I headed off to London Fields and the Broadway Market [in the East London borough of Hackney, where my classes are this fall]. The Broadway Market is a street market on Saturdays. At least I think that’s the only day. Anyway, it’s a delight—fresh vegetables, baked goods, a pig roasting on a spit that they carve right there and make sandwiches of, fresh fruit smoothies, racks of clothing, crowds of all ages. I’m limiting myself to two meals a day—this evening I noticed that Lispa recommends a food budget of £35 per week, ouch!—and had the first one there. (Each of my meals today cost about a daily budget’s worth.) And then I went back to London Fields, which may be my favorite place in all of London. And there I happened upon a wondrous thing.
I was sitting on a park bench jotting down to-do notes, when I heard an aria being amplified through the open air. I looked behind me toward the music, and there was a big Komatsu digging machine, a more modern Mike Mulligan the Steam Shovel kind of thing, if I remember the name of the children’s book correctly. It was sitting in the middle of a platform made of some kind of flat squares to protect the grass. The aria was blasting from speakers at the four corners of the platform. And a man about my age, probably a few years older, started to dance with the machine. The digger’s big claw swooped down to him, and he climbed on top of it. As the music soared, he stood and the Komatsu lifted him about 30 feet in the air. It brought him down safely. It spun in circles chasing him. He beckoned to it lovingly. It spurned him. He begged it to come back. At times what I was watching was very funny, at times very sweet. It turns out they were rehearsing for a couple of performances in the afternoon as part of London’s International Festival of Contemporary Dance.
I returned this afternoon to see it again. At one point, I started to cry, it was so moving. (The recording was Maria Callas. Go figure.) Mostly I laughed and was amazed. The Komatsu has tinted windows, so it looks even more nonhuman. I assumed it was computer programmed, though this afternoon after the dancer took his curtain call, he opened the door, and the machine operator stepped out and took his own bow. (Still, when they acknowledged the Komatsu, I expected it too to do some kind of bow in response.)
I’m sure Lispa folks will call this great theatre, and surely it is, but I’m going to resist using that term too much. So what was it? A moment of grace? surprise? delight? A thing of transcendent imagination and beauty? All of these things.
(As I left London Fields after the afternoon performance, I saw a traffic sign I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a red rectangle, with white letters and reads “Changed Priorities Ahead.” Maybe that describes the effect this Lispa experience will have on me. Not that everything will be artsy fartsy for me, or that I’ll become a theatre person. But I do hope to be more attuned to beauty and wonder, and more involved in it. These may be among the changed priorities that lie ahead.)
The afternoon crowd had lots of children in it, but I think the adults were probably even more amazed than the kids were. The dance of man and machine certainly came from a childlike place in someone’s mind and heart. Kids seemed to enjoy it, certainly, but not to be particularly amazed. That was more the privilege of us adults, who live with less wonder and more worries. (The performers/creators/artists, by the way, were Compagnie Beau Geste. Somehow it did seem very French, in an imaginative, innocent, Jeune Lune kind of way.)
After the rehearsal I wanted to call someone and tell them to come see it, to share it with somebody, but I didn’t have anyone I know that well in town to call. A moment of loneliness. Not the first. Certainly not the last.
No comments:
Post a Comment