Since Richard got me started on this whole Desi theme, I started to go through some videos I used to watch a while ago whenever I was feeling down.
These two videos still make me wanna to dance on the roof of my neighbour’s house and ride stolen horses until dawn peaks.
Now, these people (Banjaras) are Desi (meaning literaly “of the country” and used when refering to someone who is living in or whose origins are from South Asia) but they are also Nomads. It seems they have the same origins as the Romani people of Europe. The difference is that they stayed closer to home.
This first video is from Tony Gatlif’s movie Latcho Drom. It is a beautiful movie, worth watching if you haven’t by now, and actually the most beautiful compilation of traditional Romani music and dancing I have seen.
This second video I like more than the first one. It is a bit rough, not rehearsed much and certainly not directed. It looks more like jammin’ in the hood on a Saturday afternoon. They’re having so much fun!
By the way, this style of dancing looks easy but I assure you it’s very hard! I’ve hurt my back and my ankle trying to spin like they do. So don’t try it at home by yourself! Or at least warm up for a whole hour beforehand.
I was at a rehearsal tonight with a bunch of Romanians. Nice people. We rehearse in the basement of someone’s house. I wonder – how do Romanians always manage to make their houses smell like moth balls (naftalina)? I have never seen this product for sale here, in Canada. Perhaps they bring it in their luggage from Romania. However, there is no need in Canada for this product because the flies that eat your old fur coats are not that great in number. Actually, I never saw one! Can it be that the smell of the moth balls makes the Romanians regain that “home” feeling? Does it procure them the certainty that the house they live in belongs to them? Well, there’s no doubt about that, I mean who in the world (other than maybe another Romanian) would ever want to live with that smell?!?
Anyway, so we’re rehearsing and there’s this character in the play who has to maintain a very high level of energy for about five minutes. Five minutes in stage time is an eternity. This is a very hard task. I tried it myself, at home. I noticed that there were two instances: one – in which I managed to maintain the energy level but I was hitting the same note and the text was becoming boring, uninteresting and the second – in which I found variations within the text but I had trouble maintaining the energy level, especially when I was changing “states”. My conclusion at the end of the night was that the text is bad and it should be altered.
Then I found Lola. And she showed me that there are some who can do it, and do it well. This is how someone can go completely nuts for over four minutes and make the most out of every single second of that performance:
Approximate translation:
“I should have, gorgeous, cut my veins
When during the moaning of one of my couplets
You lifted my brown tanned flesh up in the air
With words I did not know.
How blind I was,
When with your eyes looking into mine
You said like this:
Give me alms of love, Dolores,
Give it to me for charity,
Put some flowers on my cross,
Dolores,
And God will pay you for it.
Don’t refuse me, beautiful, water to drink.
Have mercy, Samaritan, of the bitter in my soul,
Aren’t you sorry to see me cry?
Give me alms of love,
You give it to me, my Dolores
Because I’m going to die.
I don’t need your money,
Nor I want for you to keep your promise,
It is enough for me you crying channels,
With sorrow and remorse making you sick.
But what you will never in life
Be able to know
Is that until the moment I’m in my dying bed
I will love you.”
There is nothing that bothers me more than things done so-so. I should have included it in the “fears collection”. The horrible feeling of being “almost good” or “not too bad”…the nauseating disgust that overcomes me when I’m told that I did “all right”, that I was “fine”……Shut up!!!!!
I don’t know what strange circumstances made my psychic the perfect environment for this horrendous fear to grow like an invasive fungi. I don’t think it has to do with my background. Romanians (or at least the ones in my region) are known for doing things so-so. I heard this a million times when I was growing up: “It’s ok, let it be. We’ll see to it later.” Or “it’ll do for now”…
There has never been one instance in my life when I felt like I had enough time for finishing something. I’m always going crazy on the last minute, just hours before a project of some sort is due. I simply can’t get myself to start it, I keep thinking that something is missing, that it won’t be perfect. PERFECT! or nothing! There is nothing in between for me. Or yes, there is – excruciating pain, insomnia and a strange hissing in my ears…
I’ll publish this post without checking it for mistakes because if I look at it, as I usually do, it’ll take me another 2-3 hours to rewrite it. Just a funny thing – the first article I posted on this blog took me nearly five hours to write (and rewrite and then again erase everything and write it all over once more…).
Someone decided to show me that Canada is not such a dull place, inhabited by self-centered people. She has a four years old son. The kid is mixed (she’s white and daddy is black), one of those adorable little specimens who grow up to become gorgeous big specimens followed by a crowd of women. He doesn’t like chocolate much. Instead, he loves ice (pun is intended). I watch him put the big cubes in his mouth while I keep shivering of cold and order more hot tea. The square cube shapes his face in funny ways. Then the crunching comes! I remember a very hot day in the country side, the old carpets on the floor and all the doors wide open for the air to cool bit. The only sweet things I have left are two really old hard candies, one brown and one red. I eat them both in less than a minute and I enjoy them thoroughly, although the crunching sound is the loudest I’ve ever heard and I’m not completely sure that my teeth are gonna make it.
