Impressions: “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Marie Chouinard

Near the beginning of Marie Chouinard’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” a playful and slightly sinister nymph (?) swallows a golden bell; at the performance’s end the audience is delighted with a display of magical peristalsis that ends with her proudly producing another golden bell from her, well, you can guess. This is a rare ballet where rather than simply observing, the audience must reconcile themselves to the idea of dance itself. No doubt other works aspire to this, whether as an explicit aim or a peripheral goal, but I have never felt it so poignantly as in Chouinard’s production.

The ballet is constructed in every aspect to call the viewer to self-reflection, shocking them from passive observation to a visceral and yet riveting sense of participation. While watching I found myself being addressed; I felt that as a member of the audience I was validated as a necessary aspect of the performance. I was part of a circuit whereby information coded in sound and movement was passed through me and back to the dancers. Nowhere was this more powerful as when Eurydice herself climbed up into the audience in a vain attempt to escape hell. Or perhaps she was making her return? Such reflections are commonplace in a production that seeks to destroy the linear and keep us cognizant of being part of a dynamic cycle.

Take the sounds for example. Relentless and merciless are two words which come to mind, and they are not expressed in the negative sense. The score is a cacophony of horns and explosive percussions. Shrill notes are looped to build tension and when we are finally granted a moment’s calm we feel as if it is because we have reached our limit to withstand it, at which point the process is begun anew. And when there are quiet moments, the whisper of the music is like a cold bracing wind tracing our naked backs. I was reminded of the fury and majesty of the tide riding a cliff-face.

To this backing the dancers are constantly vocalizing in a manner that many critics have called “gibberish.” While it is true that there is no “grammar” that can be applied to it and nothing as trite as a “sentence” that can be gleaned from it, this “speaking” is not meaningless. In fact, it signifies nothing more and nothing less than “body music.” Or the sounds that flow from the dancers’ movements as they gyrate, pulse, spasm, leap, twist, mug, hump, and crawl from one moment to the next. One of the ballet’s central motifs has individuals gesture as if pulling words from their gaping mouths; first slowly and then building with a desperate rapidity, tones are produced that are at times like a single utterance deconstructed, and at others like the contents of an entire speech raging into one moment.

There are in fact words and sentences in the normal sense, including a bare exposition of the Orpheus myth and a statement of Chouinard’s guiding interpretation of it. The former seems obligatory because the latter, presented later and wilfully distorted by its vocalizer, is drowned out by the flurry of music and movement on stage, which ironically serve the same function. The only words to ring clear were “Don’t look back!” That this charge is significant is taken for granted given the subject matter, but it is how Chouinard reveals it to be significant that is the most interesting.

Orpheus is the tutor of the muses, and by extension, the father of all poetry in the Western Tradition. We are told that his inspired eloquence was sufficient for Hades to sanction Eurydice’s conditional salvation, and yet Orpheus is treated as merely a foil. The iconic scene of his escape happens at the early middle and is the only part of the ballet that has a deliberate sense of plot or even temporal progression. He makes his grave escape with elegant and deliberate strides, his arm offered back to Eurydice who follows in like-manner; they are both silent while all around them are figures enacting maelstroms of movement. Some prance across the stage with serpents undulating from their lips. Another references Sisyphus and his boulder by rolling a black ball to and fro. Still others have joined their bodies to form monsters of many limbs and heads. While we seek to apply these images to the traditional iconography of the myth, we are dissuaded from doing so by the lack of any overtures to capital T Tradition whatsoever, let alone linearity. While at other times we are treated with what seem like androgynous satyrs high-heel-hoofed and swinging prodigious phalli, or Dionysian orgies complete with gilded nipples, what overshadow these details is the spectacle of movement itself.

This is a world without Orpheus and his songs, a place of action without artifice or construction. The sounds here are not affected by symbolism or even the weight of thought; they are simply and profoundly the primal yawps of our bodies. Every muscular burst of vibration rushes forth like echolocation, colliding with the audience, returning to the dancer, and triggering more vibrations. The emotions of fear, lust, and exultation are presented to us raw, and they proceed from one another like atoms colliding.

