THE PERILS OF THE FLESH

Sasha Waltz & Guests: Körper

Körper

Sasha Waltz & Guests

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

As part of their much-welcome “Women’s Work” series, Cal Performances recently brought Sasha Waltz & Guests’ provocative dance “Körper” to Berkeley. “Women’s Work,” the latest instalment (titled with definite tongue in cheek) in the “Berkeley RADICAL” series, brings a much-needed corrective to what has too often been a male-dominated world.

As an unapologetic straight white Eurocentric male myself (to put my cards smartly on the table), I applaud, and cheer, the impulse behind this. The modern world has been over-driven by testosterone since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and the autocratic isms that have followed, beginning not least with capitalism, and has left us careening toward an Armageddon of our own making. More than ever before, the world needs a woman’s touch – the deep generosity of woman’s concern for the vulnerable, for others besides themselves; an essentialism that I suspect not even the most deep-dyed feminist will deny, at least privately. What bothers me about feminism, however, is that it too often has bought into the masculinist, and hubristic, assumptions of liberalism, voluntarism, individualism, modernity and the Enlightenment project, and by doing so merely has strengthened the chains that bind us all. Some feminists do not seem to realize that their liberation – and our salvation – requires that we overcome, and replace, modernity itself. Otherwise it will not be merely our souls that are lost.

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IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS

Pepperland

Mark Morris Dance Group

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

A review by Christopher Bernard

Mark Morris Dance Group performing Pepperland. (Credit: Mat Hayward.)

Eat your heart out, atheists: there is a god, and his name is Mark Morris.

To prove his divinity once again (though what god needs to prove his divinity? I should say: to display it to us hapless mortals), he brought his company of angels, fallen and otherwise, to Berkeley over the last weekend in September to ravish mere humanity with an hour-long dance based on one of the most inspired and exuberant and original and humane of all albums of popular music—the Beatles’ seminal (for once, the word is apt) contribution to what few virtues we have left in our world today: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It is almost embarrassing to salute so fulsomely a work of such wit, humor, graciousness, humanity, and eternal youthfulness. It stands uneasily on its pedestal, threatening at any moment to throw itself onto a 60’s dancefloor and show the rest of us how it is actually done.
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Spring Symphony

By Christopher Bernard

Spring:            Oh! Hear my call, oh world, my home!

The World:      We hear your call! The traveler’s home!

O Spring, rejoice us now!

The winter’s brutal winds have gone:

The storm

Has wrecked

Its last

Redoubt.

The birds are flying from the south.

They perch gravely on the fence;

Appraising bush and tree, they scout

A place to nest far from the cat

That watches from the windowsill.

Through the crust of snow and ice

That kept asleep her summer dream,

Earth’s eyes awake

As the sun perks up the daffodil

And turns the eyes of all to him

Until the universe itself

Beyond even his sovereignty

Breaks into music by a German old

In love with his Clara, his life, his earth

For a season; till

The trees uproot,

And the canyons wake

From their cold trance,

And the bears give birth,

And the mountains dance.

Spring:            Now, drunk on joy, let all things dance!

Oh, drunk on joy, let all things dance!

The World:      Till tizzygiddygiddydizzyfizzytizzytipsy we be,

All around

We fall down!

Spring:            And drunk on joy, now all things dance,

(So drunk on joy, how all things dance!)

The World:                 Till everybody

Finds this treasure:

Love, like life,

Is pain and pleasure.

Spring:            Drunk on joy, you’re drunk on joy!

The World:                 No, you’re drunk

As a love-lorn boy!

Spring:                        For Spring is love!

The World:                 And love is spring!

Spring:                        Dance if you know this!

The World:                  (If you don’t know, sing!)

Spring:            Drunk on joy, let’s all dance!

The World:     Oh drunk on joy, let’s all dance!

Spring:                        So drunk on joy –

The World:                  Oh, drunk on joy –

Still drunk on joy . . . !

(Pause.)

Spring:            Oh! Hear my call, oh world, my home!

The World:      We hear your call! The traveler’s home!

All:                  O Spring, rejoice us now!

_____

Christopher Bernard is author of two book-length collections of poetry, The Rose Shipwreck and Chien Lunatique, and is co-editor and poetry editor for the webzine Caveat Lector. His third novel, Spectres (originally serialized in Synchronized Chaos as “AMOR i KAOS”), will appear later this year, from Regent Press.

