Start With The Big Stuff

Because that makes the basket empty quicker. Towels are easy—rectangular and regular and their corners touch and the creases cooperate. Then t-shirts, but you have the check the label to know if it’s your dad’s or your brother’s. Men can be ambiguously similarly sized.

Always leave socks until the end. You can hang them over the basket and locate their twins more easily that way. Your lazy brother (he of the ambiguously sized t-shirts) may even walk by and claim his socks with a flick and another flick.

If you fold fast enough the piles retain their clean fresh smell and you can bury your nose in them for a treat at the end.

Parijat Desai Dance Company, NYC

Paijat Desai Dance Company

Artist-in-Residence Works-In-Progress Showing

Tribeca Performing Arts Center

March 24, 2010

A work-in-progress is constantly moving, shifting, evolving—a dance in itself. In their recent showing at Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Parijat Desai Dance Company (PDDC) moved through this space of vision and revision with nimbleness and concentration, drawing the audience into their bold experiments. Presenting excerpts of two new works, Artistic Director Parijat Desai finds dance in the seams between different fabrics of form, including Indian classical dance (bharata natyam) and American modern/post modern dance. She delivers a taut demonstration with her ensemble; the final performance can only be more alluring.

Dancers Aditi Dhruv, Kiley Durst, Carly Fox, Belinda He, Mohan Kulasingam, Cori Marquis and Riyo Mito are warming up as the audience files in, revealing snippets of their performance as they leap and twirl, stretch and twist. For this viewer, such informality is an unconventional introduction to the dance and the dancers; a conversation has begun between dancer and viewer, and the music hasn’t started playing yet.

Desai first shares excerpts of her tentatively titled piece Make Space, performed to electronic music by Dave Sharma/SubSwara, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Samita Sinha, which itself recontextualizes Indian instrumentation and vocals. The dancers begin in a cluster with classically Indian footwork and spread out to fill the stage as the music. The music's contemporary beats anchor dancers’ movements, which originate from sculpted Indian form but unfurl at different angles, creating an unusual modern aesthetic. The gestures and positions of bharata natyam become dynamic as performers undulate their bodies, roll to the floor, and permeate the stage space. Crisp and light, the dancers' steps emanate to all four corners of the stage, creating a space to dance within, and a dance to take space with.

The second piece shared, Songs to Live For, is based on North Indian classical vocal music and references the Mughal courts where this music developed. Desai uses recordings by renowned classical musicians, but for PDDC's upcoming June performance, envisions collaborating with local talent; live music allows for inspired exchanges between the musicians and dancers as would have happened in the court centuries ago. The excerpts are also enhanced by a stream of art work projected onto the back of the stage (designed by Swati Khurana and Neeraj Churi). Eternally calm and august figures—exalted Mughal royalty—watch in painted silence as the dancers bring to life scenes of the age-old story of love and devotion.

Songs, performed by the ensemble including Desai, appears to tell a more established story but without a script. Typically, Indian classical dance acts out the words being sung and adheres tightly to what is played by musicians. But Desai responds intuitively to this haunting music, and has worked with her company to develop a more complex and intimate narrative. Dancers morph between specific formations—four dancers depict a diamond of pillars; three bodies draw a slanted line; one figure shadows another. There is also the unpredictable arc of a conversation, crying to the Lord about a broken heart in one section. The dance becomes the music and the music the dance: we hear pining in the rich soundscape and see it in the tapering forms of the dancers. At one point, dancers gather in a corner and cheer on their peers, doubling as musicians and viewers, clapping to sustain the rhythm, further blurring the line between music and dance.

Individually, each dancer gestures elaborately, making full use of the body with a spectrum of delicate, angular, sinuous movement. In a tense and sensual duet, Durst and Marquis spill into each other’s space with tender hugs and vehement leaps: they flail at and fall onto each other, they twirl around each other and support each other’s jumps. Both female, they challenge the notion of a love tangle being exclusively between man and woman; love, like spirituality, knows no boundaries, and gender is but relative. Their conversation appears to move through arguments, agreements, revelations and questions and the audience is left curious about divinity, friendship, trust, and the sense of self.

