ETHICAL HEIGHTS
The lofty heights of ethical paths,
Where virtue shines, where light shines clear,
In the hearts of the brave, in the souls of the pure,
A beacon of ethics, a guide to truth.
Courage like a rock, steadfast,
In the sea of challenges, in the storms of life,
We walk firmly, with insatiable faith,
To the heights of honor, where the light shines.
Reverence is like a flower, sweet-smelling,
It spreads around us, like a roaring wave,
Appreciation of every being, every work,
In the shelter of ethics, where the heart burns.
Selflessness leads us, hand in hand,
Through labyrinths of compassion, through challenges difficult,
We share love, give strength,
On ethical heights, where humanity meets.
Oh, may our steps always be firm,
On the path of ethical heights, where virtue flourishes,
May God in our hearts be a guide, a beacon of the world,
We soar high, where we subtly walk the bridges of meeting a soul like ours to embrace a soul-elevating thought. How to help humanity sleeping on the wings of the witch Maya?
In the name of ethics, an attack in defense of the truth!
Wait
If I lose my heart to the snow of winter,
Close my eyes and bear it,
Even if I hang myself, it’s the medicine of love.
I will think of you forever
I will tell the sky about my pain.
Spring does not come to my garden anymore,
To my cheerful lips, as if laughter did not run,
My arms are filled with empty hopes,
But I will think of you forever
I will tell my dream to the star.
If you didn’t exist, I wouldn’t see you
My heart did not burn with pain,
I don’t even know what I want.
I will remember your two worlds,
At night, I’m having a hard time.
Even though my eyes are full of youth,
It’s bad if everyone calls me you
Only you, one side of you,
I look forward,
I will watch your ways...
Rakhmatullayeva Durdona Muhiddin’s daughter was born on April 9, 2004. Currently, the National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek has completed the 1st stage.
Achievements: winner of many science Olympiads and quiz participant. In the future: Professional family psychologist.
SHOULDERS THAT LIFT ME UP
The icy breeze of the morning hitting my face and the pouring rain outside prompted me to get up. I opened my eyes to find out where the cold was coming from: the window was left open. I was thinking for a while, then I remembered that I had to go to school, so I jumped up. After hastily eating breakfast, Ayam took out my white boots, which I brought from the market with my father last week.
- It's cold outside, the streets are muddy. Dress warmer, he said. And I:
"No, no, it's going to get dirty, I'll go in my shoes," I protested. But inside I wanted to wear my boots and praise them to my friends. At that moment, my grandmother told my father:
- My son, if not, take my grandson to the asphalt road.
Dad gestured as if to say "let's go" and we went out together. Then my father bent down, and I slowly climbed out behind him. As we walked down the muddy street, I kept my eyes on my white boots as I hugged my father's neck.
I still remember the traces left by my father on the October rain and muddy street that day. I will never forget the love of my mountain that day...
The Rite of Spring, by Pina Bausch (Photo: Maarten Vanden Abeele)
The Blood Wedding of the Earth
common ground(s)
The Rite of Spring
Cal Performances
Zellerbach Hall
When Stravinsky composed Le sacre de printemps, and Nijinsky first choreographed it, for a notorious Paris premiere served with a heavy helping of riot and hysterics, one would be forgiven for guessing that things African were hanging in the air at the time. After all, Picasso had for years been inspired by the masks of Africa in drawings, sculpture and paintings such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon, already famous, and the cubism that commanded much of the Parisian artworld had deeply African roots.
But who would have guessed it would take until the 2020s, by way of a brilliantly original German choreographer and her adventurous son, in tandem with a Senegalese dance school and an echt-British performance company, to, at last, fully manifest the profound Africanness of one of the anchoring works of European modernism?
Well, sometimes even this world rises to justice. And the inspired synthesis of Stravinsky’s controlled howl, Pina Bausch’s relentless choreography, and the brave and brilliant talents of 38 young dancers from 14 African countries was made fully and bracingly manifest in Berkeley, thanks to Cal Performances, over a recent mid-February weekend.
Pina Bausch originally choreographed the piece on her own company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, in 1975, and anyone who saw Wim Wenders’ seminal film Pina will remember the triumphant work of her dancers. But seeing the same moves on the bodies of African dancers feels so apt, so right, it seems astonishing no one has done it before now.
The visceral, chthonic thrill of the piece is impossible to capture on page or screen without tearing both to pieces and rearranging the fragments into a vital and dazzling chaos that begins in sleep and ends in a death whose colossal significance is the resurrection of the earth itself. At the heart of the piece, we are in a pre-verbal world of ritual, fear, and hope, a dramatic myth whose logic is that of life itself, hinging as it does on death for it to be born at all.
The celebrated Senegalese dancer and teacher Germaine Acogny, who appeared in the accompanying piece common ground(s), is quoted in the program notes as saying, “When I first saw Pina’s Rite of Spring, I felt it was an African rite.” She goes on to say she was impressed by how many of the moves within the dance reminded her of those native to African dance, and the entire aura of the work feels intimately African “because it is something universal.”
The piece is fundamentally a group effort; there are no solos as such until the very end, when the Chosen One (an exquisitely vulnerable Khadija Cisse) dances for long agonizingly suspenseful minutes as she seems literally to dance herself to death before our eyes – it is the one conclusion to Le sacre this viewer has seen in which I believed the dancer might this time actually expire at the end.
