BEATRIZ ALCAINE'S LA LUNA VISION

Gaudi's Casa Batlló

On a recent trip to Europe, I stopped in Madrid to catch up with my former student, Sonia Megias, a marvelous original poet of musical composition, whose scores are often a feast for the eyes as well as a festival of sound. She was a marvelous host, introducing me to the joys and madness of Madrid. I had mentioned I would like to take a day trip to Barcelona, and she accompanied me on the high-speed train connecting the two cities. The wonders of Barcelona were overwhelming, and my experience in roaming through the home Casa Batlló built by the architect and artist Antoni Gaudi is worth a separate description in a later entry. But after a scenic ride through Barcelona that was being whipped by severe wind gusts, we managed to end up at Gaudi's masterpiece, and Sonia had arranged for us to meet her friend, Beatriz, after we finished touring the house---a magnificent home built without blueprints, just Gaudi on the scene, directing everything to be sculpted and handmade on the spot. It was under the intoxication of this tour, that I met Beatriz, who was waiting for us outside the Gaudi House. It has started to rain lightly, so we ran to a nearby bar with outside seating and the cover of umbrellas. We managed to order drinks and a few small dishes, but the weather became more intense, and we finally sought refuge in a taxi that took us to a small coffee place Beatriz knew that was near the Train Station.

Beatriz, John, & Sonia at Train Station in Barcelona

Our conversation was magical, and I saw why Sonia had wanted us to meet. Beatriz was thinking about starting a business connected to wellness and well-being, and I told her of Jeju Island, where I had lived for awhile. 5000 years ago, the first Emperor of China sent an emissary, Seobul,  to Jeju in search of plants and animals that might provide the means to health and immortality. Seobul spend many years there, and found all manner of natural elements and plants to improve and extend life, and promote the general well-being of a people. I lived at the foot of a sacred mountain, Sanbangsan, and I could feel the spiritual energy emanating from that area.  This was the area where Seobul lived and pursued his research. I had thought of Jeju as being a home for an Institute for Arts Collaboration that sought to promote wellness and well-being.

Soon, it became time to catch the last train to Madrid. Beatriz was leaving also for a town nearby Barcelona. The rain stopped briefly, enough for us to hurry to our train, which returned to Madrid, arriving around 1 a.m.

During the train ride, I reflected on our conversation.  I learned that Beatriz had come to Spain from El Salvadore, where she had run a cafe, a hangout for artists and literati, La Luna Casa y Arte. This had become a haven for cultural and political exchange and collaboration.  Even then, I was planning a newsletter, and I was determined to learn more about Beariz's adventure and why it came to an end. But perhaps more importantly, the creative vortex of events that led to the establishment of this movement needed to be better known.

Caught up in crime and  events of San Salvador, Beatriz Alcaine's family lived in exile in Mexico, but in 1983, as she, at age 17, along with her younger sister, Isabel Cristina, visited their Grandmother, they were kidnapped by the government and brutally tortured. This became an international incident and the U.S. Government intervened to secure their release, but not without difficulty. Even today, El Salvador continues to be in the news, being the source of violent MS-13 Gangs nested in various locales in the United States committing violence and selling drugs. It was the renewal of violence that finally led to the closing of La Luna Casa y Arte in 2012 and escaping to Spain.

From 1979 to 1991, civil war raged in El Salvador. This was a time of extreme violence and devastation in El Salvador, and the young poet, Carolyn Forché had come to this country caught in the glare political controversy in the United States. Leonel Gómez Vides drove all the way from there, with his two daughters, to Forché's home in California.   Forché had not known Gómez, but he was a cousin of Claribel Alegría, a Salvadorian poet exiled in Spain, whose work Forché, had been translating, and whom she had visited in Mallorca.

In 1978, Forché traveled to El Salvadore on a Guggenheim Fellowship. She stayed in El Salvador with Beatriz's mother. From her experiences in the shattering miasma of cruelty and dismemberment, Forché published The Country Between Us in 1981, a powerful publication became that rarity: a book of poems that becomes a bestseller. These poems chronicle her experience in El Salvador and reinforce the conversation with Gómez when after describing the desperate situation of his country, Forché suggested he should get a journalist, someone with training to deal with the complexities of the country. He replied he wanted a poet.