Combining her sounds with the choreography of her dancers, Chouinard has created a palette of textures so forceful and engaging that we are forced to either resonate with them or reject them. Either way, we have to swallow and process every vibration thrown towards us and, having taken them in, we reciprocate by being riveted. We don’t have time for anything but feeling; thinking constitutes a halt in the process. So who can blame the audience when the beautiful Eurydice, savagely treading theatre seats in her ascent, climbs past us and we are told not to “look back”? We resist but ultimately we join Orpheus in his transgression, so undeniable are the vibrations and the sensations they elicit.

By the time that shiny bell is reproduced, we have undergone an odyssey of our own. Marie Chouinard has chosen to focus on the journey itself. In our travels hell is wherever we happen to be going; somewhere we walk towards and back away from again. Chouinard doesn’t give us any time to consider good or bad because we are meant to be moving. Nor do we have any time to consider our “liking” of the production until we have left the echoes and the flushed atmosphere of the theatre behind. Whatever reactions are produced by the re-assertion of our rationality, we are left thrilled and aching with every fibre of our bodies.



J. J. Baylon

A Tree And A Song (The Point Of It All)

From White Darker Than White

This song was waiting for me for a long time. If memory serves, the first time I had heard it was during my winter vacation back in Canada. As is typical of my lifestyle back home, it was 4 in the morning and I was crouched on a chair at my desk, possibly eating chocolate. I played the song, noted it, and then quickly forgot it. Then today, in a cafe nestled safely within my remote village, an ocean away from that life, I sat at a table surrounded by other staff of my school, absorbed by my own musings while staring at the mountains. Rediscovering the song two days before, I had played the song repeatedly, not really knowing or even thinking of why; just revelling in the aesthetic pleasures of it.

Then, sitting in that cafe, the ghost of a cheesecake haunting the plate in front of me, people talking in muted tones around me, myself tracing the bare pines of the distant range, bare trunks coiling to spring into verdant blush, an image of startling clarity and simplicity flashed in my mind to the sound of this music. A tree. I couldn't say what type; more than the data required to make that judgment, this tree was an idea. And when such a poignant idea manifests, it transforms everything around it. If this song that I was hearing was the air around the tree, it was not like the air that usually surrounds us, or the air that surrounded my physical self at that moment. In that particular time and space, the physical air was like a solvent into which myself and the people around me were dissolved. The same air surrounded us and permeated our tissues, and yet could not draw us into the same reality, our forms being delineated by a common void, joined only by what separated us. No, that music was the air summoned by the tree to be its voice. The music was the tree and vice versa. Seeing that tree, and breathing that music, I was no longer in Japan.

I wasn't in a cafe in Shirawaka Village, but I also wasn't bounding over Mt. Haku to the sea and back home. One isn't spoken to by a tree and possessed by an urge to fly. If you are called by a tree to listen and to see, and you allow yourself to do so, you bear witness to another type of movement altogether. Not a linear movement from A to B, but a movement in stillness; a movement betrayed only by breathes building into hours into years into ages. This is why looking at the rings of a severed tree trunk, I feel both a sense of exaltation and sadness. Wrapped inseparably tight within those rings are the traces of countless lives, animal, plant, and human. To be able to see a tree that way, and to see life that way for that matter, is to stand outside of it. "Step back and see the big picture," we say. But to do that we have to step out of line, out of our place, out of the process, perhaps out of life. To see that tree, I had to leave behind those kind teachers sitting with me in that cafe.

The best love songs, like this one, embody that same dilemma. What do we want to hear in a love song? Better yet, if we could all sing one of our own, what would we say? When a poem is written or a song is sung, the colors and tones of our love are revealed. But to do that we have to step away from it. True loving is like living is like breathing: it is happening right now and if you pause even just to contemplate it you'll have necessarily separated yourself from it. If you try to take a snapshot of your child running, you have to sacrifice the immediacy of your own sight for the filter of the camera's, only to produce a facsimile of that feeling of simple joy. I find that becoming conscious of my own blinking is a sure sign that I have stopped living, at least in that dynamic sense. So to sing a love song means to be watching love from afar. And to be moved by a love song means to be swallowed by its absence. The most poignant love songs, the ones that push the tears to just behind your eyes, are the ones intoning of love lost. In a song, love is inseparable from heartbreak. Of course not explicitly, but tacitly, in the sense that if we were really loving at that moment then we wouldn't have the presence of mind to reflect upon it. Reflection implies a subjective separation. If loving is living, then sometimes thinking is dying.

