Harry’s Sister

March 27, 2012
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I was just reading about Meryl Streep’s latest film, The Iron Lady, and suddenly I thought – how come she and I are not friends? Maybe this thought is a result of being in Jerusalem where they say it is easy to bump into and chat with the country’s celebrities. Or is it something else entirely?

Forty plus years ago while I was a student at Tufts University, one day I noticed a good looking, waspy guy in one of my classes in the Experimental College (actually that wasn’t that unusual to be good looking and waspy at Tufts then, William Hurt was there at that time as well). This guy caught my attention because he was in a dance class (a bit unusual at the time). He was driven, intelligent, and competitive. His competitiveness gave him a kind of vitality that intrigued me and that also spurred me on to excel. He had everything that was then valued in the rarefied world of semi-Ivy League small New England collegiate life – male, blond, and athletic, as well as smart. He was many things that I secretly desired to be that are too complex and complicated to explain here. But he was also kind, and I think he felt deeply. So I liked him very much.

At the time, in addition to dance, I had discovered theatre and took every opportunity to act that came my way. At one point I was simultaneously playing Hysterium in the farcical musical A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To The Forum in one theater, and would rush to another later in the evening where I was playing the ‘Officer’ in Moliere’s Tartuffe who enters at the end of Act 3 to give a long speech about the powerful, omniscient and great Louis XIV. It was during one of these stretches of doing too much that Harry, Harry Streep, the good-looking waspy guy in the dance class, came to see me in a production of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (I played Melchior). He had seen me in several productions before but had never spoken to me about them. But after this performance he looked me in the face as if seeing me for the first time and said, “You’re good. You are almost as good as my sister, and she is really good.” This stayed with me.

One evening, a bit later, during a dreadfully cold and snowy Boston winter, I was headed back to my dorm after just finishing a performance of yet another play, when I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw two figures silhouetted by light from a street lamp, standing in the middle of the road, almost knee deep in student trampled snow. They were a bit of a distance from me and though I could not see their faces I recognized the body carriage and shape of one of the people – it was Harry. The other was a woman. As they began to walk towards me the woman’s form seemed to glow. Even with the distance and not being able to see her face, she mesmerized me. As they got closer and I could see her face, this sense of ‘presence’ became stronger. Finally there they were standing in front of me. I knew this was the sister that was ‘really good’. She had the same blondness, tiny mouth and small slightly askew nose as Harry. “Hey Donald, this is my sister Meryl, that I told you about. She’s visiting from Vassar,” Harry said. I stare into her face flushed from the cold. She smiled warmly back at me and extended her hand. “Hello,” she said, “It’s nice to meet you.” We stood in the road for a few minutes and exchanged a few niceties. After finishing our chat we said good night and walked away from each other. I, like Lot’s wife, felt compelled to turn and look back. Freezing and transfixed I stood and watched as they disappeared into the night.

Several years later I was in New Haven hanging out and trying to reconcile what had been unhappy and painful experiences at Yale (I had spent a year there before going to Tufts). I was also hoping to get a sense of The Yale School of Drama, wondering if going to drama school there was something I could or wanted to do. I wandered over to the School of Drama to be a fly on the wall. Instead, I found myself watching a performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya by second year actors. After the show, I was sitting outside having coffee (it was spring) and I noticed this buzzing of voices and activity around me. “Meryl is going on” I overheard someone say. So I asked what that meant. They explained – Meryl, Meryl Streep, who was a student at the School of Drama, was understudying the lead in a Brecht play (I don’t remember which one) at the Yale Rep. It had been posted (while I was watching Vanya) that she would go into the part for that evening’s performance. So, I was told, if I was interested I’d better try and get a ticket, now! Here was my opportunity to see Harry’s sister in action, I thought. However, by the time I got to the box-office all available tickets had been snatched up and there was a long waiting list to which they were not adding more names. Apparently, she had a following.