Beatriz and her sister had been held hostage and tortured by the Salvadorian government. They were lucky to be released alive when the U.S. Government intervened. But what happen to Beatriz and her sister was an example of violence erupting as Gómez had prophesied to Forché "War is coming," and Forché recounts these epic moments in her recent book What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press, 2019.)
For a dozen years violence raged in the war that caused the flight of so many people, caught in the rage and cruelty of warring factions. It may be difficult to understand the depth of despair that prevailed, but this was countered by a sense of hope as exiles returned to El Salvadore, among them, Beatriz Alcain who had studied in France and had a rich history of performance and pursuit of the arts.
Bea, as she is known to all her friends, was searching for a way to establish a positive force for the arts. She had no money as family funds had been depleted by 12 years of civil war. When she returned to her country after the war, she had only the legacy of her family home, and the germ of an idea to create and establish a place for artists and musicians to renew their country through  collaboration to express a new era of creativity and freedom. It is only from the perspective of the sheer desperation of a country depleted of its resources, energy, and vision, that we can understand the emergence of a cultural phenomenon such as La Luna Casa y Arte.

Bea recalls:

With the advent of peace in El Salvador,  many exiles returned. One afternoon I was sitting all by myself in that house...and suddenly I had this daydream...I could see a piano...and then I could feel the music all over the house, and saw colors on the wall...and....yes... That is what I have to do... I ran to my friend, an architect, and a writer friend... it should be an enterprise... created with a multi-talent teamed ...a Composer came,  and a Photographer, and a Ballet Dancer who worked with women... and a Painter... they were from the right or left...but we gathered people from both sides... it was like many circles all interlocked.... these students became the artists ...we started with $7000 and I donated the house.... and then we continued for 21 years....

There was cultural arts fair planned, and we wanted to open during this fair... we created a temporary space... incredible space and recruited everyone.... a lot of people... started with a stamp of a new address... a very organic place... started as a cultural space at first. La Luna....feminine energies for San Salvador also... funny place to go...to go to the Moon......we were not the center...we were on the outside... we apparently were not cultural enough because the arts fair excluded La Luna House and Arts... our open space through time and imagination...

Many spaces for dance, music, workshops for kids... a bar and a kitchen...First night instead of the 40 expected, we were overwhelmed with more than 250....different ideologies meeting... it became a place of reconciliation and respect.... 21 years it lasted... we never received funds... we did it on our own.

We began the adventure of La Luna Casa y Arte in 1991.  It was a meeting ground of not only artists, writers and musicians of El Salvador, but also artists from around the world often visited and contributed to the cultural scene.  It was a time of hope and fulfillment. But after two decades, El Salvador slid back into the despair of a new tyranny of gang violence. 

In 2012, El Salvadore experienced widespread violence through highly organized gangs, and it was no longer safe for Beatriz to remain in the country as women were often the target of violence. She knew it was time to leave.

Beatriz carefully timed the closing of  La Luna Casa y Arte to coincide with the ending of the Mayan Calendar... December 21, 2012 completing a cycle of creativity, consilience and reconciliation unparalleled in the history of El Salvador, and special for all those who created and participated in that moment in time. 

MUSIVERSAL CEO ANDRÉ MIRANDA ANNOUNCES NEW INITIATIVE

CEO André Miranda has announced that Musiversal is developing a new platform that will be released on June 1st featuring a completely new branding and a much wider set of services beyond orchestra recording sessions. This is the next step as a managed marketplace and will allow music creators to hire and collaborate live with some of the best musicians, music producers and engineers.

staff at musiversal

Musiversal has curated and signed some of the top talent in LA and in other cities around the world and is opting for quality instead of quantity, a completely different strategy from other music production marketplaces. Coincidentally, Musiversal's 1-on-1 sessions were being developed before COVID and they are set up to be performed live over a zoom-call-type from the artist's home studio. The pandemic situation makes this solution particularly relevant now at this time where musicians jobs are being affects and new remote solutions are necessary. Musiversal also prides itself in its business model that aims to pay fairly to musicians while its shared session model makes prices for the consumer much more affordable than other alternatives.
 ________________________________________________________________________________

André in EXPANDED MUSIC

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

My relationship with André Miranda developed when he was in my experimental class at NYU.

It was my great fortune, a few years ago, to have had André Miranda in my newly revived EXPANDED MUSIC, an experimental class in movement, media, and collaboration using new technologies. The class focused on improvisation and Internet2 interactive performance ...we developed material through collaboration and improvisation to share scenes with Quilmes University in Argentina. This had been the first class I taught at New York University in 1969, and it had been especially created to integrate new technologies and media in the creating and production of music. It was revived in 2012 to explore new techniques and media.

As I began my new business of ARC ASSOCIATES, I planned to visit my former students in their countries as I hoped to network with their work as we sought to support Arts Collaboration initiatives on a global scale.


Among the first of NYU Alumni that I visited was André as I returned from a celebration of Human Rights Day with Sandro Dernini in Rome. I was delighted when André indicated he was at home in Lisbon and would welcome my visit. I had longed to return to Portugal where I had performed a multimedia festival with Colleagues in Porto.
But I was especially enthusiastic about reconnecting with André, since from the first day I met him, I was impressed and excited about his new ideas for the business of music. His enthusiasm and passion for pursuing innovative ideas for music business was a catalyst for my own thinking as I retired from NYU,  and started to work on building a network in international collaborative media artists.

