I invite you to check out my two newsletters on Substack.com:
MOMENTS OF CONNECTION - Seeing signs of hope everywhere.
TRAVELING WITH BOB DYLAN AND OTHER UNSOLVED MYSTERIES - https://travellingwithbobdylan.substack.com/
Investigations into how time stops when the soul takes over.
WRITING: I was told by teachers I could not dance and write and sing, I had to pick one and forget the other two. But I always refused and I´m glad, because eventually I discovered wonderful ways of working with all three, and people loved it, in my workshops, and my performances. I called it Moving Words for years, but now, in an expanded form, it is called The Crystal. What happens when we use writing, moving and singing the words we just wrote, is an activation of increased awareness of what we are working through in our subconscious, like dreaming out loud, and being able to process the message from that dream. Integrating our improvised writing, singing and movement, requires us connecting to our fearless primordial nature, and rewards us with a stronger connection with our soul.
This process led to my book, Talking to Tara and Other Poems, and many pieces in Contact Quarterly and other literary journals. My current focus is on my two newsletters on Substack.com, "Moments of Connection" and "Traveling with Bob Dylan and Other Unsolved Mysteries". I am also at work finishing a musical, with a working title of S.O.S.
THEATER and DANCE: on the stage, in the park, on the street, in nature, in nightclubs, in ensembles, crowds, or solo...from my beginning experiences in the 60s, the concept of life as theater was already in the air, and I continued crossing boundaries wherever I found them. Performance was a lens to see life better through. It was sacred space, in which the soul could be the one in the spotlight. It was camaraderie and adventure, risk and exhilaration, overcoming fear and doubt, doing surreal work in mundane settings, making temples out of garages, hopping freight trains, living in tipis, playing big theaters in NYC.
It was my father – a drayman and founding member of San Francisco Union Theater in 1934 – who taught me that what happens on a stage has the power to change the world. When I was very young, sitting in the bar with him on a Saturday morning, he told me how the whole city had gone on general strike in 1934 in solidarity with the striking dock workers, two of whom had been shot on the picket line. In response to that, San Francisco Union Theater was formed to put on plays that dramatized the plight of the working class, and my father recruited fellow truck drivers and dock workers to join.
After Clifford Odets' groundbreaking one-act, Waiting for Lefty, made waves in New York in 1934, Dad's group immediately got the rights to put it on in San Francisco, and the power of it resounded through the city like thunder.
"Odets was a genius," Dad said, sipping on his orange juice and vodka. "We were on stage as the guys running a taxi-drivers' union meeting, and the audience were the union members. Everybody knew the dangers of striking – families would starve, people might even be killed – but it was the only way to improve the terrible conditions they worked under. The tension in the theater was tremendous, the moment of truth had arrived, they had to vote. So one of the actors shouts out to the audience, "What'll it be, boys?" and a man in the audience – nobody knew he was an actor, too – jumps to his feet, throws his fist in the air and shouts, "Strike!" and the lights go out. Bam! You could feel the shock, everybody's heart pounding, people crying, cheering, up on their feet. It was like electricity, and from that point on, we had a movement, and every night we had packed houses. No money, but that's not why we were doing it. It was the spirit of the thing: one for all, and all for one."
I could feel all that energy coursing through my 8 year-old body, as if I'd been there, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that. Even though I chose a career in dance, I was always experimenting with ways to engage the audience, with text, storytelling, call and response, asking them to move or write or call out what images they saw. Ultimately, it was the collective imagination that called to me, and performance – wherever it took place – a doorway into it.
At 14 a friend in ballet class took me to a dance class where we danced barefoot, and it changed my life forever! lt was taught by Ann Woodhead, who had us improvise from the imagination, and I knew then that was what I wanted to do with my life. Anna Halprin's workshops made it about the world, nature, society. Peter Schumann's colossal Bread and Puppet Theater, in which the actors passed out bread to the audience, dissolved all boundaries and united us as humanity. At Bennington College in Vermont, I learned Contact Improvisation from Steve Paxton, who had just done the first performances of it. Instantly I felt inspired by its principles of mutual respect and trust, profound listening to sensation, and exploring the unpredictable. I took a workshop with Ralph Lee, the great puppet maker and member of Open Theater, and felt exhilarated by his outdoor happenings, the 'audience' becoming part of the troupe of actors with amazing masks, crossing fields, into the trees, like we were a tribe enacting an ancient ritual with nature. That New Year's Eve, 1976, I got to 'be' his giant Medusa puppet in his parade in New York, and I remember feeling again – as we moved like a river of people and mythic figures through the falling snow – that electricity my father described in Waiting for Lefty – bonding audience and performer in a single current – a movement in the direction of a dream. And when we put together the pieces of the dream we carry inside us, we create new realities, together. The theater of life!