So when I saw that tree and heard that song, I felt years passing. Anthony Hamilton's "The Point Of It All," has a strange nostalgic quality. It's like the projection of an old film reel. You can see the fluttering shutter of the light picking up particles from the air. The figures projected are not quite fluid, you can see the small increments where the process has bled life from a particular moment in time to make this reproduction. When a record is sped up, the first feeling you are aware of is the chaos and the chatter of the tempo being torn from its original state; however, there is rare moment when, amidst the speeding, the base rhythms and melodies meld to make a new composition. This song sounds like the record of so many lifetimes, the course of so many passions, the shine of so many hopes, all paradoxically sped up to create a slow deliberate pulsing. The dusty sonorance of the song's organ, as well as the soft trailing of the percussion, seem to embody this quality. And blended into this harmony are Hamilton's rich vocals, soaked in your parents' wisdom, the vigor of youth, and the love of generations. This is the soundtrack for the lifespan of our deepest, most intimate, and most simple truths.

Hearing the song in this way, I began to imagine the tree growing. To the muted undulations of the music, I watched the spare and insistent sprouts of a sapling grow into a capacious canopy, each increment of growth like the single frame of an old film. I began to think of all the trees in my life; I realized that at home, in Canada, a good house always has a tree, like its soul. I thought of the great willow tree I could see out of my sister's window in Marlborough Park. I thought of the young tree my grandparents planted in the backyard of their old house. I thought of all the trees whose lives I could not share because my own was too short. I thought of how the march of time had pushed me past those trees, leaving them only in my memories. Then I thought of how I yearned for the home of my heart, for my source. Of how this feeling was the spirit permeating the tree and song of my vision. I thought of the symmetry of roots and foliage. I imagined myself a single fibre woven into a resilient yet pliable brown pillar. I thought of my cousin's child Kingston, just born and the first of my generation of my family. I thought of my Grandparents, upon whom I heap all of my praises, of my Mother, my Father, my Sister, my Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, my Friends. Speaking of this vision, I have only this to say: The point of it all is I Love You.

J. J. Baylon

Eyes Behind Blinds

images by M. Erickson words by J. J. Baylon

From White Darker Than White

*huifff! I draw in to cast.

In the vacuum I see you.

A seeping reality blooms cataract white in short bursts and I shift to see you still catch you.

I’ve got you.

I like the lines.

I take those first.

They bleed into iceblue flesh frosting pink swell to black holes to tallow yellow brown bruises red wounds.

So angry then grey.

Then lines.

Only 36ths of so many circles.

Swirling deferral.

Chatter screaming pinned to black.

Two. Black. Pins.

You. Look at me. Now.

From White Darker Than White

Well. 1. Look. 2. At. 3. You.

1. You’ve got a lot in the pot and you’re stirring it just right. I’m looking over your shoulder, the waft hits my face. No need for talking; I’m ready to eat. Pop the top button, shirt and pants. Lick my lips.

2. Huh. I wasn’t looking for you but there you are. Nice pants. Right shoes. Good gait… Ahem. Oh look a tree! The tree is green… Hey there you are again. I like the crook of your arm. You’re not holding anything but there it is, marking a shape. You’re so casual; I hope you’re not affecting it. Hey a penny… Oh there you are. Well, now you’re here and there. Does that lock bother you? Sure, tuck it behind your ear. A little tickle where the lapel brushes your neck? Hey my watch. It’s time to breathe…

3. Hey! Stop flashing those sparklers over here. I’m trying to read… Gimme a break, okay? I can’t get past this sentence. I’m all over the place… Wow. Okay, you’re serious. There’s a whole quadrant, a whole hemisphere I can’t look at now. Too bright. Colors bleeding. What do you want? You want me to 3, 2, 1?