Christopher Bernard’s Novel “AMOR i KAOS”: Final Installment

A pool of darkness. To himself and his neighbors. A weeping willow above it, dragging its whip-like branches across the surface in the afternoon breeze. The little stone springhouse at the edge of the woods where they kept the cream sodas, the Oranginas, the cokes. The light gurgling of the spring over the rocks as it entered the pool. The olive green scum off toward the far side, where the tall reeds started in a dark green screen. The sound of a dragonfly darting past his ear, then the sight of it hovering over the pool, its whirring transparent wings, its delicately pulsing body as thin as a small, black finger; then it darts off.

The sense that a world of busyness is happening all around him, a hidden universe of intense, purposeful activity, from the grasses to the leaves, from the worms boring through the mud to the beetles and flies, to the lizards and snakes, to the squirrels, to the birds flashing in and out of the trees, to the little shifts of air, zephyrs, breezes, to the wind and the sky, to the clouds, the clouds, the clouds, those little worlds of chaos, to the sun, the unseen moon, the silent mob of stars behind the blank, opaque blue—in the apparent stillness, an endless busyness, motion endlessly rich, constant birth, constant renewal, an infinity of novel and strange and oddly beautiful forms, a panorama, a spectacle of beings he was, in effect, and maybe even in fact, blessed with witnessing and living among. A formation of fighters thunders across the sky.

One day an ant decides that all of creation has been made for it and it alone—from its creation myth in a clump of eggs in the corner of a damp tree stump, its growth, scrambling over its myriads of cousins, into maturity, its dramatic adventures scurrying over the forest floor, its toilsome existence dragging pieces of dead leaves and beetle husks into the darkness of its anthill, and its heroic destiny as an ant-angel squeaking hosannas to an ant-god in a heaven full of fellow insects—and it toils at growing its anthill and ant society to ever greater heights and to ever greater glory, to prove its grand dreams were justified, that nothing is too good for it or for its fellow ants, and that the rest of nature exists to support it, and will be, if need be, sacrificed to its interests, its survival, pleasures, whims. That ant, in its little soul and clever brain, has even invented a weapon that, implausibly enough, could destroy not only its own anthill, and all other anthills in the world, in one fell swoop, but the entire forest, the county, state, nation—life on earth itself. Such a clever ant! Such a mighty ant! And it might do that one day, just to show it can. It’s just that smart, and on a bad day, just that mad.

—That ant, he said, is me.

She said nothing for a very long time.

xxxxx

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Christopher Bernard’s novel “AMOR i KAOS”: Eighth Installment. (Search for earlier chapters by searching his name or the novel title on our site!)

But it doesn’t anymore. (Doesn’t what? she asked.) Happen as it used to. I remember you smiling at me. I remember me smiling at you. (I can’t say I remember either of those things. Or if they happened, they were pure reflexes. They were social smiles, meant to ward off hostility, to express harmlessness, peaceful intentions. They had no expressive meaning or intention whatsoever.) That isn’t what I remember. (You can’t trust memory. It lies.) Not always and not everywhere. (Where emotions are involved, almost always.) Then how am I to be so sure that what you say you remember is accurate either? If I have to choose between your memory and mine, thanks, but I think I’ll choose mine. First of all, because it’s more beautiful. (To you.) True: more beautiful to me. (And I choose mine because it seems more likely to be true.) No, because it’s meaner, and you think the meaner the thought, the more honest, the truer. Sometimes I’m afraid of you, you have a cruel streak, or maybe it’s just anger, and you’re looking for a reason, any reason, to fight. (You’re wrong. I don’t want to fight you, you want to fight me, everything you say is meant to provoke me. Everything you say is an attack. All you want to do is win.) No, no, no, I don’t accept your terms for this debate. (You’re trying to impose your meaning on me. I won’t have it!) I’m not trying to impose anything on you, I’m just trying to express what I feel and understand. (You won’t let this go, you’re being insistent and disrespectful.) No, I’m just not letting you win, I’m standing up to you and not letting you bully me. (You don’t hear what I’m saying! Stop this!) Stop what? Stop speaking? I can’t, I won’t. Don’t order me. (Don’t order me! You’re being selfish and childish in trying to impose your ideas and feelings on me.) I am not, that’s not what this is about. Why are we fighting? I don’t understand this, I don’t understand you. Why are you behaving like this? (What about the word stop do you not understand? You’re being violent in your insistence. I want no more communication from you. I will not listen. If you communicate with me again I will seek recourse to stronger action.)

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ARDOR

A review by Christopher Bernard

Ava/Ada

Manual Cinema

Zellerbach Playhouse

March 16–18, 2018

Manual Cinema performs Ada/Ava Friday–Sunday, March 16–18, 2018 in the Zellerbach Playhouse. (Photo credit: Yi Zhao)

Chicago’s audacious theater company Manual Cinema has brought its hour of magic to Berkeley just past the ides of March this year, and if you have a theatrical bone in your body, you owe it to yourself to hie thee thither posthaste ere its pixie dust evaporates away into the memories of its enthusiasts.

