A "Sweet Spot in Time"

Yesterday evening, a young girl's wish came true.

Emi said that someday she wanted to meet the subject of her biography report, American oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer Dr. Sylvia Earle.  Last night, she was in the audience to see a dance performance after spending the afternoon with her family in the Aquarium by the Bay.

Dr. Earle was a featured guest at last evening's performance of Okeanos Intimate. Along with fellow ocean scientist Tierne Thys, Dr. Earle collaborated with Capacitor's Artistic Director Jodi Lomask to create a truly beautiful "Love Letter to the Sea," a dance/cirque perfomance designed to inspire and educate audiences through this moving "portrait of the ocean as body, environment, resource, metaphor, and force."

Okeanos Intimate highlight reel from Jodi Lomask on Vimeo.

Dr. Earle and Ms. Lomask came on stage together after the show to answer questions from the audience after the performance.  As the Q&A session drew to a close, I heard a little voice came from the center of the house.

Emi had a question for Dr. Earle.

What will happen to the ocean in the future?

Dr. Earle's beautiful response was directed at one very special girl, but her words of wisdom and hope washed over us all — like a gentle wave of blue love.

What will happen to the ocean in the future depends a lot on what we do right now.   

I think that you have come along at exactly the right point in history, because we didn’t know when I was a little girl the things that we now know. We thought the ocean was infinite in its capacity to yield whatever we wanted to take out and to accept whatever we wanted to put in.  Now we know, you know, that there are limits to what we can take out, limits to what we can put in the ocean, and still have a planet that works in our favor.  So, lucky you. Lucky all of us.   

This is, I call it, the “sweet spot in time” because never before could we know what we know now.  We now have submarines to go down in the ocean.  We have eyes in the sea.  We have dancers who can make it even more real to us what is out there in the ocean.  We have film and cameras that go deep in the sea and high in the sky and look down and see that we are all together in this.  And if we didn’t know, we’d really be in trouble.  

And here’s the thing, there are a lot of smart creatures on the planet other than humans. Dolphins… really smart…and so are whales, so are octopuses. I think that crabs have a certain thing going for them as well.  Cats, horses, dogs, elephants, some very smart birds… really smart fish that I’ve met personally!  You’ll meet some here in the aquarium.  And they cannot know what you know.  As smart as they are, they don’t have the knowledge that Earth is spinning around in a universe of unfriendly places.  Try living on the moon.  Try going to Mars, and have all of the things that you take for granted here, like air, that you can just breathe.  Or imagine having rain fall out of the sky.  It doesn’t rain on Mars.  Well, it might rain things that are not good for you… but water, I mean.  There is no ocean there.  That ocean gives rise to rain. Sweet stuff, water that is mostly there that goes up into the sky.   

So you are armed with power.  Power that no other creatures on the planet have, and you are also armed with an opportunity, because even humans didn’t know what you now know going back to when I was a little girl.  

And so this is kind of a magic time. For the first time, we’re beginning to get it.  We understand.  This is it.  This little blue speck in the universe… So, we have to get better at taking care of the systems that make our lives possible.  And you’re here to make it happen.    

Imagine, another ten years, you could be Mayor of a city, you could be running a company. You could be driving a submarine.  You could be a scientist in a laboratory coming up with new discoveries or out on the ocean making new discoveries.  I mean, kids ten years old now can put on a scuba tank and explore the ocean… and you can explore the world by, you know, taking out a little electronic device that gives you information. 

You can look at Google Earth and fly around and see our parts of the world that people didn’t know about, had never explored, including going down in the ocean… until right now. So there's plenty of reason for optimism that the world in the future will even be better than it is today, because we will take care of it, better than we are today.

Capacitor's Okeanos Intimate, featuring images of the ocean, the voice of Dr. Sylvia Earle, and an incredible crew of dancers, is now playing at the Aquarium by the Bay through September 28th.

Dancing in the Streets

August 23 is the birthday of the great dancer/choreographer, Gene Kelly.  His screen persona in the MGM musicals showed everyday people just how much fun it would be to dance in the street.

Kelly's first wife, dancer Betsy Blair said of Kelly truck-driver style, "A sailor suit or his white socks and loafers, or the T-shirts on his muscular torso, gave everyone the feeling that he was a regular guy, and perhaps they too could express love and joy by dancing in the street or stomping through puddles...he democratized the dance in movies."

