Pick It Up and Give It a Go Again

“Find your light and take your bow! This is your moment!” I prompted 130 students over the past few days as we wrapped up ten days together in circus with two energetic performances.

Now I look at the photos and videos on my phone: students balancing feathers while wearing oversized coats and clown noses, a troupe of ribbon dancers on a blue-washed stage, two umbrella performers looking like giant raindrops, two fan dancers stirring the air at the top of an act, three students making a hoop sun, the signs for the elements of nature lining the stage.

There is a short rehearsal video where you can hear my voice saying, “It’s okay if it drops. Just pick it up and give it a go again.” In some ways, that was the whole ten days.

We explored elements of movement with our bodies and with objects: weight, time, space, force, flow. I taught hoop skills, balancing, scarf juggling, ribbon dancing, and we spent two days on clowning. I was surprised by how much the students enjoyed exploring the two clown archetypes, Whiteface and Auguste, and equally moved by the kindnesses they showed each other in improvisation.

Somewhere in the process of paying attention, trying, failing, trying again, and discovering that you “have it in you,” the theme for our show emerged. As I watched kids become wind, water, fire, and earth, all five classes transformed into The Circus of the Elements. We built Circus Air, Circus Water, Circus Fire, Circus Earth, and finally Circus Storm, where all the elements came together.

I became the ringmaster/meteorologist, guiding the acts and occasionally vamping with my pinwheel hat and slide-whistle weather instruments. The band instructor handled the music and lighting cues. The art teacher worked with sixth graders to create our circus sign. The music teacher helped with rehearsal and performance logistics. The gym teacher generously gave us her space for all ten days.

The first performance was for the school, with the fourth graders performing for the fifth and sixth graders. There was a considerable amount of pep talk around that. I reminded them that they were doing things the “big kids” hadn't done yet, that they could find a friendly face in the audience if they needed an anchor, and that this particular circus was ephemeral. 

“What does ephemeral mean?” a student asked.

There will never be another Circus of the Elements exactly like this one, I said. It will only last for a brief time. 

Through their presence, their abilities, their willingness to try, and what they created together, they made a singular moment of circus theatre.

This was a good reminder for me too, as I dealt with last-minute broken feathers, knotted ribbons, clown anxiousness, schedule conundrums, and one particularly long and dizzying day when I forgot to eat.

After the school performance the students were ecstatic. Flying higher than eagles, they all wanted me to visit them during lunch. I sat with each group as they shared their performance experiences.

“I was scared but I did it and I want to perform again!” There were a lot of pizza-sauced smiles in the cafeteria. “Is it really your last day today? It’s over?”

They were blindsided by what happens to time when you are having fun learning something new.

I received lots of side hugs, and later some pretty incredible artistic interpretations of what they had enjoyed most about their time in the circus.

Then came the evening performance for families and the community.

The evening cast was much smaller because of soccer practices, dance practices, and other extracurriculars. Kids have busy schedules. The school show had been choreographed for five classes totaling 130 students. The evening show had less than half that number, and I had one rehearsal with the group. A creative challenge!

When my clown duo couldn't be there, two students stepped into their roles at the last minute. We had a pickup rehearsal in the art room during my break. I brought in the other clowns to work on their busking ideas. The art teacher made last-minute origami creatures for them to hand to audience members. The clowns busked before the show, weaving through the audience, and then appeared again during another act. 

Somehow, it all works out in theatre. You throw yourself into it fully, a free fall of efforts: time, space, weight, force, flow. And then, somehow, two girls with umbrellas emerge looking like giant raindrops. The quiet kid becomes the rising sun, a clown balances a feather like it is his entire world and before you know it everyone flaunts and takes a bow. Balloons bounce into the audience, and remarks are made and donors thanked. Group photos are taken. The power lines switch off, the tent is packed up, and the circus disappears. 

What remains, I hope, is my reminder:

“It’s okay if it drops. Just pick it up and give it a go again.”

Piecing It Apartogether

I'm not so great around my birthday anymore since my mother died. I feel deeply lonely, no matter what, and a scrambled, frenetic energy that goes nowhere. For my 56th birthday, I was determined to make the best of a year that was divisible by eight, my favorite number. I collected all the self-portraits I've written over the years, took them to Staples, and had copies made to create a book. My plan was to make the book interactive with pull-outs and pockets with secret messages for the recipient, and collaged covers. This never happened because the project was beset with printing errors, user errors, and a general sense of "maybe this just doesn't matter all that much to anyone other than me." So I relegated all 100 (why?!) copies, and the special binding machine I purchased to the attic storage, and forgot about it. A week or so ago when I was digging around for art supplies, I opened up a suitcase and rediscovered all the copies of poems.

I left them out as I worked on another project. "Maybe now is the time to do something with these," I thought. Then I really looked them over, all these versions of me, poems I no longer related to, and I threw them all away. The spontaneity! Whee! I'm letting go of all this ego! Also, how wasteful. I felt liberated, with a coating of light guilt and melancholy.