The next year or so my interest moved farther away from theatre and more into the world of dance. I moved to New York and shared a loft on the edge of Chinatown with Harry and two other male dancers. I was now obsessively consumed by dancing and completely immersed in the world of the New York dance scene. Dance was everything to me and nothing else existed. On occasion Harry would give me news of what was happening with Meryl, though I never saw her.

Financially, New York was a challenge. I had difficulty getting and keeping jobs and was completely incompetent at managing money. While Harry and the others were sympathetic to my situation, eventually I found myself on the street without a place to live. For a long stretch of time I couch surfed and even slept on park benches, often showing up at a compassionate friend’s apartment in the morning to take a shower before heading to ballet class.

One afternoon while sitting on a park bench, I noticed a magazine next to me. I picked it up and began to read, something to distract me from my hunger pangs and general depression. In it was an interview with Jane Fonda about her upcoming film Julia. She was asked the usual questions including ones about working with her co-star Vanessa Redgrave. As one would expect, she praised her. But seemingly out of the blue she mentioned a newcomer on the scene that she predicted would have a great career, Meryl Streep! Excited, I scraped up some money and went to see the movie. I was completely immersed in the film when suddenly there she was, the young woman with the glowing presence from the snowy night in the middle of the road at Tufts. On screen, larger than life, was Harry’s sister. But this time she was not blond but rather she had rich dark hair. Yet, it was unmistakably the same face. I don’t remember much about her part but I think there was something incestuous about her relationship with her screen brother and she turned over a table. But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for me – I wanted more of her!

Over the next several years, I saw every movie she made. I was delighted by her performance in The Seduction of Joe Tynan where I can still hear her saying in a Louisiana inflected accent, “Cause he’s my daddy”. There was a sadness that coursed through her performances in Manhattan and especially Kramer vs. Kramer where her vulnerability enthralled me. As Meryl became more famous and celebrated, I, and I suspect many others, obsessed over her. With The French Lieutenant’s Woman I was hopelessly in love. I feverishly dreamed of her. Even imagining us as secret lovers, our passionate love affair fueling her creativity and propelling her to even greater heights of brilliance. However, it was not until Sophie’s Choice that I finally got it. I watched in awe and amazement the heart-wrenching scene where she reveals her unthinkable choice. Her pale skin flushing ever more intensely as the layers of her secret were ripped away, like the skin off an onion, and exposed. At the end I was emotionally devastated as if I had lived Sophie’s choice. It was in that moment that I got that Harry’s sister is indeed really good.

Forty years later sitting in my apartment atop Jebel Deir Abu Tor in Jerusalem, I find myself still thinking about Harry’s sister. She has always seemed so familiar to me and felt so much a part of my life. So much so that in reality it seems odd that she and I don’t really know each other and are not friends. But neither are Harry and I, anymore. Perhaps only in Jerusalem where I think about and experience time as layers or collapsing timelines could reading an article about The Iron Lady makes me remember not only my brief encounter with Meryl Streep but also trigger an awareness of the different possible directions my life might have taken – if I had made different choices. It seems that this place momentarily weakens the linchpin that keeps my various and alternate realities securely attached to the axle of their appropriate time.

With the Valley of Hinnom separating me from the al-Aqsa mosque and the south wall of The Old City of Jerusalem, I sit at a glass desk in an ultra-modern stone house with floor to ceiling windows on an ancient hill and I wonder. What if I had chosen to be an actor, and being almost as good as Harry’s sister, what would my life look like today? Perhaps Meryl and I would be friends (lovers)? Or perhaps these ruminations are simply a symptom of middle age – as life passes, a wondering about what might have been.

Jerusalem Journal, 11/12-11/17/2011

December 2, 2011
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Saturday, 12-November 2011

Let me begin by saying I love Jerusalem. I love all its contradictions, political messiness, convergences and colliding of religions, cultures and ethnicities, as well as the resultant tensions. It is my kind of joint! To me it is not a city it is a ‘place’. A place that feels as if it is not bound by space-time but rather one that often feels outside time, since time here can appear as layers or to collapse in on itself. I must admit that while here I often don’t know what ‘now’ is. It is like being in a rubix cube of time with its parts constantly rotating at various speeds and its dizzying permutations trying to settle on ‘a now.’

