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Beacon Hill Panorama @ All Asia Café 10/4/2004 5:20:09 PM
Saturday, September 18th:
I feel particularly invigorated the day after seeing Marceau perform and then meeting him. I had feared that seeing the master would simply make me feel inadequate, but instead I felt inspired. I had come to see him at what seemed to be the right time for me. I was advanced enough in my studies that I understood the technique behind the effects and having never seen Marceau on stage, I had already developed a distinctive style of my own.
After a morning rehearsal with James, I break for lunch and head back to the rehearsal space again as I have a performance later in the afternoon. The show is at All Asia Café and is something of a book release party for Lo Galluccio, a poet and singer/songwriter with whom I've become friends of late, so when the event was being organized I was added to the bill. I met Lo some time back when she was working as a receptionist at a theater where I was auditioning. We quickly struck up a conversation and discovered that while she was living in New York she had written lyrics and performed with one of my favorite bands, the Jazz Passengers. We crossed paths a lot after that with ever more frequency and by that time I had become a bit of a fan.
I had been spending so much time on the pieces related to Waltzing to War that I wanted to do something more fanciful as a break so I dusted off a piece I'd not performed in public in over a year: "Beacon Hill Panorama With Paper Airplanes." The last time had been the only time at the Open Floor Showcase in May of 2003. I had composed the piece for a large space owing to the six foot wing span of the basswood wings that Chris had built. Last November I had attempted to enter it into a dance concert and while it was rejected it was not without some very useful feedback and encouragement to resubmit it. my schedule hadn't allowed for a resubmission but I had spent a few hours revising it in my notebook while on a train bound to Washington, D.C. that December. Finally, it was time consult those notes.
I had realized that not every line in the text needed a movement to go with it-- I had placed too many events over the recitation of the text to a point that it ceased to be a coherent movement piece, but in my notes that I had written in December, I had stripped away the extraneous events and the movement passages that had seemed clichéd, and when I brought it to the rehearsal space I discovered that my technique had advanced to a point that I was able to confine the performance to a much smaller stage, despite the wide wingspan.
I arrived at All Asia at 4pm, much of the gang was crowded around the bar, but the audience hadn't arrived yet as the place had just opened. The dominant theme of the decor were kites and hanging carvings of dragons flying spirits and winged dieties, so my wings kept well with my surroundings. I just went into the men's room and started changing into costume, the floors were fortunately just washed. Bill Barnum came in as I started applying my whiteface and I started telling him about the Marceau show. Bill had shown me my first elements of mime years ago and made me interested in the possibilities of the art form and had studied with Decroux, Montanaro, Avital, and been one of the original leads in Paul Curtis’ American Mime Theatre.
I hang out near the back preparing myself as fist Doug Holder and then Deborah Priestly read poetry. Meanwhile I work things out with Lo's bandmates so that I can have the stage cleared quickly. Lo reads a few poems from her book and then her band joins her for a set of originals and standards.
When they are done, I strap on my wings, wait for the stage to clear and slowly move through the crowd, bringing them back to silence. I step onto the stage and begin the silent pantomime of ascending to a roof top first by elevator and then by staircase but having to contort myself because of the six foot wingspan, tilting my torso at an extreme angle in order to move myself through narrow doorways and passages, only straightening myself when I reach the rooftop of Bill's Beacon Hill appartment building which had inspired the poem. I throw the first airplane into the audience and I begin the spoken word part...
In the end I feel much better about this performance than the original showing. It may still not be a true dance piece, but experience and confining it to a smaller space has made it stronger. Regarding the criticism I had received back in November: it's entirely possible that I am not and may never be a dancer, but I am a mime and a poet.
Once I strip off my makeup I start to feel sniffles come on-- I have to get myself home, I've worked myself into a cold.