Later that week I was looking for some drawings to show my friend, and I found yet another box of those self portraits. I must have said to myself that if I left the poems within view, I'd do something with them. But the box became part of my everyday landscape, just another object my eyes grazed over to get to the glue sticks or pompoms they were truly seeking. I ignored them.

"Those are some determined poems," I decided. Now I had to do something with them. 

Every morning I've been cutting these self-portraits apart, redacting myself. I redacted my own book of poems, Year in the Blanks, a few times over, and I have so many versions of that book now on my hard drive it's confusing. My process was different for that. I started by blacking out words and phrases on the printed pages, and then quickly went into the file and removed words, and tinkered with space. It had less a physical, visceral feeling to it. I was, for the most part, focused on a screen.

Cut-up technique is nothing new. The Dadaists started it in the 1920s, and William S. Burroughs began cutting up newspaper articles and rearranging the words to create prophetic phrasings in the 50s and 60s. Many artists use the technique now in varying ways. 

"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out."  - William S. Burroughs

I'm not exactly cutting into the present when I take apart my old poems. I'm cutting into the past me, revealing what I hope is more present tense, and less about me. It's hard to get away from yourself when creating though. There's always just a titch of you flavoring the soup. I think that's what I find fascinating about this. How much do I pare away and what do I keep?

Cutting up paper is a very tactile, focused experience. The screech of scissors from the 1970s, the little slivers of paper that I flip over carefully with a licked finger then shuffle around the desk. I trim away suffixes, prefixes, rearrange words in a puzzle that has no end goal image to follow. When I'm done I take a few photos of the poems as they rest on the desk, and then I whisk them into the trash bin. Ephemeral. That kind of letting go feels good too. It is pure play. Quiet and filled with delight.

Here's the source self-portrait I used this morning. The poems you've seen throughout this post were made from this poem. 

The Best of It

“How is the ring of my being singing through others?”

- Nora Bateson

Of course this book of poems

is me, and you, 

and the stranger who

starred in it, looped, bracketed, underlined

whole passages —

order is always

starting over

A reminder that objects

invite our touches,

just a highlight here

and there

As though the self

were eager to be wrecked

As though each of our selves

were dying to be found

and then cut out 

of our muzzy landscapes

and the chap of dreams, 

rearranged, out-of-context,

and out of order.

How messy

it is to live, all

marks and meaning

to get to some final

point of exclamation,

to feel connected.

How distance

begins to look extraordinary

and logimagical enough to abandon

this poem-book-lover-past-tense-childhood

for someone else to pick up 

and start over. 

It's Me, I Swear.

I’m writing these words to you. When you read them and hear my voice, whether you know me or not, you learn something of my mind. You know a bit (but not everything) of what makes me tick. When I write I shake up my failings, my joys, my tendency to drift off into the Otherwhere. I’m not trying to sell you anything. You either twig to my choice of words, my syntax, all these commas, and yes, the dreaded em dash everyone is avoiding now – all part of my unique code – or you don’t, and you turn the invisible page with a flick of your pointer finger. This is the new book, the phone that we carry everywhere to have access to all information, false and real, and to document our lives. To prove. 

I’ve been trying to use my phone as a phone. Why do we call this object with no discernable receiver or snug earpiece, or long coil of connection to twist around our fingers, a “phone?” I crave a proper word for it. Yesterday as I chatted with a friend on my “cell” (who uses that term anymore?) I experienced that phenomenon where for a moment you can hear an intrusive echo of your own voice. Everything I said was parroted back with a three second delay. My head was so crowded by my echo I couldn’t think to continue the conversation. We paused until whatever caused it passed, and I could speak again without me talking twice. 

Maybe phonecho is the right word for it. It is an auditory, hallucinatory, visual canyon we shout into, our words bouncing off each other. Whoever shouts loudest gets their message across.

I can’t write or read on my phonecho. I’m in awe of people who do.  I write best by hand, or on my computer. I comprehend what is read from the pages of a book, and I sluice what is read from a screen. 

I also dream a lot, offline, and remember many of them. These dreams are not on my phone, or yours, or anywhere, really. Are they in my blood, soft tissue, nerves, pons? They are the rucksack of images I have processed throughout my days, hauled out and handed back and forth between the here and there. 

Last night in my dreams I had a winter glove on my left hand, and in the palm was a strip of masking tape, and on that tape were some handwritten numbers. The numbers changed like a padlock code. I understood that I had to press the center of my palm when the sequence was correct. I had to unlock the code to be able to communicate. No matter what sequence I chose, I was never successful because the code was constantly changing, its language bending toward AI sameness. 

Clipped numbness. 

False humilities. 

Whispered truths.

I made that last bit sound like AI, but was me, really. Trust me. I mean it. These are my words that I am writing to you, words I’m not sure I can prove.