Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

For much of January I was incommunicado, involved in several projects, rehearsing with DanceCircus when possible, yet trying to save my voice, and energy, for performances. Working with a dance company is not the same as giving a poetry reading. When I perform alone, I can vary my speed, pauses, inflections, and gestures, and no one cares. But for DanceCircus, I had to be consistent, fifteen minutes of poetry the same every time. Betty Salamun choreographed movement and designed costumes to my words, the dancers moved to my words, everything hung on the words! What would the dancers do if the words that came out of my mouth weren't the ones they were expecting? Luckily I didn't have to find out. I know, performances are like that, the lighting and sound people, the musician, poet, dancers, stage manager, we're interdependent, an art-based eco-system.

That kind of responsibility made last Saturday’s five minutes at the Woodland Pattern Marathon seem like a breeze. The annual fund-raising event, thirteen hours this year, featured over a hundred Wisconsin poets, each with five minutes to read. I was so fascinated by the quality and variety of the poetic voices that I listened for over five hours.

And now it’s January’s end, and I have another performance coming up, a food pantry benefit at the Nineteenth Street Coffee House, 631 N 19th St., on Friday, February 2, at 8 PM, $4 donation plus two cans of food. If you want to donate to food pantries and hear Brenda Cardenas, Susan Firer, Karina Schafer, and me in return, here’s your chance.

When the truth is inconvenient, some people pretend not to notice it; they continue along their preferred, or profitable, path until they reach an impasse. So here we are at the impasse, overwhelmed with wind, warmth, and weirdness of weather to such a degree that even those who are inconvenienced have started to get nervous. Which makes this a good time to see Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. There are two free showings in the next few days.

The first showing is at the North Shore Presbyterian Church (one block north of Capitol Dr. and one block west of Oakland) on Friday, January 26, at 7 PM, doors open at 6:30 pm. Enter through the northeast door. The second showing is at UWM’s Union Cinema on Monday, January 29, at 7 PM.

Dance is part of my family history. My grandfather danced on the tables in the Ukraine; my mother was still prancing around to Paul Cebar at age 85. As for me, I think I was born dancing, or at least I have no plans to stop as long as I have feet that move to music. Actually, that's not true: we don't need feet to dance. My mother taught yoga to people in wheelchairs, so maybe I'll dance as long as my eye-balls bounce.

Over thirty years ago I started to draw dancers. I liked the challenge of capturing the motion. And whether I'm dancing, drawing, or painting, for me dancing is going with the flow. The music tells my feet what to do, or the motion tells my brush where to move. So it's not surprising that the first real poem I wrote, Yoruba Pygmies, was for a dancer, Clyde Morgan. I'd invited him to perform at a reading I was giving at the Jewish Community Center in 1984. He accepted my invitation on the condition I write something for him to dance to. It took months to write, he performed it only once, yet the poem changed my life. Jeff Poniewaz heard me read it and invited me to become one of the Earth Poets when he formed the group almost twenty years ago. That meant I had to keep on writing ecological performance poetry. That lead to my collaborating with other dancers, most frequently with Melanie Panush. Collaboration with dancers is perhaps in my genes. And it's in my future: My performances with DanceCircus take place on Friday, January 19, & Saturday, January 20, at 8 PM at the Humphrey Masonic Center, 790 North Van Buren, Milwaukee, General Admission: $15., Students and Seniors: $10.
Here's an excerpt from a poem I wrote for this event:

LIFE ON A LEDGE
We came from the water, now we're back again
Marching towards the border, where we may end
All life's trapped, in the space on the ledge
Ebbing, ebbing, ebbing towards the edge.
The ledge of the universe, edge of the universe
I know my puny verse, is unable to reverse
The trend
We're mere molecule, moving in galaxy
Yet every eye can see
We're rounding the bend

The water that's here
Is the water we've got
Water that's frozen
Melts when hot
Thaws, thaws, follows nature's laws
Held here by gravity, it's earth's through eternity
Life is not

Strapped in, trapped in, the space on the ledge
Ebbing, ebbing, ebbing towards the edge,
Edging edging, edging towards the eddy
Sea levels rising, yet we don't seem ready
To act in concert to stem what we've begun
Still in denial of the damage done

We came from the water, now we're back again
Marching towards the border, where we may end,
All life's trapped, in the space on the ledge
Ebbing, ebbing, ebbing towards the edge.

© 2006, Suzanne Rosenblatt

1/8/07 No, I'm not hibernating. Who's hibernating? Even the bears aren't. The one winter we don't go south for two weeks to see family and make art, the south comes to us. If it weren't so scary, I'd think we were lucky.

Weather seems to be the world-wide conversation topic, even when there are other things to talk about. The cover of my London School of Economics Alumni Magazine (I was there in 1957-58) shows Earth on a life-preserver floating in the ocean. Will life be preserved? The world's warming to Al Gore.

When I'm on my bike or carrying my helmet, I'm a magnet for commentary. At the Fitness Center, Jeff, one of the trainers, and I are soon into the status of the globe. I bike downtown, and a Mexican man working on the building exterior next door to Artasia tells me the seasons are reversing, so warm here, and can you believe it, it's snowing near the border with Texas. Snowing! He points to my bike and says, "That's the solution," and of course it could have been. Instead there's another reversal: in China everyone who can is giving up his bike for his dream of a private car.

I go to the dance studio to rehearse with Betty Salamun. She thinks we passed the tipping point a year ago, I think it was probably longer ago than that. What's left? To raise awareness. If everyone tries, perhaps we can slow down the speeding up.

So no, I'm not hibernating, I'm collaborating, with Betty Salamun and DanceCircus, biking downtown in January to rehearse our endangered species concert. The dancers warm up, and so does Milwaukee. It's the countdown, high stress, is everyone ready? Our performances are January 19th and 20th at the Humphrey Masonic Center.