. I don’t know. This present moment is just about all I can take – it consumes me. The other day, Andreea spoke to me about moving to Romania, later that day my energy sank and eventually crashed leaving me with a headache for the remainder of the day. The present has me and there is very little space for anything else.

I wrote most of this post yesterday. Today I intended to visit the images. I just turned on the computer with the image processing tools on it, and now I know without a doubt I do not yet want to bring the images from the previous performance into my consciousness. They carry with them a mass from the past and a hint of a future. This post will remain written and spoken and unseen.