Being in Jerusalem has made me think about the notion of fitting in, assimilation (or maybe I mean acculturation). What does it mean, practically? Often I will ask dancers to give me a working definition of a dance term, for example arabesque penché, whose definition in this context might be – your highest arabesque tilted forward. This definition not only helps aganist the common tendency for the dancer to drop their back as they ‘lean’ forward but it is also based on the reality of their body and not on some idealized notion of the body. So if I were to define ‘to fit in’ or assimilate in relationship to Jerusalem and in the context of practical and real world, what would it be – “to be at ease in a place, i.e. Jerusalem” perhaps?  Or is it something more like – “not always at ease but not ill at ease either”.

Last Sunday at the Academy’s weekly salon and dinner, I said that Jerusalem reminded me of New York. The woman seated next to me tensed, sat up straight in her chair and said, “That’s not possible!” To her thinking, Tel Aviv was more like New York – cosmopolitan, rich in culture, and most importantly to her, tolerant. But tolerant of what, I wondered? To my observations Tel Aviv is practically militant in its secular jewishness. Almost everyone is Jewish and almost every Jew is secular. So there isn’t much opportunity to test one’s tolerance in a practical sense. It is all concept of tolerance; there is very little opportunity to practice tolerance. There is a sameness to Tel Aviv society [and in that sameness I feel ill at ease]. I think that the sameness provides comfort to the inhabitants while underscoring the ‘otherness’ of outsiders. When I was there four years ago often I noticed that my presences seem to startle people. It seemed as if my apparently obvious Gentileness caused them to be momentarily shaken out of the comfort of their jewishness or the sameness they are used to. Their faces seem to say, “Where am I?” There would be a quick shake, a slight shiver in their bodies as if shaking something off, they would recover and be on their way as if I did not exist or that the encounter did not happen. They returned to the safety of the bubble that is Tel Aviv. Clearly, one of these did not fit and that was I.  Nothing of the sort happens in Jerusalem.

Let’s be clear here, I am not suggesting that Jerusalemites are tolerant – they just seem to tolerate you, albeit sometimes with lots of attitude, shaded hostility, or feigned indifference (depending on which ‘Jerusalem’ you are in, East, West, Old City, a ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, etc.). Which to me seems very New Yorkish. Just taking a ride on the new, currently free and often-crowded light rail that is jammed with every version of a Jerusalemite you can imagine demonstrates the New York likeness of Jerusalem. It is in those short moments when diverse peoples are forced to tolerate each other for the duration of their ride, when their tribal identity and humalah are momentarily subjugated to, quoting my friend Tommy DeFrantz, “people doing their thing as best they can” that I feel as though I most fit in.

Here are three dictionary definitions of assimilation (courtesy of Encarta World English Dictionary) 1. The process of becoming part of, or more like, something greater; 2. The process in which one group takes on the cultural and other traits of a larger group; and 3. The integration of new knowledge or information with what is already known. They all speak to a smaller or single ‘thing’ being integrated into a larger or group thing. But this says nothing about the mindset of an individual who is assimilated. In the Star Trek universe/ mythology The Borg, a pseudo-race of cybernetic organisms that share a single mind and a single purpose – to assimilate technology and individuals into its ‘collective,’ “We are the Borg. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”  This is the ultimate act of fitting in (and a frightening one as well).

All of this fitting in stuff came up because while sitting in one of my favorite cafes here, Kalo, on Beit Lechem Road, the leafy and peaceful thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the old stone villas and gardens of Baka, I noticed how at ease I felt. Perhaps more so than I ever feel when in most American cities, except perhaps New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and Seattle. And certainly more than in any foreign city I can think of.

Perhaps to fit in is simply a personal assertion – I fit in because I say I do and I am at ease in this place. This has nothing to do with how you are perceived from the outside but rather how it occurs for you. Ultimately, I am only concerned about how I feel not how others see or think of me. There is a 12 Step adage that says, “What other people think of me is none of my business.” So, In Jerusalem I find myself fitting in because I say I do and it doesn’t matter if others think I do or not. I also want to fit in – I desire it. I am at ease and surprisingly have a kind of peace of mind here.  But also Jerusalem, like the Borg, demands that you submit and resistance to this place is indeed futile.