André proved to be the perfect host, taking me to lunch and then tour the world famous MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology).

Located in Lisbon beside the Targus River, MAAT's iconic structure defines the essence of what it curates for the 21st century, bringing together philosophy and architecture (a stunning installation of Wittgenstein, for example, while I was there), and rooms of old technology as objects of history and art, to the ecology of waste and its impact on our oceans... I can't think of any museum in the United States that provides as wide a range of converging disciplines as what I saw at MAAT---Lisbon should be proud.

FINDING THE FLOW...

POET'S PASSAGE Home Page

As I found structure to my process through enacting a way of dealing with Time, I discovered openings to old, abandoned passages of creative energy. It was a little like finding an old site on the Internet that I had forgotten about: POET'S PASSAGE. This is similar to other websites I created early in the days of the Internet as we entered a new century. It was designed so that  "travelers" would find their own paths by clicking on moving objects entering and leaving the site. I remember another based on Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I couldn't find it, even though it might exist somewhere in cyberspace. And I think there was another site for a small group of students in IMPACT, who happened to be in my mentoring group on text and texting, but several computer crashes and disastrous data transfers have obliterated the location of this site that was secretly posted during one summer of IMPACT around 2014. Years passed, and I forgot these experiments. Stumbling on this old, unvisited site, reminded me of past noticings that found articulation in some past fabrication that was squirreled away in the labyrinth of time.

As I faced the dilemma of this Pandemic 2020 Lockdown, I was shackled by the debris of unfinished projects and creative ideas that had receded into the realm of the forgotten.  A number of elements had a numbing effect on my perspective:  the spontaneity of the past, and the immediacy of the moment were now tattered remnants of consciousness. My conscious awareness pursued expansion through the act of noticing. Our personal NOTICING is the singular dimension that we bring to the world through what we see, touch, feel, think and experience. Sharing our noticing contributes to the quality and quantity of the reality of the world. We share by creating. In the labyrinth of time we posit our awareness of our noticing.

Thus, we are all poets of the world's reality.  My personal experience is etched in the permanence of reality when I create a poem to disclose my singular noticing of a moment walking in a New England forest:

Sunlight, breaking through the leaves,

Spikes brilliant shafts into the ground,

Shimmering, transparent spires

Of some invisible kingdom.

Silence slips through the trees

Masquerading as the wind;

Imitating eloquent Eternity,

The shade, riddled by the light,

Accommodates a galaxy,

Enduring one silent moment

Some brief, forgotten day.

The COVID-19 crisis awakened within me an inner impasse of spiritual struggle. So many things, so many works, so many opportunities had vanished in the wake of my own inertia. This personal blockage had begun early on, well before the crisis of the Pandemic. In fact, my colleague's March visit for a project in Lived Experience as Research, was an attempt to revive creative energies that at one time seemed inexhaustible. Connecting with the Flow, seemed elusive, blocked by impediments of bewilderment and detachment.

I remember when I was about five-years old, sitting in the hallway, secretly listening to my sister, who was nine years older than me, as she played through works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in an impressive display of mastery and understanding. Later, when no one was around, I would find my way to the keyboard to improvise in the moment. I couldn't read music, but I felt the flow of music that emerged as sound from my fingers on the keys. From that time on, I could improvise endlessly, but also had a gift for remembering those improvisations.

Flow was brought to our attention through the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1996, as an optimal psychological state emerging when deeply engrossed in an challenging activity  through immersion as concentrated focus on a task. This was something I was experiencing in 1941.

I bring attention to this, because today as I listened to a Rachmaninoff piece: Moments Musicaux Op.16 No.3., I went to the piano and improvised. Rachmoninoff's work had a special quality of a dissonant suspension which resolved upward, and inspired by that, I improvised a prelude based on a song I had composed a few years ago, but never wrote down.  It had that same kind of suspension with upward resolution.

Within the crisis of this pandemic, I open to new awareness, to a new sense of Flow where the moment connects with energies I thought were lost. I pick up the loose ends of projects abandoned from fears instilled that it is too late for me... the stories vacated... the lyrics of librettos and plays forsaken... I feel them flowing in a moment of marvelous mingling of miracles.

BEING ON TIME

Ultimately, we come face to face with Time, as I have explored in earlier Blogs: IT'S ABOUT TIME. Having been devastated by the effects of the Pandemic COV-19 Lockdown, I know I needed to find a way of of my depression and despair.  Symbolically, I linked my dilemma to a song THE WAY, by Neil Diamond. His songs often reflect his quest to find his identity in someone else, even though ultimately this ideal is about being true and honest with ourselves.  As I listen to this song, I was struck by its structure, each verse reaching a new plateau of insight and realization, then regrouping and continuing to reach new plateaus... finally culminating in "I need to find, I need to find, I need to find The way..."

