I've been actively lurking (if that term can be applied to blogs) here for a while, and since I was signed in to Blogger (not a frequent occasion) thought I'd drop my first line here.
I have a question: am I the only American contrib'r to this blog? Maybe I should attempt to focus on that voice, although honestly I'm not very American, in the typical sense of the word. And in two days I'm moving to Sarajevo, Bosnia.
My "trip" to Greenbelt has many facets this year. Last year I decided to come about one week out, and was really helped out by the Grace people, who I had met briefly during a prior trip to London.
This year I am definately coming, if I have to swim there. But I am also looking to perform, hopefully at the Performance Cafe venue. I was also asked if I wanted to do something for New Forms 1 or 2. I definately have some ideas for NF2, I don't have the people power for something in NF1, but I will have to wait until we're settled in Sarajevo to again start thinking about that.
I am looking to strike that perfect balance between participating as a creative and also as a consumer, having it as a venue but not allowing that creative activity overwhelm the getting-something-out-of-it-all. It is the highlight of my artistic calendar either way.
Lastly, I will do just a little double-posting. I don't like doing this too much, I want whatever I put here to be it's own thing, but here are a couple entries I have on my own site that relate directly to my GB03 preps: preparing my demo for GB and soon after my best gig ever...some thinking about performance and critics during that process...and finally re-discovering a friend from GB02, Iain Archer
Aside: one of my fav musicians, Tom Conlon, is playing london in May. checkit.
Aside 2: what do you think of a blogroll consisting of this blog's contrib'rs? That way I can find ya'll's other voices.
Last Good Friday a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds gathered behind a hillock as pilgrims on the annual Iona Easter Experience went walkabout, doing stations of the cross around the island. The children were performing one of the stations - typically provocative (for Iona), typically pertinent. As the pilgrims approached, they moved to the top of the hill and, holding high their home-made banners proclaiming 'Not in my name', they began chanting, "Don't kill Jesus, don't kill Jesus".
Some members of our Iona Community Family Group were there, including two of the children among that hilltop crowd. Last night they shared with the rest of us the inspiration they enjoyed there during Easter. The stations were just one memorable session among many that week. People misguidedly assume Iona's a nice quiet place to go and retreat from life. Couldn't be more different. It's a place where hard issues are dealt with face-on, where prejudices shatter as lights come on and people shudder into community. Where the sideways view counts.
.........I love it,when you get close.....the human contact of course but I mean the relational stuff .......love it when you can get so close you can share the real meaning in life.
Spending time at a meal table with two humans who themseves openly talk about the damage done to them ......or the damage done by themselves ................... the broken humans,the broken offerings to life (and here I include myself) bring something special to relationships .... .......so I sat and dined with them, more importantly, communicated to each other. It was not long before the questions flowed. 'get beyond the level one' I say ....as soon as possible .....we move to a different level so I asked them both 'what do you think is the greatest quality in the other person and ......... fantastically the words flowed so quick, so sincere, so out there but also so sensitive.
1 'the listening and the acceptance'
2 'the kindness, the generosity'
.....they shared and glowed to hear the other affirm ......love it .... it was a deliberate developmental question aimed at facilitating them building each other up in world which so often savagely knocks them down. It was also about relational work .....their relationships and them with me too.
Then the next question was about the two doors. Do you know that one? If you don't let me know and I will do it yet again with you because it is so fantastic AGAIN for development ......... and they continued to talk openly and warmly with each other and myself.
I have written a mission statement for my new work and I will share ...in the next blog methinks. It helps me focus and say to myself ......'does this programme I am thinking, designing, proposing, .......does it fit the mission.' I want to be mission focused in all things and not just doing the admirable things like meeting needs and and building relationships .....I want to be proactive. I am a man with a mission .....non oppressively, but freely chosen with self determined hope.
I yearn for the wholeness of these damaged bhp's .....but so much I will not add to the deprivation and create dependency.
I am off .........and ask me to tell you the 'bus driver' joke next time we meet
bhp
"If you didn't like what you saw tonight, then you don't like football." Des Lynam's closing remarks after ITV's screening of Man Utd 4 - Real Madrid 3 (Madrid win 6-5 on aggregate), were typical tabloid TV, but apposite. It was a cracking game.
Such on-pitch poetry took me straight back to an article in the current Harper's Magazine, Ajax is all about attack, by Jim Shepard, one of the best pieces of football writing I've read for a long time.
He writes in the persona of Velibor Vasovic, Yugoslavian captain of the legendary Ajax team which won the club's first European Champions Cup in 1971. That Ajax team demonstrated a new way of playing which transformed European soccer, and which this evening, in elaborated and refined forms, we saw again. Shepard (as Vasovic) describes it beautifully:
Few remember that before Ajax became Ajax, Holland's football record in internationals had been the equal of Luxemborg's. It took all of us - coach, Communist, and longhaired boys - all of thirty minutes that first day to realize that what we'd collected was a group of people who thought about space. The ultra-aggressive football in which players switched positions and rained attacks from every angle was worked through and worked out on that pitch over the next three years. It was a collective. During rest breaks we all talked. We all listened. Suppose we tried this? What happened when we tried that? We started letting midfielders and defenders join in attacks, and saw the ways in which forwards would have to support such flexibility by flowing back to cover. Position shifting came easily and provided opponents, once we started playing matches, with a chaos of movement and change with which to deal. The first Dutch word I really learned to speak was "switch."
Funny, that word was quoted on the commentary this evening as being Steve MacManaman's first Spanish word learned on his move to Madrid.
While opponents see this fluid football as a chaos of movement and change, spectators see it as a form of poetics, teammates as perfect geometry: Vasovic said of teammate Johan Cruyff, "He was a Pythagoras in shorts".
Thinking about space. Switching. "Envisioning whole geometries." Football at this level transcends, inspires, and formulates lessons for life.