They leave. Five minutes after, the waitress tells us that she has paid all our bill. I don’t like ice. Chocolate things don’t last long around me, though.
• Fear of cars and highways
• Busy places
• Closed spaces
• Empty and large spaces
• Heights
• Basements
• People with really dry skin
• People with really moist skin
• People who smile too much
• The lack of people, but not loneliness
• Loneliness
• Crowds
• People who are too clean and who don’t have BO
• Cancer
• The abstraction of the abstraction of the abstraction
• People who say and do things that don’t make sense
• Hi-tech stuff
• Rigidness
• Extreme cold and wind and dryness
• Tumors
• Dust, lots of dust that is going to clog all my pores and suffocate me to death
• Death through – suffocation, drowning, crashing into a truck, falling from the top of a high rise building, chiropractic manipulations of the neck.
• The Romanian Diaspora
But most of all I fear that one day I won’t be able to travel to my country, that I’ll never hear my language spoken again and that I’ll never bathe in the dirty, polluted, smelly, literally black Black Sea.
So what if I’ll die one day? Should I spend the rest of my life studying the Bardo Thodol? Does it really matter how I die? Is dieing from cancer different from dieing in a car accident or dieing when sleeping? Gabriel Liiceanu, a Romanian writer, was explaining in one of his books that we should leave the web as it is. The web is the illusion, Maya as the Hindus call it. We have to leave it the way it is because otherwise we can’t function. If we can’t function we’d rather kill ourselves since there’s nothing worth living for. The absence of the illusion brings out the nonsense, the ridiculous side of things. Everything looses meaning, our actions, our words seem to be in vain. Simone de Beauvoir takes things a bit further. She talks about ethics. Out of the sudden, out of this nothingness, there is something. Something which seems to bring sense to this whole existentialist nonsense. I didn’t understand how Simone got there and Liiceanu’s explanation is too short, but here’s what I was thinking last night after having too much green tea and not being able to sleep: Even though I have to die someday, I still want to live until then. Living is nice, sometimes even pleasurable. I want to live not because living makes sense, but simply because I was born and because, I have to admit, I’m afraid to just die like this. I don’t believe there’s an entity like God because I’ve never seen him/her. Since I don’t believe in all these stories that people tell about life after death, I assume that there might as well be nothing on the other side. So, in this case, life is something and after death there’s nothing. However, the something is limited, it’s only going to last for another 60 years or so (I’m being very optimistic – I might as well die tomorrow in one of those shootings that happen in universities lately). Even so, I prefer the something for the time being. The time being is the key idea here. I sometimes have the intuition that the present moment, if grasped, could somehow take us out of this black and white situation. However, that’s just an intuition and I’m not taking such things into account for now. Therefore, if I choose life, I should make something out of it too. Since there’s no God, the idea of punishment (imposed by a force situated outside of myself) doesn’t make sense either. There’s no right or wrong, there’s just choice. My own choice about the way I live and the things that I do. Should I start killing people? Well, I could, but what’s the point? They’ll die anyway sometime in the near future.
Nothing impresses me more during the month of February than a bunch of girls on a black stage with bells on their ankles jumping around, moving their hands rhythmically, accompanied by music so unfamiliar to my eastern European ear that I immediately give up categorizing and analyzing it and I accept it with all my heart and stomach. Not to mention that the girls (and boys too!) are wearing yellow and orange, red, green, purple and gold!
Menaka Thakkar’s show is all I needed to see these days in order to stop hating grey Toronto. After all these years, studying yoga, Eastern philosophy, Asian traditions, I am still too shocked when I attend such an authentic Indian event. Halfway through the show I get dizzy and I have a nauseous reaction. It’s similar to the feeling I had for the first year after I immigrated. Should I call it “cultural shock”? Can this happen to me as I’m watching a show? Well, it doesn’t matter what I call it, really, it’s important that I’m living it. Any reaction is better than no reaction at all.
Who are these people? They are dancers, all of them immigrants, mostly brown, performing a set of traditional Southern Indian dances. There’s a white girl dancing with them and I’m watching her trying to catch a glimpse of her non-Indian self. None! Maybe she’s just a white brown girl. I’ll never know, but it’s not essential.
Something else is essential – the feet hitting the floor, the eyes and face expressions, simple but incredibly sensual, the weight, present through all the moves, even through the fast, light ones and the directness of every gesture. I don’t know the meaning of all the expressions, gestures, mudras. I’m sure that even the brown people in the audience don’t know them all, but the performers surely do because I don’t smell a second of hesitation and believe me, I’m too critical when it comes to performance arts. Everything is done with purpose and has a clear meaning behind it.