Neil Diamond: The Way

NEIL DIAMOND: THE WAY
Even as I write this, I am guided by the structure of this song, which is a remarkable achievement in linking the sense of being on a quest and arriving at deliberate destinations along this journey. The essence of the song is the feeling of a solid underlying structure that becomes more and more profound as the foundation of the structure is established through tonal destinations. . The music and lyrics lead to different plateaus of awareness, establishing  a moment when there are no words, only the plaintiff guitar solo--- then resuming the journey, the quest for identity, for reaching for the next level of inquiry... and in the end finding a renewed dedication. The Way always leads to new destinations of awareness. As in life, the Quest is never fully resolved, as we continue to find our way through life.

Neil Diamond I AM I SAID

Inspired by this Bard from New York who began his career hawking his songs to publishers and artists in the famous Brill Building in NYC located at 1619 Broadway at 49th Street, I was inspired that maybe we had crossed paths because the Brill Building was where the printers were for printing scores prepared on onion skin. Many times, while at Columbia, I would go to the Brill Building to have score of songs and shows and operas printed. I remember the cacophony of songs spilling into the hallways from producers, publishers, and sometimes famous performers in search of new material. I think of this modern day troubadour, coming from his humble beginnings (Brooklyn Roads) to extraordinary fame (I AM... I SAID).  Contrast the contemplative performance after a long career (linked here) to his performance 40 years ago at a live concert in 1971 (I am I Said 1971)... as he became an icon for a generation---an extraordinary journey.

BEING AND TIME (Heiddeger's famous inquiry) has always been central to my own inquiry, but now, after my own ontological inquiry, it comes down to the practical structuring of time that can bring me into a new relationship with myself and Time. As I noted in earlier Blogs, I researched how various artists and innovators scheduled their day.

BEING ON TIME: After reflecting on my situation and need to notice and structure time so that it became the conduit for creating quality, responding to the Qualia existing only within our conscious awareness, I found a structure that inspired me while organizing my creative energy productively.

I am now into the second week of implementing this new schedule, and by strictly following this new schedule, I have broken free from the miasma of this government-imposed LOCKDOWN, and have produced more new work in a week than in the past two months.  I won't go into the details of the RITUAL, but I am indebted to Twyla Tharp for her suggestion that a Ritual establishes a context for the whole day.  Each day begins with a renewal. Each of us establishes our own ritual for starting the day, even if informally, such as the first cup of coffee, or thinking reflectively, or working out. My own Ritual is evolving. The above schedule is for my work day, Monday through Friday. The weekend is entirely free, more open-ended.

This most practical outcome of this new schedule is that I focus on Being On Time, each part of the schedule is like the various plateaus attained in Neil Diamond's song THE WAY. And like the song, there is no ending, only the ongoing quest for discovery, for uncovering emerging reality as the experience of growing awareness, articulated in concrete outcomes.

In the midst of establishing a business website, I created a dummy website that serves to illustrate the structure and process of the new site so that web developers would have a guide to how ARTS RENAISSANCE COLLABORATIVE might evolve in this brave post pandemic new world. For a glimpse of this dummy website, you can visit ARC, Arts Renaissance Collective at least temporarily, until the real thing comes along.

I am still discovering MY WAY. Somewhere there's a new song inside of me making its new way to the surface.

IT'S ABOUT TIME

Faced with dilemma of my despair and confusion in the midst of a government imposed lockdown without any referendum of its people, I felt I was powerless to control my destiny. The COV-19 Pandemic establishment, fueled by the pied piper of the CDC, had determined that all I had worked for during my lifetime, and all that I was currently engaged in, was not worthwhile in light of a new virus launched by surprise on an unsuspecting global population.

As I fought through the brain fog of isolation and shutdown, I began to understand that I was allowing myself to be victimized by the circumstances of confinement. I needed to find my way out of this pandemic maze that had totally shredded the mechanisms of routines in my life that had imbued each day with structure and purpose.

Everything seemed to collapse and merge to the problem, (blackhole) of TIME.

Ah, Time...the dilemma of life, of science, of the universe...the focus of Einstein... the relativity of the absolute. Hadn't I always grappled with this... remembering my attraction to and obsession with Martin Heiddeger's BEING AND TIME?
Remembering my romance with phenomenology and ontology, that began when I went to NYU after completing my doctorate at Columbia. That romance began because of an encounter with my colleague in the Art Department, David Ecker, an astonishing phenomenologist who, at first seemed to be talking nonsense, when suddenly heuncovered the landmines of objective reality---and he was opening a new world of wonderment, clear vision and understanding of method. Later, I stumbled across Heidegger's TIME AND BEING, written near the end of his career as an experiment in philosophy and education.