Desai adapts the tools of dance to expose the edges between techniques, and to map an ongoing process of constructive transformation. At the intersection of classical and experimental forms, she poses the question, Should dance tell an established story or convey a personal interpretation? PDDC's work plays at both, revealing points of contrast and convergence between tradition and individual expression, between historical moments and lingering emotions. Dance is a fluidity of grace and posture, and Parijat Desai Dance Company captures this exchange of flesh and air with precision and truth.

Tribeca Performing Arts Center will present Parijat Desai Dance Company in performance Saturday June 5 and Sunday June 6 in Theater 2. tribecapac.org/air.htm | parijatdesai.org

Five Minute Love Affair

Nothing says abandonment like a destroyed, distraught umbrella. It lies helpless on the road, spokes exposed, rolling about like a dead carcass.

I sought it when I was desperate, needy, dying to cling to something brave and strong. It stood there, slightly askew, leaning against the wall with attitude, waiting to be noticed. Its was impressively tall and I knew I had to claim it, to make it mine.

We got off to a rocky start but I was hopeful. Sure, we formed a maladjusted couple whose nooks and crannies poked each other, but my urgency to not be alone compelled me to stick to my choice. I clutched my new companion’s solid stem and liked the way it responded. Slowly it opened up, let me in. I held it close and it hovered above me, protecting me, preserving my warmth, preventing my thoughts and my happiness from being leaked on.

The world seemed to fade around me, I could barely see past my new companion and I had no desire to. Yet I began to grow cold. The smooth spine I held onto for dear life began to reject me; it curved with a flourish I could not match. It tried to pull away as I drew it nearer to my heart. I compromised – as one does – but by giving it some space, it gulped down much more. (Cold feet? Mine were wet!) It began to grow heavy on my shoulders, exerting an uneasy pressure on me. Its resistance to the outside world and its devotion to me began to weaken. I tugged in frustration – where was its focus? But this only angered my somber friend. It threw its arms up in anger, surrendering to the rain, letting go of its identity and purpose completely. It was finished. We were finished.

There were tears everywhere. Metal flashed angrily in the glare of car headlights. I understood what it was trying to say, so I left it. I would find warmth somewhere else.

Nothing says abandonment like a destroyed, distraught umbrella.

Movits!, Mercury Lounge, NYC

MOVITS! are reliably and quite curiously upbeat every moment that they are performing. The song titles become indecipherable Swedish words over the roar of the audience, but regardless of the song’s background and intent – one is a love ballad, another a blues song, a third about owing someone money – what follows is a constant stream of high tempo, inflected rap from Johan Jivin' Rensfeldt while his two band mates bounce to the beat.

Their attire is dapper with a hint of a surprise in their sneakers. All three sport tuxedos and bowties, which they fix for each other before bounding onto the stage. Saxophonist Jocke "One-Take" Nilsson and producer / DJ Mördar-Anders Rensfeldt start the familiar and fiery 'Appelknyckarjazz' and Johan leaps into action moments later, wearing his “brand new song hat” and gesturing emphatically with his free hand.

They continue with tributes to James Brown ('Have You Got Soul') and Sammy Davis Jr, and perform Tom Jones as an homage to, well, Tom Jones. Halfway through the concert, Johan free styles the notable Swedish audience acappella, upping the celebrity status of the band’s hometown, Luleå. Jocke enjoys several solos of his own, letting his sax lead him in a catchy swing while he plays.

With windmill moves, spins, arm-linked skips and persistent bouncing, MOVITS! capitalize on their stage real estate. They continue with 'Swing For Hyresgastforeningen', 'Ta Pa Dig Dansskorna' and 'Fel Del Av Garden' while their spiffy tuxedos and impeccable coiffures morph into varying states of disarray. Johan announces the “official dance frame of the evening” and the three cluster together, flapping their arms like wings and staring beyond the audience, intriguing and amusing everyone before performing 'Appelknyckarjazz' as their last and fittingly “danceable” song.

