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For Truthout, Williams Rivers Pitts discusses shared satisfactions of gardening and activism.

That’s what they were called at City-as-School, and probably still are. Some of them taught classes, but basically they advised the students and directed us to all the work/study internships, college classes, in-house courses, all kinds of things you could take. For me it was such a relief after two years of strait-laced Stuyvesant HS.

Jean was so angry and self-destructive, an advisor who knew him well told me shortly after he died, but also so sweet and so creative. His moods whipsawed almost by the minute. He inflated/then deflated–the classic superstar dichotomy, I guess.

He pissed me off about something and I didn’t talk to him for nine years. A girl we both knew from CAS was staying with me in 1986 and insisted we call him. He invited us over to his house that night. It was like those years hadn’t lapsed at all–the first thing he said was something about Tallulah! Yes, even in high school I wanted to write about her.

I mentioned here that CAS was across the street from Brooklyn Heights because those blocks are not part of the Heights landmark district–therefore my surprise when I was in downtown Bklyn five years ago and saw that part of the old campus, housed in a building that belonged to the Armenian church across Schermerhorn St., had been torn down–to make way, natch, for an apartment building.

“Natch”–isn’t that a Jean/Al Diaz word from their SAMO days?

Fortunately in these days of robo-education and STEMing to the test, CAS still exists. Now it’s in a former high school building on Carmine Street in the Village. But the intimacy of the old plant can’t be perpetuated.

Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center Festival.

Last evening (Thursday July 14) three additional entries from the classical Noh canon.

Before we get to that, may I just announce my lifelong fascination with curtains, from the mod fiberglass curtains that masked the dreary outside of the apartment in which we grew up to the graceful dance performed by the “great golden curtain” of the Metropolitan, but nothing has prepared me for the Noh curtain that marks the exit off the bridge — that is to say the transition from backstage to onstage in this traditional Noh stage that has been erected at the Rose Theatre.  Crossing a bridge — we learn in last night’s last offering, “The Stone Bridge” — is an experience of becoming enlightened.  In Noh, the transition from offstage to onstage is effected through the bridge, and the curtain marks the beginning of this enlightenment.  The Kanze Noh curtain somehow rises vertically and then horizontally.  There are two distinct movements —  vertical followed by horizontal.  How is this done?  If there were a vertical pulley, it would interfere with the horizontal movement.  It may be that the vertical pulley itself is whisked horizontally.

The first offering, “Sumida River,” has a bit of an O Henry story feel to it, being a mother searching for her kidnapped son overhearing a stranger relating the tragic circumstances of the boy’s death.  The non-mimetic Noh style (see my first night blog entry below) perfectly contrasted with the overwhelming pathos of the events being chanted and danced.  As against that, the short comedic “Fake Sculptor” had an almost sketch comedy feel to it, a brilliant if one-idea encounter between an urban con artist impersonating his own sculpture and a rustic.  The final piece, “The Stone Bridge,” had virtually no narrative at all, just pure theatre.  A pilgrim waits before a difficult stone bridge, waiting for a miracle.  Enter four lions clad in red mane and shimmering gold, who perform a feral, foot-stomping, head waving ode to joy of being alive at the climax of the food chain.

If the original Globe Theatre together with its original 16th century actors had been transported to Lincoln Center this summer to perform Shakespeare’s masterpieces, it would be a bit like the tremendous achievement of the Lincoln Center Festival in bring the Kanze Noh Theatre — with its 26th generation master — to New York this July

You will never see their likes again in New York. Lincoln Center states: “This summer, Kiyokazu Kanze—the 26th Grand Master of the Kanze School and a descendent of the founder of Noh—brings the profound lyricism and aesthetic elegance of this ancient dramatic art form to Lincoln Center.” Five dramas are being presented from this classical repertory of a “nearly 700-year-old dramatic form” that is a official UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage.”

“In the Noh we find an art built upon the god-dance , or upon some local legend of spiritual apparition, or, later, on gestures of war and feats of history; an art of splendid posture, of dancing and chanting, and of acting that is not mimetic. It is, of course, impossible to give much idea of the whole of this art on paper.”  Ernest Fenollosa & Ezra Pound, “NOH'” OR ACCOMPLISHMENT A STUDY OF THE CLASSICAL STAGE OF JAPAN (1916) at 4-5.