Ecker focused on the process of the phenomenological method, using language as a tool of inquiry to uncover layers of meaning.  While I had read of Heidegger in my philosophy studies, I had not fully understood phenomenological use of language as a tool of inquiry, moving through layers of meaning from phenomenological description to meta-critical observations and conclusions. So as I came across Heidegger's reversal in the twilight of his career: On Time and Being, I was delighted that this was drawn from lectures for a select group of students in which he declares that he has no idea what his lectures will be about, but that they will discover the content of the lectures as it emerges from the class as a platform for inquiry.  I identified with this approach as it has been foundational to my classes and workshops.

As much as what I am writing here might seem a diversion from focusing on my dilemma of the COV-19 shutdown, it is extremely on point.

My own dilemma within the context of the COV-19 lockdown was that I was paralyzed from the shock of isolation and the tangible cultural support that had served as a source of inspiration. The cultural context had served to structure my time as well as define the strategies I needed in order to create new work. You may object by pointing out the vast cultural resources of the Internet. But the energy is different. In the screen before me, I sometimes seem to be staring back at myself.

I realized that I needed to rethink Time in the context of the lockdown. The idea of the schedules of artists and scientists (creators of new knowledge) has long been of interest of researchers. For example, Beethoven's regimine was as follows:

His approach was very disciplined. At breakfast he counted the number of beans for coffee: exactly 60 were needed to make the perfect cup. The breakout came at 4:45 p.m. when he would take long walks while sketching out ideas.

Mozart's schedule was somewhat more frenetic:

Mozart had to build his creative life around employment to serve as the musician and teacher of the court and attend to music for various occasions, some very formidable in terms of large scale music events for which he composed music and led ensembles from the keyboard.

In my teens, I strongly identified with Mozart (I composed a safety opera in the fourth grade), as well as George Gershwin, who fulfilled my fantasies of New York. Both died at 35 years of age, and I based most of my life on the assumption that I would also die at that age. For that reason, I never planned to retire.

Looking at the schedules of creative people led me to research Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, an impressive collection of how creative and innovative people structured their daily routines... great bedside reading. Then I came across a reflection on the creative process by the noted choreographer
Twyla Tharp, THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn It and Use It for Life. In this book she stressed the importance of beginning with Ritual, and her discussion of how it set the tone for the day deeply impressed me.

I realized that within the isolation of this Pandemic Shutdown, I needed to find my own way out by discovering a regimen that would help me out of the despair that was weighing me down. I loved the circle graph that defined Mozart's schedule. As I read the lives of various innovators, I started to imagine how my day should be structured. The circle graph connects to the earth, to time, to the face of a clock.

So now began my quest to find a way out of my depression by discovering how to re-imagine my typical day. I also realized that this structuring of Time was a dimension of Being. I recalled the improvisations of our class EXPANDED MUSIC that explored Time, Manifestation, and Being through open-ended improvisations in THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYHOUSE. Somehow this Pandemic was opening the pathway to energies of the past that now populate the present.

PANDEMIC PANIC: A VICTIM OF LOCKDOWN

After a whirwind of two days, drenching ourselves with the artistic energy of New York City, Lisa Naugle returned to California on March 10, as the virus that Fauci claimed was "not a threat" appeared to spiral out of control. All business and activity in New York City came to a halt, and within days a lockdown was in effect. All that artistic energy vanished as though it never was.

From the confines of my apartment I would venture out every 10 to 12 days to buy supplies from the market.

At first, I thought this was a wonderful time to get work done, and for a while I was able to convince myself that this was not much different from my life as a loner.  But I was discovering that I had so many friends that I could see, have dinner or brunch with, or go to a coffee house to write in the presence of very creative people who were using places like Reggio's as a haven for creative work and stimulating discussions...or pop into the Morgan Library, the Whitney, The Russian Tea Room, or see a show or opera almost spontaneously when I needed a boost to my perspective on life.

That creative milieu was removed overnight, and it appeared that no one had calculated the consequences of such an unprecedented, catastrophic compromise.

I began to understand that I was in a state of shock, withdrawal, and depression. The day lost its shape, and I lost all sense of day and night. I could not sleep. All sense of a sleep cycle was lost. I was becoming more and more depressed because all this luxury of time on my hands was not being converted into any productive activity. I was starting to lose it...