Other standouts included a princess who effortlessly led the young women, Shelly Ohene-Nyako, and a king-in-waiting, Bazoumana Kouyaté, who dominated among the men. But the sharp coordination of the dancers as a group in a piece that flirts with chaos in the only way that works artistically – by keeping it under complete control – was a truly strange thrill to behold. Full justice was done to Bausch’s conception, if what I recall from Wenders’ film, which, sadly, was filmed just after Bausch’s death, was a fair expression of it. For me, this performance was the crowning of a work of unique artistic power.
The production, from the Pina Bausch Foundation, the École des Sables, of Senegal (and co-founded by Germaine Acogny), and Sadler’s Wells of London, and the program of which it is a part, was initiated by Foundation chair Salomon Bausch as part of a “transmission project” to keep alive and relevant the work of Pina Bausch after her untimely death in 2009. Its planned premiere in 2020 at the Théâtre National Daniel Serano in Dakar was canceled due to the pandemic, but it refused to be kept down, and was finally premiered two years later and came to the United States recently on a tour that began in New York and ended in Berkeley.
A side note about the production: following Bausch’s original conception, the dance was performed on a layer of peat that had to be spread by a small army of stagehands across a large tarpaulin laid out across the stage during intermission. It came from Canada and had to be carried from city to city throughout the tour. It is an essential part of the dance: by the end of the work, the dancers are partly covered by it in a sign of their marriage to the earth and its perpetual cycle of life and death: it is both life ritual and death ritual, wedding and funeral, a digging of graves and the cradling of a child.
The first half of the program included a piece for two female dancers: common ground(s), performed by two legends, the afore-mentioned Germaine Acogny and a dancer who worked with Bausch at the beginning of the latter’s career, Malou Airaudo. The work was a simple but profound meditation on female friendship and the life of women. The senior dancers make no pretense to virtuosity, but instead emphasize their wisdom, maturity and groundedness in the daily and annual cycles of life and growth. At one point they speak, in French and English, before returning to the wordless eloquence of dance and the rites of daily life. The music was by Fabrice Bouillon LaForest, performed on strings and keyboard but evoking the sounds of Africa and the earth, cicadas, winged creatures, and animals in the night. It was a work of peace only to be broken by the eruption of spring.
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first stories in the “Otherwise” series for middle-grade readers: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia.
I lived without you
The love spell struck suddenly,
Made a nest in my heart,
As a miracle my love novel,
I dreamed with your absence.
Right and left, wedding knot,
On the happy day of lovers,
I stayed true to our love,
I got engaged with your absence.
My eyes longed for you,
I could not be happy with you,
Signed my soul pen,
I got married with your absence.
I knew the love poem,
I loved life so much,
I did not blame my fate,
I lived with your absence.
Count down the fall
Falling There lurks still fall---fall!
And—it keep on to where it stops.
Out fr’ dunder-dee clouditry.
Really? How come?
whack
D’ deh kwyte vertrical roarozontinal fast falling nature of these spouse’s present.
whack
( ) whoooooooooo down past—Top-mayor there?
Where it folds under itself down as far as it can and because’s where you’re fell to.
137 {milliseconds into the fall} nd down in this here clear air no don’t look down ( ) the wind 133 {seconds into the fall} past—log pole’s t-phone factory? Scrappo’s? Did’st thou say—Skrappo’? ( ) of the earsplitting kind? pantography Human nature to just keep on same but; all’d gone and all fall. 128 125 {milliseconds into the fall} Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Bac—
Wow!
Isn’t this game great, great fun?
Yes it’s fun!
—k! Catch! Squeak! St—! Fl’ g’ y’ ss’ is’s—the end—the end—could the end be—really really near? Hot hickory [pillo] Hot hickory [pillo] 105 100 {milliseconds into the fall} there be pillows arranged all out for the falling? There be pillows arranged for the out falling out? [pillo] It bends under its ‘neath and all’s gone and all fall. All stop looking ahead. Human nature. 95 93 91 89 80 {milliseconds into the fall} I trust them they got brains they won’t let that ug uckily happen where on Earth are we destined for That is what happened to this town you know. 75 69 60 {milliseconds into the fall} [pillo] stormbushery’s roll’d over after all floods Pop Cubanore? This that b’ Pop Cubanore? 45 40 {milliseconds into the fall} hast not never seen my Pop Cubanore to dis day [pillo] why you do dis to me Gimi [why you do dis {pillo} to me] eh? Why shmush up me birdhouse, Gimi? Cab Krackelefish’d fer tunas just like deep down off that picture see Gimi just like deep down off that * esh?* This council. whack where on Earth are we destined for b b b where on Earth are we destined for That’s you. 35 22 22 {milliseconds into the fall} Pop Cubanore? This that b’ Pop Cubanore? upcmpashoosh this here tablesplat so; prepare 20 17 15 Why shmush up me nice l’il birdhouse Gimi? Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Bac—
Wow!
Isn’t this game great, great fun?
Yes it’s fun!
—k! Catch! Squeak! St—! Fl’ g’ y’ ss’ please promptly prepare thy d-d-daily 10’s, {milliseconds into the fall} 8’s, {milliseconds into the fall} 7’s, {milliseconds into the fall} and 5’s {milliseconds into the fall} “suh”, prepare thy whatever soooooooo splat hast not never seen my Pop Cubanore to dis day whack whack whack
You stopped watching what’s coming.
SPLAT! SPLATTER