The concert ends with a moment of rare stillness and MOVITS! share an unmic’ed caucus in the corner planning their encore – two new songs, one so new the band invited name suggestions from the audience. Their electric drum set maintains a thumping pulse, keeping them sweating and the audience cheering. You can’t help but wonder if hip hop, as their t-shirts claim, was in fact was born in Sweden.

In The Maytrees, Annie Dillard creates a love story in Cape Cod’s natural beauty, mixing her lyrical talents with classical poets, philosophers and an almanac. Principal characters Toby and Lou Maytree are tender and intense in their love for each other, explored by Dillard through metaphors of the ocean and sky and hardly a word from either character. “Her depth he knew when he kissed her. His brain lobes seemed to part like clouds over the sun,” (The Maytrees, 33) allowing for his love for her – or her love for him? – to nestle between dura mater and layer every rational thought with an poetic, indulgent one.

Dillard gives the reader cheekily accurate glimpses into each character’s mettle without revealing how crucial each heart is to the progress and sustenance of the story. “He fell in love with Lou again and again,” she writes of Toby Maytree, while Lou “seemed, then and now, to roll or float over the world evenly, acting and giving and taking, never accelerating, never slowing, wearing a slip of red or blue scarf,” (46). Just as Toby is distracted by his love for Lou, so is the reader distracted by Toby’s endearing appetite for his new wife, unaware of what happens fourteen years later. However, it is the latter sentence that lasts throughout the book; Lou is guided by her even temper for the rest of her married life – with and without her husband.

Dillard, like the Maytrees, approaches love as an “epistemological tool” (53), comparing emotions and reactions to Jupiter’s moons, constellations and the essence of “beauty laid bare” (The Writing Life). When their son Petie is injured while riding his bicycle, his parents move their bed to the basement where their son can rest. Their bed and its purpose are displaced: it attends to a new resident as Toby attends to another woman – Deary! – in Maine. His insistence that he will always love Lou throws her off her three-wheeled family-circle: “Fast as shock she knew now what, what alone could come next, and her blood in every vessel tripped. Not her Maytree. Never her Maytree, who loved her, as he just unsaid,” (65).

The rift in the Maytree family allows the reader to see each character ponder his / her thoughts without interference from others. Toby repeatedly questions the recurrence of love, partners, companionship. “Her silence was paper on which he wrote. She always thought and felt precisely what he hoped. She loved making him happy. Was he his own or not?” (72) he wonders painstakingly, faced with a “love unlooked-for,” (100) with Deary. Lou erects a routine to replace Toby’s void and climbs Pilgrim Monument daily, to achieve “a grip on letting go,” (93). Petie grows into “Pete, who pondered facts,” (95) and resents his father for the next twenty years. Lou’s death 39 years later is addressed amidst this cacophony of contemplation – Dillard is brief and quiet, upholding Lou’s silent dignity. The section ends with a one-page hint that old friends Deary and Lou are reunited – what about Toby? Their meeting is announced, fittingly, by the clouds, several pages later.

Toby and Deary’s relocation to Maine introduces a new vocabulary to the story. Physically, “Maine’s beauty was not of sky but of earth. Sunlight hit black spruces and died, or sprawled in fields,” (102). Their entrepreneurial relationship means secondary jobs (lobstering, Deary suggests with twinkling eyes) take priority over poetry. Dillard sounds critical of their revamped lifestyle, complaining that they “wasted their many-paned dining room on dinner parties instead of ongoing games and music,” (118). They live a noisier life, but Dillard maintains her muted, descriptive writing filter and the narrative never becomes loud.

Back in Cape Cod, Lou remains connected to Toby. She reads a published poem and notices that from his “usual poetic line he had subtracted a foot. Perhaps the cold took his breath away,” (106), respecting her husband’s adaptation to a new life. Another time,

Lou felt a friendly greeting from Maytree in Maine. She felt his surprise jig several times a year. Did it rebound from that old blackboard the moon? Hallo, she said back like Toad, amused. (133)

Petie-turned-Pete-turned-father finally visits Toby and Deary and is a new man before returning to his boat, wife and child.