I was in LOCKDOWN... I was in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, UNDER HOUSE ARREST, with all these talking heads on television who seemed to bicker back and forth on nothing of consequence whatsoever, except to remind us of what we could NOT do... that we were being watched... KEEP YOUR DISTANCE... WEAR YOUR FACEMASK! STAY INSIDE!... THEY seemed to be making "lists of whose naughty and nice" ... but it wasn't Santa... it was Governors and Mayors and bureaucrats who believed they had the power to make laws and conduct invasive surveillance without our consent... and then there emerged a sense of despair of media in collusion with so-called government... so that it seemed there was no end in sight... there appeared to be some perverted delight that lockdown was essential and must continue for "because it's good for you."

April tumbled end-over-end, out of control... my lack of sleep had filled my brain with the fog of despair. Easter loomed and passed as a non-event. Early spring days were filled with sunlight, with passing storms and sometimes very strong winds, even a tornado warning for NYC.

As May approached, my lack of sleep had become alarming. I was a victim of LOCKDOWN. And I knew I was not alone. Every email and message proclaimed everything was OK... and so did I also put on an air of survival mode mentality. But we all knew and know that everything was not well. The globe has entered an unprecedented era, far worse than the GREAT DEPRESSION...Worse because it has been a government-imposed shutdown based on faulty data and flawed projections.

Night and day merged without distinctive boundaries. With all this personal freedom of time on my hands, nothing was being accomplished. The end of April fizzled into May and I experienced PANDEMIC PANIC--- the LOCKDOWN has become an insurmountable hurdle... all imposed from within through the destructive energy of isolation.

I had nowhere to go. "Don't bother us unless you have COV-19--- we can't be distracted unless you are essential... " You see, some some of us are essential, but the rest are not, so those lives don't really matter.  "Since you're not essential, don't bother us until we say it's okay to come out."

I realized that I had begun to see myself as a victim, and there appeared to be no way out. I needed to find THE WAY.... and I thought of Neil Diamond's song THE WAY... and his plaintiff face out: "I need to find...I need to find...I need to find..."
                                                            FADE OUT

PRE-PANDEMIA: RESEARCH AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

My collaborateur, Lisa Naugle of UCI Irvine, had heard of a virus that was beginning to insinuate itself in people's lives in early March (2020), and had been planning to visit me so that we might use a couple of days to research venues to stimulate our thinking and discussions about future collaborative work. We have worked together, collaborating for many years as we toured Europe each spring with Maestro Dinu Ghezzo, the mentor of us all.

Lisa called to ask if I was uncomfortable with her coming since there were these rumors of a serious outbreak of a new virus. Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC had recently commented it was not something to be too concerned about---"not a major threat"--- and Nancy Pelosi was encouraging everyone to go to China Town. I remember several viruses from the past, including the Pandemic of 1968 which peaked in 1969 during the Woodstock Festival, so I was not worried that things were so serious that Lisa should change her plans to visit.

On the day she was scheduled to arrive, March 9th, the NYU School of Psychology was hosting Ted Coons' 90 Year Festschrift and I was scheduled to present. As I entered NYU's King Juan Carlos Center, the venue that was hosting Dr. Coons' Festschrift, I detected an air of concern among those who had traveled to be present to honor this great scholar, researcher, and educator.  Participants declined to shake hands and bumped elbows instead, although Ted, unfazed, continue to shake hands and hug former students and colleagues.

West Side Story (Spring 2020) Projection Amplifies Dramatic Tension

Lisa arrived during the evening of the Festchrift celebration, and we talked about our plans for using New York City as the backdrop for our researching performance resources to uncover new  ideas for collaboration. Of particular interest was the new multimedia production of West Side Story that had just opened. The production utilized techniques that we had explored ten years earlier, using media and projections to create an array of theatre effects in the NYU multimedia workshop IMPACT.  As a researcher pursuing phenomenology as my major mode of inquiry, I had proposed to Lisa that her visit would model Researching Lived Experience, the epic text by Max van Manen. My thought was that we might use her time in New York as a canvas to sketch ideas from our explorations that could lead to collaborative projects.

IMPACT Production: Image Echoes stretch sense of space

We were curious that techniques we had been exploring for more than ten years since 2007 were now finding their way to Broadway, including live video projection to intensify dramatic action and amplify the performance presence, adding a dimension of immediacy.  I had invented a term, "MoviOp" describing an opera using technology spontaneously to combine live and prepared projections, increasing the immediacy of the performance. This idea reaches back to Richard Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk.
Were Wagner alive today, he would undoubtedly be a film director in order to exert strict control over every artistic element.

ROTATION, multimedia opera

IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) was a summer workshop at NYU from 2007-2017 that along with collaborators Tom Beyer, Youngmi Ha, Chianan Yen, and Deborah Damast, I founded to initiate college level students to the emerging technologies that were revolutionizing the arts in ways that underscored collaboration, spontaneity and immediacy. Indeed, I often referred to this new sensibility as the theatre of immediacy. We utilized the concept of Arts Collectives from the 60s-70s to congregate students into collective groups utilizing different disciplines and backgrounds to collaborate by bringing together their unique talents and skills to create and share new work.