From White Darker Than White

I can't look at you right now. "Show me your eyes," she says. "Later," he says. "Now. Now." "No!" - Mos Def A Soldier's Dream

I was thinking about looking, looking at, looking for, looking in, looking out, overlooking, looking and not looking, looking while not looking, looking at everything while looking at nothing, looking at "you"and not at"you," wanting "you" and not wanting to want "you"... hey what happened to"looking"? I guess this means it's time to sleep. Eyes closed but no respite. Eyes wide... Damn it all Kubrick!

a dream

The following is a transcription of a transcription taken on February 6th at 9:18am. It was written as a message to two friends of mine. It is now 3:30pm on February 19th. Some details of the dream have mysteriously altered since that first morning (memory is a fickle mistress haha). At any rate, I think this conveys how I felt about the experience sortly after. Enjoy:

aaaaaah my pets. its day two of a strange level of mental activity... hmmm its not activity... its more like a state of tension.... like violin strings vibrating on a single piercing yet beautiful chord. so. last night i had the most interesting sleep in recent memory. it was as if it i had entered a state of restful bliss and contentment while maintaining a state of neutral consciousness... or a state of unconscious clarity. needless to say i had many dreams. but the one im going to describe to you happened right before i "woke" up which means that it was the most intense and also the most memorable. but anyways, for some reason i was in a luxury high rise apartment owned and maintained by my cousin's family. but actually said cousin is not important to the story as much as his dad is. in fact, his dad is not that important either: his brother is (but in reality he doesnt have a brother, its a dream you see). sooooo, all of sudden my girlfriend in this dream is lee's pseudo-cousin carmela. she's standing behind me, wrapping her arms tenderly around my waist. and sitting on the couch are my uncle (in a sort of patrician head of the household kind of pose), and beside him is his slightly younger brother who is not gay (he is perhaps carmela's father in the dream... actually no b/c she refers to him as uncle so and so)... well anyways he is not gay but he is one of those incredibly funny, charismatic, goofy uncles who are the only reason a person bothers attending family functions at all. so anyways, he is sitting there beside his stern brother with a kind of benign slightly mischievous look on his face, and then carmela (all the while embracing me ever so tenderly) tells this super hilarious anecdote about said funny uncle and how he has a habit of crouching into a cartoon-farting position and secreting a pheromone from a pouch on his posterior that makes everyone love him. then as soon as she's done telling him, said uncle does that same action with the most comical look on his face and it is the most pleasant and funny dream i have ever had and i felt i had to share it with the two of you cuz i love you mutherfuckers and i more than likely am in love with your "cousin" carmela, no offense to her charming boyfriend who i met a few times. okay, ive got to teach class now. this took me all of 7 mins to write train-o-thought style, can you tell??


Hmmmm, I confess to feeling a little bit _______ about having put that down. My brain is interpreting this feeling and offering up the word "guilty" to insert into this blank. However, from experience I believe "guilt" is the singular repository for a whole range of emotions and colors, as if instead of a pot o' gold there was a mouldy dustbin waiting at the end of the rainbow. Not that there isn't a lot of toxic sludge that is rightfully deposited into the concept "guilt"... Okay so a rainbow and a septic spew hole terminate in the same metaphorical dustbin. Shutup. Anyways, much that is indicative of the richness of human experience gets forced into a rancid pool to be tainted first and then to contribute to that same taint second. It's really quite ridiculous because just last week I was revelling in the idea of this moment. Because really, what is a good dream?

A good dream is teasing your eyes to the edge where the world drops away into blue and each step feeds a tightness in your chest and your breath becomes shallow and your soul coils to spring and then with an titanic leap you are ripped from yourself your consciousness trailing behind you and your body screams with a clear vibrating tension to explode into true sensation, true depth, true color...

Right? I feel so damn clean to say it, like that first shower after my hair has been freshly shaved. So obviously "guilt" (for lack of a better term) has no place in the above, right? That leaves me to believe that it comes from the act of expressing, itself...