Impossible to convey on paper and yet one perseveres.

Noh plays “present some more vivid hour or crisis.  The Greek plays are troubled and solved by the gods; the Japanese are abounding in ghosts and spirits.”  Id.  Pound saw an immediate connection between the psychology of Noh and his own modernist aesthetic (and that of Yeats):  “The suspense [of the Noh] is the suspense of waiting for a supernatural manifestation — which comes.  Some will be annoyed at a form of psychology  which is, ‘in the West, relegated to spiritistic stances. There is, however, no doubt that such psychology exists. All through the winter of 1914- 15 [as the real life horrors of the First World War were playing out] I watched Mr. Yeats correlating folk-lore (which Lady Gregory had collected in Irish cottages) and data of the occult writers, with the habits of charlatans of Bond Street. If the Japanese authors had not combined the psychology of such matters with what is to me a very fine sort of poetry, I would not bother about it.”  Id. 44.

Last night (Wednesday) began with “Okina,” a sacred dance rite in which the mask is donned and the actor physically transformed into a deity.  The evening began with the most remarkable sound ever heard in the Rose auditorium — utter, ear-splitting silence as the actors soundlessly entered the classical Noh stage, a three-sided platform reached by a “bridge” leading offstage.  Here the exit was curtained with a rainbow fabric that lifted up and then inward entrancingly.  This remarkable silence was a testament to the power of the form and lasted perhaps five minutes.  The audience was mesmerized.  Slowly, slowly the drama unfolds with simple drumming — so simple as to be reminiscent of a Steve Reich piece — changing and what they call “dance” which is a rigid sequence of set poses punctuated by occasional stomping.  The effect was intense, highly-focused, mind-freeing tedium illuminated by an aura of grace, the feeling of peering back centuries into a pre-digital age to a completely non-Western culture.

The second piece was a veritable melodrama in comparison.  “Hagoromo or The Robe Of Feathers” told the story of a simple fisherman who stumbles upon a sacred robe belonging to a fallen angel of sorts, a guardian of the Palace of the Moon, who must retrieve the robe in order to return to heaven.  After an intense negotiation between the two —

Hakuryo:  Give payment with the dance of the Tennin, and I will return you your mantle.

Tennin:  Readily and gladly, and then I return into heaven. You shall have what pleasure you will, and I will leave a dance here, a joy to be new among men and to be memorial dancing. . . .For the sorrows of the world I will leave this new dancing with you for sorrowful people.  But give me my mantle, I cannot do the dance rightly without it.

Hakuryo: Not yet, for if you should get it, how do I know you’ll not be off to your palace without even beginning your dance, not even a measure?

Tennin: Doubt is fitting for mortals; with us there is no deceit.

Hakuryo: I am again ashamed. I give you your mantle. Id. 165.

— The fisherman agrees to return the robe in exchange for the angel performing the sacred dance of the guardians of the Palace, not something that a fisherman or any human would ordinarily be privy to.  And then the dance, again, static and fluid at the same time, again involving a mask, slow, fast, tedious, entrancing, altogether out of this world and fully evocative of the Palace of the Moon indeed.

As to the nature of this dance, where would Martha Graham be without Noh? “Graham was influenced by the Yeats-Pound-Eliot-Joyce branch of Anglo-American modernism” and thus by Pound’s deep appreciation of Noh.  Graham, it seems, picked up Noh through dancer Michio Ito, who performed Yeats’ Noh-influenced play At the Hawk’s Well in 1916, and later introduced Graham to her future collaborator Isamu Noguchi, who created masks for a 1928 revival of the Yeats play.  Graham also danced Ito’s choreography in New York.  Graham thus picked up a “modernist ‘Celtic’ conception of Noh.”  Franko, Martha Graham in Love & War (Oxford) at 103-04.

