Fado night and Giacometti

Since last I blogged, I've been to Portugal to see Isabel, who was spending time with Diogo. (This was after Isabel got turned away from entry into the UK. She flew into Heathrow and they wouldn't let her past customs and immigration. Put her on the next plane back to Newark. Long and frustrating story. You can find some of it on Isabel's blog.)

So, since she couldn't get into the country--and they wouldn't even let me see her at the airport--I went to Portugal to spend a few days with her. One highlight of the trip (besides seeing Isabel and enjoying the hospitality of Diogo and his parents) was going into Porto for a fado night. Fado is perhaps the characteristic Portuguese music (from what little I know)--very soulful, full of heartache, much like the blues but without any blame on whoever done you wrong. It's more like whatever happened was simply fated, and loss and grief are as much a part of life as breathing. What we heard was Lisbon fado, ("the real fado," I'm told), sad to the point of heartbreak, even to those of us who couldn't understand the words.

This was in a small cafe, crammed with maybe 40 people. All the singers that night were mid-40s and over, but several folks in their 20s came to listen. Fado is making a comeback, though there is some tension between traditionalists and some innovative stylists. One Portuguese guitar (it looks like a big, teardrop-shaped mandolin with six pairs of strings) and two "regular" guitars accompanied a series of solo singers. If the setting had been Sicilian, it would have looked Mafia. It seemed pretty blue-collar. One singer wore a shiny gray suit with big pinstripes. The men who wore suits (fewer than half) had the kind of wardrobe where the shades get darker from the tie to the suit to the shirt. This guy's companion--a bald man dressed completely in dark brown--flashed a little gold jewelry. Most of the singers were men. One was a woman in a fur coat with an amazing tenor voice. This is the kind of music that people sing with their eyes closed and brow creased, hands and head punctuating the words with tight gestures. It's passionate as flamenco, but if flamenco is fire, fado is the slow inextinguishable burn that goes deeper and deeper and never lets you go.

If, as we keep trying to achieve in our classes at Lispa, the voice can truly come from the belly, this is the kind of music that's rooted there.

Had my flight back from Porto had been a couple of hours later, I might have gotten an extra day or two with Isabel and Diogo. During my bus back into London from Stansted, it started to snow. And it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. And snowed. All night and the next day. This wasn't just little rainy snow, this was big flurries. It even felt like Minnesota for a while. The airports closed that evening. Then buses and the Tubes stopped running. On Monday, London took a snow day. Pretty much all of Britain did, I think.

Our school day was canceled for one day, shortened for the next two. Then we got back to what is our new regular schedule.

We’ve now had a week in our permanent facilities at Three Mills. Before this, half of our classes were in a lovely wooden room with a high ceiling and skylights which, unfortunately, was really too small to have 20-25 people moving around in. Our other classes were in what felt like an airplane hangar with a hugely loud heating system that had to be on full blow almost all the time to keep the chill down. The two spaces were separated by a 5-minute walk and a security gate. Now we’re in two large renovated spaces separated by a short cold hallway. They don’t quite feel homey yet, but they’ll probably start to when they get a few scars on them.

We’ve moved on to poetry as the thing to move us, physically and emotionally. The sounds of poetry in particular at this point. (How do you move each sound in the word “crack,” for example? Or “dozing”? and then how do you move the whole word?) In our Creation small groups we’ve set about choosing a painting to develop a piece around, eventually to include musical and poetic elements as well. If I can, I’ll post a link to the painting we settle on next week if I can. How all this will come together I have no idea. But we’ll develop something. Stay tuned.

I'd mentioned the Andy Goldsworthy film we saw a few weeks ago. The series continues. One film was about Evelyn Glennie, the percussionist who hears through her body. Another was about Alberto Giacometti--he of the spindly spectral sculptural figures. The most recent was a Brazilian film about different ways of seeing, including interviews with blind visual artists. I liked the Giacometti film the least and not surprisingly, it's stuck with me the most. I'd always liked his sculptures, but after the film I had less appreciation for them (and more for his paintings). Part of the problem with the film was the self-consciousness of its construction of the image of the Great Artist, which was a bit comical as well as frustrating. But more to the point, Giacometti says at several points that his obsession sculpting comes from his really not understanding sculpture. I don't understand sculpture either, I'm sure, but after listening to him and seeing the same kinds of forms from him over and over and over again, I think he's right. Not that that's a fault. But it occurred to me that what he seemed to be doing with one sculpture after another was the equivalent of a singer singing scales. They were all practice, in a way. Necessary exercises for one who's working on his or her craft (or art--where's the line, I wonder sometimes). But is that enough?

Which got me to thinking: Mightn't the same be said for a lot of Picasso's works? The other day I went to the Tate Modern. Enshrined on the walls there are a quick pencil drawing Picasso did (the card next to it mentions several other known drawings he did the same day) and a cubist painting that looks unfinished. OK, maybe intentionally, maybe not. Or maybe it doesn't matter how it looks to me. It's not a new insight to say there's a cult-like fascination with anything created by certain artists after a certain point in their careers--probably more so with visual artists than with writers, directors, or performers, or maybe this is more a sign of how things were in the art world several decades ago--but this all has gotten me thinking. It used to be, for example, that music was more of a participatory art than it became with the advent of recording. How embarrassing to falteringly play an instrument in front of your family or friends when you could hear perfection on an LP or CD. And so experimentation became discouraged. Maybe the same could be said for drawing and painting in an age of mass publication of high-quality color images, and the mass copying of sculptures. Buy your favorite Rodin in any dimension you want in the museum shop. And so perfection and some kind of critical authority squelch the showing of any kind of exploration. With the internet and GarageBand, maybe that pendulum has reversed, but with the huge budgets needed in the main current of dramatic arts like theatre and film, the same danger has shifted to another arena. This is some of what Lispa seeks to counter, I suppose. Long live the experimental artist. And here's to iconoclasts breaking the idol of perfection, I suppose. Go off-balance, as they'd say here. Discover something that's more than you could plan or strategize. And then have the discipline to refine it while also keeping it open.

(Yes, I know. Blogs are supposed to be short. But this is what I get for not writing more often.)