(4:30 pm) After sitting on this for a while, here's what's hatched. You know that important decision you have to make whenever you leap? You know, "leap or don't leap"? Don't you find that especially when your body is committed another little part of yourself sometimes tries to halt that decision the instant before your feet separate from the ground? Every one's done it. Some people have even ended up as mangled pulpy masses massaged frothy red by the waves after doing it. But maybe the physics of expression are not quite as brutal. So rather than bloodying your forehead and scraping your leg, you are suspended. (11:00 pm on February 20th) As if time stops at the moment where you have violated every equilibrium maintaining mechanism in your body, the point where the delicate illusion of the "You Who Can Stand" lays broken at your awkward feet. The sneaky way that it makes you aware of your mortality is subtle, embarrassing and disturbing, like Death flicking you on the forehead.

Just like tripping is a matter of timing, maybe my "guilt" over expressing my dream is a temporal matter. Perhaps I waited too long to "put it out there," so to speak, and as a result I'm floating in the air staring at the safe ground on one side, and the dark swirling waters of possibility on the other hand. Two things come to mind. Firstly, if you strip my metaphor of its trappings and distill its essence what you get is something like a night terror I used to have as a child. I'm not talking "nightmare," I'm talking terror. I used to hallucinate that I was standing upside down staring into an unfathomable blackness. I would have to be forcibly woken up, only to find myself standing in a familiar room made foreign, weeping uncontrollably. The way that the night terror constituted a gross violation of my reality is similar to the whole tripping thing, if only on vastly different scale. The second thing is something that the vice principal of one of my elementary schools said to me today. In a deft but joking way he commented on my characteristic tardiness; not in a nagging mom kind of way, but in a way that summoned me to a moment of self consciousness. I know that I am always late and blahblahblah but something about the way he said it made me feel like I was seeing myself for the first time. So now I am left wondering where I would rather be. Should I stand on the cliff and muse passively about possibilities? Or should I throw myself into the kaleidoscopic maelstrom, abandoning all self-possession for the promise of a pure sensation? But of course there is a third option that I find myself drawn to; so much so that in writing this I have obscured my original purpose of talking about a dream, in order to talk about talking about a dream. Should I be terrified or reverent that the abyss and what it could represent sends tremors through me less and less?

J. J. Baylon

walkman

Generally speaking, there are three types of walking that I do. The first is the simplest: it’s the type of walking that people do when they’ve been forced from sweet languid repose to totter atop two stilts in order to… I dunno… shoo the cat away from table scraps you’ve been avoiding clearing up since dinner or… to fetch the crossword puzzle from the newspaper so you have something to occupy you during commercials. Yes, I’m sure other “people” do that too. The second is more intent-driven and often involves moments when I’ve calculated that I don’t have to run but it would serve to stride. A good stride is deliberately calibrated to convey purpose but not undue haste and is very useful in the workplace. Try using it the next time you walk over to the stationary cabinet to replace the red pen that you’ve lost about a million times; you are guaranteed to draw at least half as many un­-glares from Mrs. O who orders the supplies (*note: an un-glare is when a person makes a conscious effort not to spit their distaste at you. It is usually characterized by dilated pupils frozen into a stiff gaze, and the subtlest increase in brow tension.) Personally, I often use this walk when I’m compelled to go against the stream of fellow mall-shoppers to tap the shoulder of a friend. Conversely, I use this walk when I’ve noticed that another person is coming my way for the exact same reason but I can’t be bothered to dispense with the whole vanilla-faced small talk. Despite their necessity, these previous two don’t really hold any charm for me.

The third type is what I want to talk about. Think about any time that you’ve been compelled to walk. I mean that if you didn’t get up, get out, and strike the pavement it would constitute a primal, unspeakable loss… As if your very being, situated in that exact time and space, would be nullified. Sure, you could sleep that night and wake up the next day fine, but that one lost opportunity would be like a void in the universal continuity… I get wound up a lot. I think that runners must build up a store of energy that they channel into a sustained release; the reason for doing this no doubt being the precious endorphins reaped. I also suspect that some people I know walk when they are angry or frustrated; they rush violently against the air hoping that the pain will wick away from them like the tongues of a dying flame. I don’t mean that they are flying madly through the streets cursing the world. I mean that if you could open that oft mentioned third eye of yours, you would see that their soul would be clinging to them like the ragged pinions of a flag buffeted and torn by a terrible wind. I get wound up in a different way. It almost invariably happens at night. And unlike the previous examples, it is a reaction to an absence. I mean that it’s not something that I store like joules in muscle tissue or swallowed disappointments. I’m risking asymptotic insanity to try and describe it but, well… Let’s say I’m like one of those old grandfather clocks. Except that it’s the hand of absence that turns the crank (does absence have hands?). So I am stalking about my apartment probably searching for a missing book that I’ve been telling myself I want to read; I don’t actually intend to start reading it but it just wouldn’t do for it to be lost; and in the midst of this train of thought I catch the mere suggestion of a girl’s voice outside of my window and I stop. And the crank clicks. Or I am eating my favorite Japanese curry and watching the Cosby Show; all of a sudden the flavor is stricken from the last bite I took, simply from savoring it too much. I can taste it but it’s like all the joy has been emptied from it. Click. Or I am skyping my best friend over the internet; I can understand everything he says but the occasional flutter in the line’s integrity pokes little holes in the sound. Click.