The form Manual Cinema has created is as simple as it is imaginative: a hybrid of simple animation, Balinese shadow puppet play and live performance (including sound effects and music), using two screens and four overhead projectors, much like those many of us have all suffered through in high school classrooms and musty lecture halls, but with imagination and heart attached, like the balloon that haunts the show throughout.

The live performances make each performance unique and provide the same tension one feels watching a high-wire act: of course they won’t fall, but what if they do?

The story is of an admirable simplicity and originality: two ageing sisters, Ada and Ava—identical twins, as an array of old-fashioned oval-framed silhouettes adorning the walls of their home let us know in no uncertain terms—keep a lighthouse on a stormy coast, and one of them dies (no spoiler here, as the death occurs in the very opening).

The remaining sister has not only lost her oldest and closest companion, but in a sense has also lost her other self, and the rest of the story is what happens to her in her long journey to try to rejoin her sister, through memories of their growing up together, dream and nightmare, an unfinished chess game, and the haunting presence of a tall pier mirror that taunts the surviving sister with the image of her dead twin, which is, of course, her own.

We are told the story in a series of acetate and paper projections, thrown against a small screen at the back of the stage, as the performers work the models in full view of the audience onstage, with their backs to us.

The performers portraying the two sisters act out their scenes in front of that first screen. The shadows on the screen are then thrown onto a considerably larger one hanging high above the stage, and in mirror-reverse from the action seen on the first. That second screen, combining the projected images into one commanding image is what rivets the audience’s attention from first to last, though one can, at any moment, glance down to watch the “kitchen” where the febrile stew is being concocted.

The strongly convincing performers included Vanessa Valliere as Ada and Kara Davidson as Ava, as well as puppeteers Dru Dir (who directed and first explored the ideas that eventuated in the show), Sam Deutsch and Charlotte Long. The musicians, whose music subtly shaped the show’s emotional cast, were Michael Hilger, Kyle Verger and Quinn Tsan, who also performed the colorful and clever sound effects.

One thing about the names: one might be forgiven for thinking of the heroine of Vladimir Nabokov’s longest novel for “Ada,” or Ava Gardner for her twin. One might also think of “avian” for Ava, as in at least one scene, a bird appears above Ava’s grave. And of course, there are only two letters to add or change to go from either Ava or Ada to “alma,” the soul.

The show’s only weakness is its conclusion, where the authors are clearly unable to figure out how to end their story. The story’s logic sternly leads in one direction only, but they can’t quite muster the courage to go there, and so equivocate, sweetly enough if not entirely convincingly. But forgivably.

To say too much would be to spoil a show of such fine delicacy of spirit and subtle strength. Leave it at this: stormy nights and threatening seas, beautiful dreams and fearful nightmares, gaiety and deviltry, mischievous teapots and nagging clocks (one of them advertising the “Menaechmi Bros.”—from the Roman Plautus’s comedy about twins), fights between the sisters and a near drowning, a visit to a carnival and a visit to the regions of death, chess games and halls of mirrors, a lost balloon and a forever kept shell, skeletons and graveyards and spiral staircases, and the looming light of the lighthouse, twisting like an owl’s eye and forever threatening to go out for good, and the mystery of who one is, and the mystery of death, and the mystery of reconciling ourselves to the mysteries of life.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City came out in 2016; his second collection of poetry, Chien Lunatique, came out in 2017. His new novel (currently being serialized in Synchronized Chaos) will appear later this year.

Christopher Bernard’s “AMOR i KAOS”: Seventh Installment

It could be a lifetime. Between the screed and the admonition, the command and the oath. Your followers lined up like soldiers on a ridge gazing down at the ignorant city. The horses neighing as they slip on rocks wet with dew. The dawn treacherously beautiful and cool, as if carrying, clutched in its hand, the message that will never reach them. Stop. Do not attack. We have surrendered, the war is over. And they descend, silent, to a pointless destruction. It could be like that. Or it might be briefer, a sojourn over a weekend or no longer than a summer of one’s youth. Remember that? It feels like yesterday. But it was a lifetime ago. It might be a gentler doom, more quiet, discreet, causing damage to only two people, bruised and aching and left for dead on the indifferent battlefield of love, cruelest of tyrants, your gauntlets bloody, your banners torn and fluttering in the dust-filled wind.

xxxxx

He closed the book and gazed at her gravely.

—I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, she said. You hopeless romantic!

His mouth smiled. Which looked strange since his eyes were so bleak.

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