Dr. Lisa Naugle became a part of IMPACT as the Director of Dance and Movement not long after the workshop came into being. I had the honor of chairing her dissertation research committee at NYU, and we had begun collaborative projects with other colleagues as early as 1995, when we were using dial-up modems to connect with the Internet.

Tom Beyer, Media and Technical Collaborator

Projection of different angles enhance presence

IF TIME REMEMBERS, prepared video with live projections

A crucial figure in development of projection and sound techniques for this new Theatre of Immediacy and Distance Collaboration was Tom Beyer, Systems Engineer for Music and Performing Arts in NYU's Steinhardt School.  Tom served as one of the founders of IMPACT, but we had been collaborating on projects and productions for a number of years before IMPACT. He has collaborated with many artists over the years, and was one of Dinu Ghezzo's major collaborators on the many tours throughout Europe. I played a role in bringing Dinu Ghezzo to NYU, and when I became the Chair of the Department, I appointed Dinu as the Director of Music Composition. I give this background, because it was this milieu of extraordinary artists that led to many collaborations that were constantly breaking ground and exploring new frontiers, attracting new collaborators that eventually grew into an impressive informal network of individuals coming together to create new expressive forms. Perhaps our greatest weakness was that we were always in the moment, and the pressure of production prevented our pausing to take note of what we had created. My philosophy was to document everything we did to excess. We created so much data that the task of retrieving it and attempt to reflect on our journey was utterly over-whelming. We were always on to the next production, the next experiment.

As artists, we were internalizing and processing our experience: we were the embodiment of our research. Thus each successive year and collaboration built upon the previous experiments and provided the means to leap forward by continually adding to and evolving the previous concepts and techniques into new experiments. Every season of IMPACT was a new experiment,

ROTATION, multimedia opera multiple screens

evolving from the previous year as we discussed the structure and process for the new workshop.

We experimented with the simultaneous running of two independent videos while incorporating live projections of performances, multiple screens, enhanced directional sound, connecting independent spaces in simultaneous distance performances.

During these years, we introduced so many young students from around the world, that we discovered (during our debriefing of their experiences on the final day) that perhaps the most important outcome for the participants in this collaborative process was they had sustained a transformative life-changing experience.

Our creative research as lived experience project of March 7-9 concluded with attending the preview of a stunning new production of Sondheim's classic, COMPANY, that starred Patti Lupone, who brought down the house with "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch." The production reversed the genders of the original production so that the major premise was of a woman in her 30s who couldn't commit to marriage.  I found this production more exciting and inspiring than the original 1970 production. This new production never happened. Shortly after Lisa returned to California on March 10th, Broadway went dark and the COV-19 PANDEMIC pummeled New York City into a lockdown.

VIOLA ENLUARADA, CAPOEIRA & A PANDEMIC

In my earlier days as Phaedrus, I encountered someone in September 1999, who was in a formative stage of her journey, although she was wise beyond her years. She performed with her flute, and was always searching to use the beauty of her musicing to take her to solitary paths in search of enlightenment. When we met, she somehow intuited that I should meet Rilke, the German poet that I knew only through some of his poetry serving as texts for composers. To introduce me to Rilke, she presented me with his book Letters to a Young Poet.

Her gift of this book reminded me of my professor and mentor Doc Hemmle, who while I was under his guidance as a freshman at Texas Tech University, was often gifting me with whatever he was reading. When I first walked into the music building, I met him in the hall where he was reading a book called The Art Spirit. He held up the book and asked, Have you read this?" I said I hadn't and he put it in my hands, and said, "Take it... you may think at first it is about painting, but you will see it is all about the music of life."

Celina's gifting of Rilke began an adventure with a poet of the flute who has collaboratively made music around the world since those days of 1999, as a new century unfolded. The book had a profound effect on me, leading to an identity of Phaedrus...and that is a different story. But now we are at NOW, and I am embarked upon a journey retracing the steps of "THEN."

I was indelibly connected with the emergence and growth of the internet, and in my process at the university, I was surrounded by young people caught up in the transformation of the world as the electrical grid was transformed into a connection of nodes all over the world in an emerging digital consciousness. We are talking about the late 60s, and in 1968 there was a pandemic that overtook the world.

This pandemic spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968, and peaking a year later. The pandemic was caused by an influenza A (H3N2) virus comprised of two genes from an avian influenza. An estimated one million deaths occurred worldwide with about 100,000 in the United States. Most excess deaths were in people 65 years and older. H3N2 continues to circulate worldwide as a seasonal influenza virus. The world did not engage in lockdown as a defense.