The clicks accumulate imperceptibly and then one night, when the intrusive ripples of the day die down and I’m left treading the silent black waters of my singularity, a ring is sounded. Not loudly, but resolutely. Then I go upstairs and put on some jeans, a white collared shirt or a hoodie, my black brushed wool pea, and a cap. I go downstairs and slip on some comfy loafs, adjust my earphones, and upon stepping out into the cool clarity of the night air, I press play.

At first my steps are over anxious. Then the beat disciplines me. A good drum cadence reflects a harmony of movement and your legs tell you what that is. The base rhythms determine the gait. The little syncopations, brushes, and stutters provide momentum. And a throbbing bass-line provides context, like trees rushing past your car window to show you how fast you’re going. Lastly, the melodic layers hold your consciousness to the process. You are walking, and from the dead ticker-tape transcriptions that were your thoughts burst images of perfect color, intensity and proportion. The whole thing could last fifteen minutes or hours, but you are never released from your reverie to be conscious of it until it’s over. And while your face picks up oranges from the street lights and the glow of windows you feel strange and lonely and beautiful, like you are stepping through people’s dreams…

(ps. maybe I'm listening to this:

J. J. Baylon

let me just say something

Let me just say something.
PRESS. Words are too heavy.
An elegant prison. In levity. A bleak chaos when you’re weak.
When I’m not around, words fly staright straight, find their mark, the sweet rosy flush of significance, pinprickedfingertip.
Myself: milk a stone.
There’s no where known I want to go there’s nowhere new to go.
Stack your thoughts and stand on them; you still can’t touch nothing.
Fingers make the table real- lick your finger to make even the air real to touch-
the void retreats away from you.
My singularity expands limitlessly but my density is constant.
The weight. The PRESS.
And across the table across the page, always the prospect of a bridge to escape. Stop.

Weight comes from revision.
We build our minds backwards, always. the moment’s malaise bleeds and trickles over the detritus, a current carving a landscape, spreading and lengthening and voila: “I’m alone because I played alone as a child…]
The moment is a selfish glutton; it greedily consumes its predecessors and gnaws incessantly on the past. The Old Lady who swallowed a fly, well you know what happened to her.
[…or because my cord was cut a millimeter too close to my root meridian, or because my parents married too early, or because conquistadors and the conquered shouldn’t have fucked, or because of the consolidation of power in bronze age chiefdoms, or because one person was fine with depriving the world of another person, or…” Stop.
Short of blasphemy.

The ones before don’t mean anything read aloud. Maybe they are the transcriptions of my thoughts. But that’s a lie because they have been edited. How much you ask? I never ask myself that, I simply edit. What use is all of this? Just to say something?
Stop. This moment’s eaten too much.

Jordan Baylon (March 22, 2007)

(My name is Jordan James Baylon. The “James” is not really important; it’s not even an honorific like an officer’s stripes. I wrote that yesterday… since then I have deteriorated somewhat. I feel as though… my reality is merely composed of vibrations of different intensity. As my soul moves it stirs the vacuum and shapes emerge. When I stop moving, everything dissolves into absolution. Absolute darkness or absolute light; they are the same. As I sit, I stare into the absence of contrast and wait for black-lighter-than-black or white-darker-than-white, so I will know that my steps are steps. How to move again? How to speak anything that signifies?…)

Movement & Speech.