Inevitably, Toby returns to his wife and child, too with an ailing Deary. Toby is injured and knows his only hope is to ask Lou to help him care for Deary, but he arrives at his decision after futilely muddling through non-existent options. He returns to his beaches to appeal to his wife. Lou has already felt something stirring in the sky earlier that day; a “flying wedge of cirrus was coming in high,” (157). The tables have turned: Toby is speechless and Lou wraps his silence with her words of welcome and familiarity. Dillard expertly depicts a worn out Toby, unsure of a woman he last saw twenty years ago: “Come in, his ex-own Lou said, and he saw her oval face, her wide eyes still affectionate, or affectionate again, or affectionate by habit. Or she didn’t recognize him,” (197).

The Maytrees’ bed hosts its next patient for the eight weeks Deary competes with life before losing. As her health declines, Toby and Lou revive their dormant relationship, pausing their inevitable companionship to take out the garbage and “breathe[d] the wind," (176). Pete’s family assists with caretaking and the Maytree family regularly gather around the woman who first rendered them apart; she refused to fight love and now refuses to fight death. Dillard pays homage to the town’s bay tides, which “amazed them again. Bay tides re-created the world, stink and all,” (204) and revives the friendship and natural passion Toby, Lou and the rest of Cape Cod live by for a reflective, sound ending to a timeless love story.

Book: THE MAYTREES by Annie Dillard. Published by Harper Collins, 2007.

Family Trees, Family Trunks

We have bigger houses but smaller families;

More conveniences, but less time;

We have more degrees, but less sense;

More knowledge, but less judgment;

More experts, but more problems;

More medicines, but less healthiness;

We've been all the way to the moon and back,

but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.

We build more computers to hold more information to

produce more copies than ever but have less communication.

We have become long on quantity,

but short on quality.

These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;

Tall man but short character;

Steep profits but shallow relationships.

It's a time when there is much in the window,

but nothing in the room.

— The Paradox of Our Age, by the 14^th Dalai Lama

The way everyone talked about my great grandfather and his immaculate memory, I was convinced that, had we been alive at the same time, he would have remembered me. He never forgot a name, my father said, and would systematically enquire about spouses, children and careers of relatives he was meeting after years. “Like an elephant who never forgets,” someone once quipped, and I pictured my great grandfather as a large grey elephant, all sagging skin and drooping ears, but with a nimbleness to his thoughts and words.

I was in India for my cousin’s wedding and stole away one morning to the coastal town of Pondicherry where my father spent his childhood. I knew my father had lived with his grandparents – my great grandparents – for some years before they all moved to the larger city of Chennai, and I was eager to visit the house that played host to so many of my father’s milestones, measured in dollops of mischief and ladles of pride.

The three hour drive hugged the coast line the entire way. The Indian Ocean seemed glued to my left window, punctuated by the occasional beach resort. My sunglasses kept out the sun but not the salty breeze that nested in my hair and made my shirt dance. The water roared its welcomes and warnings to me throughout, and when I finally got out of the car in front of the address I had scribbled down that morning, the tide’s rhythm continued in my head, as if a shell had affixed itself to my ear en route.

My great grandfather’s house stood before me: grey with sagging walls and drooping windows. It had responded well to sharply administered doses of neglect and the crashing tides of time. The garden was overrun with weeds and vines that now sought refuge indoors through cracks in the windows. Rust wrapped around the knee-high gate, which protested loudly when I pushed it open. Weary of stepping too heavily and disturbing the fragile state of a long-retired home, I just stared, instead. What now?

“Who are you?” asked a voice in polite Tamil, a South Indian language spoken in the area. I turned to my left and it took me a few moments to locate a small head peeping through the neighbor’s door.