 

Monday, 14-November 2011

Sometimes I wonder about my project here – To explore the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a perpetual machine of failed attempts and disillusionment. The political implications are annoying, artistic scope limiting, and personally painful. It’s like beating your head against a wall knowing that the wall will remain standing but you continue to do it anyway. (What is that definition of insanity – doing the same thing and expecting different results?) Pursuing this project is an act of insanity and I have been here before, yet I persist.

I have had three workshop/auditions for dancers. The first had five women – four Jewish, one Arab; the second I had two men, both Jewish; the third, three of the women from the first session did not return including the Arab woman but a different Arab woman showed up. During all sessions, people wanted to talk – a lot. At first I encouraged this but by the end of session three I was sick of talking. To paraphrase Faye Dunaway in the film Mommie Dearest – No more talking!

I find myself in a kind of Chekhovian melancholy while working on A Chekhovian Resolution, my work from 2008 that delved into “hamatzav” or “the situation” (that’s how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is often refer to by Israelis). In some way I feel like a character in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, invoking Moscow over and over and over again – “To Moscow, I beg you!” But the ‘Moscow’ they long for does not exist, will not make life richer or fuller and they know it.  Perhaps what I long for here in Jerusalem, (and the unattainable Jerusalem that people here long for), is impossible and I also know that… Maybe I’ve just found the title of my piece Moscow/Jerusalem.

 

Thursday, 17-November 2011

I’ve seen quite a bit of dance since I have been in Jerusalem. Most of it has been by young emerging artists such as Iris Erez, Maya Brinner, Maya Weinberg to name a few. It has also not been what I expected. What Israel exports to the world often has been the big theatrical and full throttled dance of Batsheva and the work of Ohad Naharin, Isik Galili, and Emanuael Gat. The work from these emerging artists, however, for the most part is the opposite. It often appears small in scale, myopic, bleak, very cerebral, minimal in its movement value, and unfathomably deep. There is a sameness about much of it, much like the Bauhaus International style of the buildings in Tel Aviv the city where I believe most of this dance is originating. At a recent performance I attended, it occurred to me that if I didn’t know better I would have thought that it was all the work of a single artist rather than three different choreographers. This was very disappointing especially since one of the choreographers presenting a new piece that I was excited to see was Iris Erez whose Homesick I had admired in an earlier performance.

However, there was one performance I attended that was truly surprising and definitely not disappointing, Ka’et Ensemble. This is a group of orthodox Jewish male non-professional dancers. They brought a level of honesty and earnestness to their performance that I rarely see on the professional dance stage. There was neither a hint of the professional dance post-modern irony, nor 21st Century apocalyptic jitters, nor amateurish smiley cutesiness. It was spirited, spiritual and full of a radiant joy, as only true believers seem to posses, (religious and artistic). And their joy was contagious. I caught a glimpse of a few of the ‘dancers’ their faces washed in the after glow of their performance speaking with friends and relatives after the performance, and their joy was projected on to and reflected back on the faces of those who had experienced the performance and to whom they were now speaking. Their joy was not a ‘look I’m dancing’ joy or the community center’s dance troupe’s proudness (maybe a tad) but something much deeper and profound. It was transcendent with a touch of the holy, the spirit elevated. It was beautiful!

This is a kind of religious dance, I think (but it is also serious and rigorous choreography that any contemporary dance company could conceivably perform). It seems to me that what Ronen Izhaki (choreographer), his music/sound collaborator Emmanuel Witzthum along with these men has done is to create a form of ‘charismatic’ modern orthodox body based prayer, especially with the piece Highway # 1.