1968 was a banner year for me, as I had the premiere of my multimedia opera ROTATION, and came in contact with Dr. Jerrold Ross, who had recently effected the merger of the New York College of Music with the music department of what was to become the Steinhardt School. Ross had heard of me through David Simon, the Registrar of the New York College of Music, but more importantly an American composer with whom I studied composition. Ross had heard of my vision for a music department of the future based on the emerging technologies. He invited me to join the department to build a a department with a new vision and mission. 

The economy dealt with the virus by continuing to operate in the midst of widespread fear. But if we had come to lockdown in 1969, I would never have met Jerrold Ross and Woodstock would not have occurred.

We have no way of knowing what cultural and economic devastation and deprivation is now being caused by a political response to a virus, that is deadly, but might have been detained if we responsibly protected our elderly population. We may learn from this shutdown and control of people's lives around the globe that the economic fallout may result in far more tragedies than COV-19.

I point this out, because had there been a lockdown in 1969, it is likely that I would have never met Celina Charlier, this remarkable Muse of the flute. I might have not learned of the deep musical structure of Brazilian Portuguese, and might never have discovered Capoeira--- a Brazilian practice that disguised the learning of martial arts through musical movement against a regime that oppressed its population. As a Muse, she introduced me to the rich musical fabric of this music and practice through a song, "Viola enluarada". She meticulously translated the text, the poem of this remarkable song that is at the same time a call to arms against oppression and a love song.

Deeply engrossed in the beauty and depth of the text and music of the song “Viola enluarada” composed by Marcos Valle and his brother Paulo Sérgio Valle, I hear this song as a personal call for liberty, while slowly but surely those who would control our lives and our comings and goings, ---through facial recognition and drone surveillance ---use the opportunity to take away our liberty, and divide us as a people through digital isolation and enslavement --- all for the public good.

In Brazil, viola refers to the acoustic guitar. Violas are used for serenades, to accompany songs at parties, and other musical occasions. It is part of the soul of Brazil and contributes in unique ways to the musical culture. Viola enluarada was composed in the 60s in the context of Bossa Nova but transcends the genre to become a classic statement of the human spirit. Enluarada has no real English equivalent but means “moonlightened.”

Bathed in moonlight we can see the world differently, intuiting that the challenges of life are not as sharply etched as we might think. Love, music, liberty, life and death embrace us in the breath of a single moment. Listening to this recording brings a rebirth and renaissance as we realize that no matter what we face, the freedom of the human spirit triumphs over all the claims of power and destruction. This has been the experience of the Brazilians, and the rise of Capoeira (martial art, dance, and music) as a response to slavery and brutality, attests to the resiliency of a people who have suffered much adversity and yet remain full of hope, as well as being among the most innately musical beings of our species.

Here is a literal translation of the Portuguese as revealed to me by Celina. The texture and resonance of the words are inseparable from the music, and Marcos Valle’s phrasing will astonish you with its subtlety and sensitive stretching of time that lives in counterpoint to a simple but eloquent harmonic commentary.

The version that never fails to bring tears to my eyes is Marcos Valle from Bossa Entre Amigos.…so simple and elegant, his phrasing is impeccable. Follow this link below to hear this remarkable
performance in another window, while you read this poem and its translation (courtesy Celina).


Marcos Valle- "Viola Enluarada"

a mão que toca o violão 
In the hand that plays the guitar

Se for preciso faz a guerra 
if needed [(it) notes the war

Mata o mundo, fere a terra 
kills the world, hurts the earth

Na voz que canta uma canção 
In the voice that sings a song,

Se for preciso canta o hino if needed, (it) sings the anthem,

Louva à morte 
praises death

No sertão é como espada 
in the countryside, it’s like a sword,

Viola e noite enluarada 
moonlight viola, moonlight night

Esperança de vingança hope of revenge.

No mesmo pé que dança o samba In the same foot that dances the samba

Se preciso vai à luta if needed, (it) goes to fight

Capoeira 
Capoeira

Quem tem de noite a companheira 
(the one) who lies, at night, his companion (fem.)

Sabe que a paz é passageira 
knows that peace is transitory

Prá defendê-la se levanta 
To defend her (peace/companion)

E grita: Eu vou! 
(it) stands up and shouts: I go (I will)

Mão, violão, canção, espada 
Hand, Guitar, Song, Sword

E viola enluarada 
and Moonlightened Viola

Pelo campo, e cidade 
through the country-side and the city

Porta bandeira, capoeira 
Porta bandeira, capoeira

Desfilando vão cantando
in the parade (refers to carnival) they sing

Liberdade 
Freedom 

Liberdade, liberdade… 
Freedom, Freedom