But back to “The Robe Of Feathers.”  At the end, the angel simply walked offstage as she is said to have ascended to heaven, and I swear I saw her flying through the sky, past the clouds, all the way up to the Moon such was the full activation of the imagination after the hypnotic spell cast by the performance.

More from Fenollosa & Pound about the ancestors of the Kanze troupe which is performing at the Rose Theatre:  “The Kanze method of acting was made the
official style of the Tokugawa Shoguns, and the tayus, or chief actors, of Kanze were placed at the head of all Noh actors.”  This method, and the entire Noh tradition, is different from the “common theatre” characterized by “mimicry and direct imitation of life. . . . The Noh, the symbolic and ritual stage, is a place of honour to actor and audience alike.”  Fenollosa & Pound at 13.

This is uncommon theatre, nonmimetic, not imitating life, as artificial and unnatural and profound a form as Italian opera.  These forms force us to work harder to suspend disbelief, and thus bring us to deeper parts of the imagination.

The summer Lincoln Center Festival Asian offerings have never been less than bracing, an ice cube dropped down the mind’s back on a hot evening, something completely different, performed by gold-plated ensembles with impeccable artistic pedigrees.  We are so fortunate to have this Festival.

I don’t go on Facebook every day and I didn’t know she had died July 9.

She was an unusually stimulating woman to talk to !

Had a memorable lunch with the Barnetts when they were in town several years ago–then took (walking from Times Square part of the way) those two incredibly vigorous over-75s to Lincoln Center and watched some old NYCB tapes. Then had dinner with Wilde and the two of them when Barnett presented her with the Dance Magazine award a few months later in 2013.

Virginia always said important, interesting things, forcefully and charmingly expressed. . . unfortunately, we won’t get to do that interview for Ballet Review that we talked about.

But I’m so glad she’s quoted in Wilde Times! Just an extraordinary person.

Jim Naurecks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting supplies the inconvenient (for Dimon) fact that those pay raises he’s crowing about are going to be “largely involuntary”–as in legally mandated.

Apparently, following the law is something Jamie thinks he deserves special props for!

It’s a busy week for the GV Historic Society:

T’row evening it places a commemorative plaque on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s former studio/ home on Great Jones Street. It’s a praiseworthy thing to do, but nevertheless there are so many layers of irony to this. Jean would scoff and be pleased–he was a renegade but also desperate for official approval. He was cannibalized by the art world–and he avidly submitted himself to be devoured. GVHS, of course, is a much gentler seal of approval.

I went to high school with him at City-as-School, a public alternative high in Brooklyn, just across Court Street from Brooklyn Heights. I often think of him when I go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a few blocks away from the brownstone where he lived with his family.

Jean was a very strange person. I want to look up something one of our teachers said soon after he died in 1988.

Tom Miller of “Daytonian in Manhattan” blog fame, lectures this evening at the Sixth Street Community Center, a program presented by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. He’ll talk about Manhattan’s long-ago Little Germany neighborhood which once radiated out from Mark’s Place. Its existence remains attested to by a number of surviving landmarks.

Miller’s talk is free but reservations are required.

Once again, Robert Parry at Consortium News departs from the lockstep geopolitical narrative of our ever-more war hungry neo cons and the “mainstream” media that toadies to them. Not content with the catastrophes they sowed in the Middle East, they now drool over a war with Russia.

And if confirmation were needed, Michael Klare in The Nation examines the “new and dangerous strategic outlook in Washington. Whereas previously the strategic focus had been on terrorism and counterinsurgency, it has now shifted to conventional warfare among the major powers.”

I went to Shuffle Along Friday night and I had a ball. Nothing about the show seemed aimed at tourists–Yureka time!  That said, anyone from anywhere could “get” it. I felt a bit like I did as a kid when my ex-vaudevillean grandmother took me to Broadway musicals.

The show deftly uses techniques of old vaudeville and revue to tell the narrative of the original production’s creation and creators. The dancing is fabulous. It was a treat indeed to see numbers drawn from the old steps performed by dancers who are so much more trained than the cuties of many-a-yesteryear ago.

And at the lovely old and intimate Music Box.  I could have sworn I heard a faint echo of Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb leading “Easter Parade” there in 1933. . .