Rhythm is also essential, which is still a mystery to me, since I will never be able to follow any rhythm, through movement, song or anything else. The repetition of beats arises such a reaction in me, as if I’m afraid of getting stuck in it for the rest of my life. Maybe that’s why I can never develop routine in my life. Or it could be just that I need a shrink.
What happens, though, when someone is exposed to such a performance without being prepared? I brought two friends with me who were completely ignorant of this art form. One of them kept asking me for the first fifteen minutes of if he can go now. After two hours and a half of dance and song, though, we were all dancing and singing too while waiting for the streetcar in -15 degrees weather.
I think that even though globalization is something we can’t fight against, traditional art should always be preserved. I’m convinced that if we refine traditional expressions from different cultures, if we work towards extracting the essential element of all these arts, keeping one gesture or an archetype, a symbol, eliminating thus all artifice, we will end up with things that look identical for all cultures. Even if the first reaction when encountering something new is an adverse one, a person who can be open (and by this I mean just watch, breathe and refrain from emitting harsh judgments) will surely smell the essence, the light reflected in the eye, the blood flowing in the veins, the flowers in the hair and will be awed by the beauty of all these.
It’s amazing how much resistance one can meet when breaking the rules in art. Even when the rules were made up a few centuries ago and were broken the same day they were established. Even if art is one of those fragile subjective areas where strict rules don’t bring anything good but build grey walls and hold back inspiration. Whenever someone mentions the word “artist” do you right away think of a tight-assed corporate employee wearing a suit and driving a…whatever-the-hell-these-guys-drive…? Hmm, I don’t think so. I rather imagine a man with a straw hat and lots of brushes in his hand, strolling through the fields in search for the perfect sun flower. You certainly recognized Mister Vincent Van Gogh. I might also think of the amazing Romanian tzambal (the Persian santur) player, Marius Mihalache and many actors, theatre and film makers but I’m not going there because that’s not what this post is about.
In Greek mythology, the nine muses are the ones who inspire the artists. However, I think the Greek gals should be changed from time to time since they hold their muse chairs for too long and they’re sort of…outdated. And I happen to also know who should get their place on Mount Olympus! I’m thinking, of course, of Rachel Brice and her Indigo crew! Whenever I see a video of these girls dancing I stop worrying about cancer, about the additives in food, about money and jobs and school and money again, about globalization and my identity crisis, about pollution, the technology and the distance that stole away our lives along with our ability to communicate. I start to love what’s happening with my life, with our lives, the good, easy stuff, but also the hardships because that’s what gives layers to life.
The way the Indigo girls dance – it’s all layered – Egyptian, cabaret, Syrian, Lebanese belly dancing, Persian, Indian, banjara, Flamenco, gipsy style, sometimes even hip hop, all sustained by yoga, Pilates and a lot of enthusiasm and good taste. Then all these new age mottos come to my mind:“love your body”, “always be open to change” blahblah.
I was complaining one day to a close friend of not being able to stick to something, a profession, for the rest of my life. She answered back, nonchalantly, that one should keep changing things, that we should have a whole rainbow of areas of interest at hand other than getting stuck doing one thing, like maniacs. Maniacs! That’s what we’ve become! What does specialization do for us? We are doctors in one area, but complete idiots in others.
Back to Tribal Fusion though, I get very upset when I hear such rash, uneducated judgments like “belly dancing is something degrading that belongs in the harem”, or “belly dancing is just performed for the pleasure of men”. Really? I thought that belly dancing, just like all the other dance forms and like all the art forms for that matter, are a form of expression, a way of getting closer to yourself. And what about that old Aristotelian “catharsis”, the ecstatic feeling that one reaches by watching art or by being involved in the making of it and that purifies and revitalizes the whole being? Is the owner of the harem the only one who can experience this “catharsis”? And if that was the general mentality at some point, in some remote city of the desert, should that still be the case now? Obviously not. But why do we still hear this kind of thinking? When will this hatred for the body end? Oh, Nietzsche, you would have really loved the Indigo girls…
“The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. (…) I want to speak to the despisers of the body. It is their respect that begets their contempt. What is it that created respect and contempt and worth and will? The creative self created respect and contempt; it created pleasure and pain. The creative body created the spirit as a hand for its will. Even in your folly and contempt, you despisers of the body, you serve yourself. I say unto you: your self itself wants to die and turns away from life. It is no longer capable of what it would do above all else: to create beyond itself. That is what it would do above all else, that is its fervent wish.
But now it is too late for it to do this. (…)And that is why you are angry with life and the earth. An unconscious envy speaks out of the squint-eyed glance of your contempt.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