I use the term charismatic (this maybe is a mistake and might open me up to all sorts of attack); perhaps, Jewish ecstatic body prayer might be a better term. I say this because the outward display of passion in their work brings to mind, while clearly not the same thing, those in charismatic Christianity. Ka’et (a Hebrew acronym that means “timely”) is to my thinking especially ‘timely’ at this particular period in Jerusalem’s artistic and cultural life given the exodus of young thinkers and artists to Tel Aviv. While Tel Aviv, a modern secular Mediterranean city clearly looks to Europe and the West for it aesthetic affinities, Jerusalem a venerated religious site and a contentious political capital is Middle Eastern in its sensibilities. One wonders then at how its art should be or how it should speak here. I am reminded of Dvořák’s (the 19^th Century Czech composer famously know for his Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World”) newspaper articles reflecting on the state of American music. He conjectured that African-American and Native American music should be used as a foundation for the growth of American music and only through the ‘native music’ would Americans find their own national style of music. In Jerusalem the ‘native musics’ are religion and politics so it is only fitting that the dance here at its most authentic should be manifest with religious and/or political signifiers. Ka’et is indeed timely, truly of this place Jerusalem and that for me is why it succeeds.

Jerusalem Journal, 10/27-11/3/2011

November 9, 2011
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Donald Byrd is in Israel on a fellowship at the American Academy in Jerusalem, a program for senior-level artists and cultural leaders to share their vision and expertise in order to foster greater dialogue and understanding between people of the United States and Jerusalem. This post is a diary of Donald Byrd’s second week. Click here to see more photos.

Thursday, 27-October 2011

Last evening I saw a remarkable film by the Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrovicz at The Cinematheque in Jerusalem, “The Law in These Parts”. The film, which won Best Documentary at this year’s iteration of the Jerusalem Film Festival, explores the four-decade-old military legal system in the Occupied Territories. It does so with a searing, almost painful desire to find and speak ‘truth.’ The truth includes the director’s honesty in acknowledging his and the film’s subjectivity. In a beautiful visual metaphor for this ‘set-up’, the film opens with what looks like a stage being prepared for actors to take their places. In this case ‘the actors’ are the judges who presided over the military courts during the early days of The Occupation. We are given by voice-over during this sequence a definition that draws a distinction between a traditional documentary and a narrative film. This ‘documentary’ suggests that though this definition is true it is neither specific nor nuanced enough. Through the course of the film this delineation, the film’s ‘law,’ is subtly subverted, just as the justices of the military legal system in the Occupied Territories are interrogated about how they perhaps subverted justice.

 

Friday, 28-October 2011

This place, Jerusalem, is a place of narratives. It is a place where voices battle to be heard. Here narratives contend and interpretations of those narratives challenge and compete. At first it is easy to hear only the familiar narratives that breakdown into opposing voices  – ancient and modern, Jewish and Arab, secular and religious. These are the big narratives and they are loud and clear. But gradually as my ears have begun to adjust other more subtle voices have begun to emerge. Some fall in between the familiar voices and are variations, nuanced or shadings along the spectrum of the oppositional narratives (ultra orthodoxy and modern orthodoxy might be an example). But others fall outside of dualism and are singular and seem completely new, at least to me.

There are personal narratives fraught with aspiration, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Others are wishful thinking and pessimism colliding inside a taut exterior of normalcy and denial. Some narratives articulate quiet acceptance of an inevitable annihilation and apocalyptic endings (“In 20 years Israel won’t exist” – more on this later). There are hushed rageful, tight-lipped narratives that threaten to explode into deadly shrapnel laden words. These voices quietly murmur below the din.

 

Sunday, 30-October 2011

On Saturday night I saw a dance piece called “Homesick” by the Israeli Jewish choreographer Iris Erez. It was part of an out-of-door series of performances and installations collectively called “Welcome To Nomansland” or “Visit Nomansland” (I saw it written both ways). Two young Israeli visual artists, Yuval Yairi (photography/video) and Guy Briller (performance/installation) initiated the project. No man’s land is the space between the line drawn in green pencil by Moshe Dayan and Abdullah Tal in 1948 dividing Jerusalem in two – the western Israeli part and the eastern Arab part. At the foot of Notre Dame, in the area between the Damascus Gate and the Musrara neighborhood, was the largest stretch of no-man’s-land in the heart of Jerusalem. In this area, in a small plaza is where I saw “Homesick.”