“My name is Aditi. My great grandfather used to live in this house. I just came to see it. Sorry for disturbing you! I’m leaving now.” I clicked the gate closed and turned towards the car. I wasn’t sure how much more Tamil I could manage and assumed our conversation was over.

“Where are you visiting from?” he asked.

“America,” I replied. “I’m in Chennai for a wedding.”

He nodded understandingly; after all, weddings are the delightfully or disturbingly universal reason for people to visit India. But I had no idea how to say that in Tamil and didn’t try. I doubted he was interested in my social commentary, anyway.

“America! You’ve come all the way and you’re visiting for just a few minutes? Come inside, have some tea! I knew your great grandfather; he was an excellent man.”

Visiting relatives in Chennai had taught me that just as vegetable vendors and others constantly passed by people’s houses, calling out their wares in loud and resonant voices, so did neighbors between them, a non-stop shuttle of food and children and news and noise. People’s doors stayed open all day to allow the sun to draw its shadows, and were only shut at night when hungry mosquitoes took over to draw blood instead. I could imagine this man in my great grandfather’s house, spending time, eating meals, playing with the children. I was curious to know what he knew about my family.

As I approached the man’s doorway, he brought his palms together in greeting and I was moved by this kindly old man with a soft voice and thin hair, skin lotioned by sun and salt. I slipped out of my sandals and followed him into a small, neat room with a single bed, a framed picture of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, and a ceiling fan churning the air with a lethargy that suited the sleepy town.

“Your great grandfather was a very wise man. He raised a wonderful family and taught his children to single-mindedly pursue knowledge, for that is the ultimate goal” he said in English. He spoke with a thick accent, pushing English words out of a mouth that first learned how to shape Tamil vowels and consonants, and I envied his bilinguality.

“He was a teacher?” I asked.

“He taught us all, child. Anyone who had a problem went to him. One of his favorite pieces of advice was from the Dalai Lama. Here, let me show you something.”

He disappeared into another room and returned with a framed poster titled “The Paradox of Age.” While I skimmed it he disappeared again, and I heard a clatter of cups in another room. He returned with two stainless steel tumblers of tea balanced gingerly in shallow, wide saucers. We poured the tea from tumbler to saucer to cool it, the back and forth sounding a little like the ocean, and I followed his lead and drank my tea out of the saucer, leaving the tumbler unused on the floor.

“There is much in the window but nothing in the room,” he said, quoting the last two lines of the Dalai Lama saying. “Quite often,” he elaborated, “a person believes he is in a dilemma because of how he perceives his situation. An obstacle is a hardship, but also a chance to overcome and grow stronger. A loss is painful, but also a chance to learn to live with less and separate our wants from our needs.”

I nodded and continued sipping my tea. We sat in a rare silence that was comfortable, not awkward: two strangers drinking tea out of saucers, bound by the memory of my distant relative and his dear friend, my ancestor and his neighbor. Whatever lay outside his window, there was something magical in the room.

He broke the silence. “Before you go back to Chennai, be sure to stop by the Ganesh temple. Your great grandfather loved visiting it.”

I rose and handed him the Dalai Lama poster.

“No, keep it. Your great grandfather gave it to me, and now I shall give it to you.”

I gratefully accepted with a “thank you” – I knew how to say that in Tamil – and left. The man pointed me in the direction of the temple and wished me a safe and happy future.

“Remember, a triangle can be a square that has been torn apart, or a square whose tips fell in love.” He smiled.

The temple was ten minutes away on foot, ancient and patient and comforting to step into. Right at the entrance waited Lakshmi the elephant – a real one! – who blessed me with her trunk before nudging me for some rice that sat in a sack within my reach but out of hers. She seemed to smile while she ate. Inside, I made a quick round of the main shrine to the elephant God before heading back to my car.

I left Pondicherry feeling peaceful and satisfied. I had something my great grandfather once owned and lived by; now I could learn to live by it, too. My great grandfather the elephant! I left knowing I had the blessings of not just that elephant, but many more.