I found the piece arresting and compelling in its beauty, especially the first long solo by a male dancer whose name I don’t know (there was no program) and its final image (the same dancer). Here is a youtube clip of the piece in a theater as opposed to outside on a Jerusalem stoned plaza without any kind of flooring to protect the dancers bodies, which is how I saw it.

 

Wednesday, 2-November 2011

It has begun! The moment after I have begun to separate from my life at home and locate in a different place. It is like awaking from a dream.  It is my ‘traveler entity’ emerging. I am a stranger in a strange land. I am distanced and alienated from myself as well as from the place. I have been here before. It is both a new and familiar mental state. In it I am discontent and doubtful, anxiety and uncertainty reign. It is a kingdom of comparisons.  I sit in judgment on myself and what I do and who I am.  It is a place where I am always asking, questioning. It is a sometimes neurotic and painful land whose topography is pitted with emotional landmines and IEDs, as well as intellectual mind-fucks. The landscape is strewn with the bodies of my perceived failures and littered with the aftermath of brutal self-annihilating warfare from my past. I am glad I am here.

 

Thursday, 3-November 2011

Jack Persekian’s The Jerusalem Show (V), and in particular Palestinian artist Sharif Waked video installation To Be Continued was a revelation to me. In fact Jack Persekian, a Jerusalem-born American of Armenian descent is a revelation. (See his bio and statement about The Jerusalem Show because what it is and intends to do defies easy categorization, and he says it better anyway.) Persekian is frighteningly smart, and his nattily dressed, lean, taut, straight-spined body says much about his will, determination, and laser sharp vision (when I met him I was reminded of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas). In his presence I felt, as I have often felt when around those who have a deep understanding of ‘the situation’ between Palestinians and Israelis, naive.

Waked’s video installation, to quote the online catalogue, “overturns the familiar videos of the suicide bombers’ last will and testament through an unending process of reading and narrating. It transforms this terrifying moment of sacrifice, the killing of the self and the other—into a state of perpetual postponement.” As I watched, listened (Arabic), and read (English subtitles), I was transfixed.

The piece references the “living martyr” videos that (again from the catalogue) “document a man or woman posing to be filmed for the last time alive, announcing the will and determination to carry out a suicide operation among their enemies. This video re-enacts this scene but confiscates the living martyr’s final text. It entangles him in another text that was also narrated between life and death. The living martyr is made over into the narrator of A Thousand and One Nights. He tells the tales of Scheherazade.”

Does the suicide bomber, I wonder, like the subject of his narration, Scheherazade with her thousand and one nights’ of tales, hope that after those many nights the hearts of those who have convinced him to sacrifice his life will have softened? Or if he supposes that by prolonging his life by weaving more and more fantastical stories that over this time those in conflict will have resolved their differences?  Or perhaps it is a loss of faith because he loves life now more than the promise of paradise later?

I connect the would-be-martyr’s hesitation, his moment of doubt, to Jesus on the cross and to Martin Scorsese’s film Last Temptation of Christ. Especially how Scorsese depicts the vision Jesus has when He steps down from the cross of an alternate life as a husband and father living his days out into old age as just a man. Does the suicide bomber also want to be just a man, live a simple life and die with those that love him around his bed? Or will he after his thousands and one nights, like Jesus in the film, beg God to let him fulfill his purpose because martyrdom is in fact the only right ending?

This is what I wonder.

 

ALERT! Start time for The Miraculous Mandarin will be at 8:30PM due to bright sunset. If you reserved a seat, please arrive by 8:15.

The Miraculous Mandarin: May 17-19 & May 24-26,  at Hing Hay Park, Chinatown-ID, Seattle

LOVE (World Premiere): June 21-30

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July 9-14, pre-registration required

http://www.stepsnyc.com/classes/workshops/steps-with-contemporary-masters-2011/#