In opening scene from On the Town (1949), Kelly, Frank Sinatra & Jules Munshin share the sights and sounds of New York, but the dance is contained, mainly repetitive hand jestures.

In American in Paris (1951),  Kelly teaches the Parisian children how to speak English and how to dance by singing an American song,  I Got Rhythm, by using his whole body to become a soldier, Hop-a-Long Cassidy, Charlie Chaplin, or even an aeroplane.

S'wonderful Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) & Henri (Georges Guetary) unbeknownst to each other, are in love with the same girl. Their feelings of love can't be contained in the cafe, and their dance spills out into the street.

This dance number from the 1955 musical, It's Always Fair Weather, 1955, is known as "The Binge."

Three Army buddies - Michael Kid, Dan Dailey and Gene Kelly - have a little too much to drink  and they take to the streets for a dance.  They go in, out and though the windows of a taxi cab, dance a raucous hoedown with trash can lids in a alley, before ending up right back where they started.

When he sings I Like Myself, rollerskates are a perfect match with the quickened heartbeat of love.

Come rain or come shine, Gene Kelly is always Singing in The Rain (1952). 

The next time that you see people dancing in the street in a commercial, a music video or a flash mob, be sure to do a little jig of thanks for Gene Kelly.

Change Partners and Dance

An interesting opportunity popped up when I learned that one of our students was attending the Joffrey Intensive, a summer program in Los Angeles, learning with one of America's premiere ballet companies. It is a rare thing for a young artist to be presented with such an amazing opportunity. I thought that it would be interesting to invite her parent to share some thoughts about the artistic journey of a mother and daughter. 

Thanks to Lorraine for taking the time to share her perspective on the art of the parental dance.

*******

“The eyes are the windows of the soul”, so the saying goes, but when my daughter was born, this phrase offered little comfort. Birth trauma and a low apgar score gave way to immediate improvements and numerous reassurances that she was a perfectly healthy child. Looking into her eyes convinced me that the doctors simply weren’t paying close enough attention. Every parent knows that a baby’s milestones are anticipated and measured in the tiniest detail, partly to ensure that the child’s development is progressing as expected. My child, though perfectly formed on the outside, seemed to lack a certain inner spark that babies are only able to convey through eye contact, vocalizations and their own limited means of non-verbal, physical expressions.

It was difficult to make and sustain eye contact with her, to capture or engage her attention or to provoke a reaction from her. She seemed to exist in a bubble- perfectly content to be held and cuddled, but not particularly interested in discovering the world outside the two arms cradling her.
“What are you complaining about?”, a friend remarked, “You were blessed with what is known as an ‘easy baby’!” “Quit worrying!” my husband chided, “She is fine! One day, she’ll show YOU!”

But a mother’s worries are like a leaky faucet that won’t be fixed, sometimes gushing, sometimes drilling into the unconscious with a persistent drip. As beautiful as she was, that nagging worry about my “easy baby” wasn’t easily silenced. She displayed traits I’d only read about in psychology textbooks or seen in special needs children I had worked with. As she continued to gain motor control and physical strength, her apparent lack of desire for communication and engagement lingered. I was determined to break through to her myself or to figure out the kind of help we’d need for her.

Upon learning everything I could find about communication with babies and about possible special needs, I decided to try to teach her sign language. Every source agreed that it would probably take several months for her to sign back to me, and I was instructed to keep things simple but consistent, and not to get discouraged even when there was no immediate progress. Some days I thought I’d lost my mind in this obsessive quest to open the window on my child’s soul. How could I show her to sign if I couldn’t even make her look at me?

Weeks of signing the word “milk” before feedings finally gave way to her first breakthrough. The repeated opening and closing of a fist, a gesture babies develop quickly, thanks to the muscles involved in the grasping reflex, is often their first sign. Was it my imagination, or did she just ask for her milk? To my delight, more signs soon followed, so I was reassured that the light inside my daughter was definitely strong. Thrilled and relieved, we continued to exchange communication and build on more each time. Things improved as my worries became more typical, so that even my husband’s “I told you so!” didn’t bother me in the least.

Still content to be held as often as possible, she didn’t have much motivation to develop the muscles her legs and tummy needed in order to crawl, sit, stand, and toddle. I reasoned that this was a temperamental issue instead of a developmental one- she was probably a kid averse to movement and exercise. She’d give me the same trouble I gave my mother when I was more interested in the comfort of the couch than the challenge of the monkey bars. Assisted by my prodding and various baby exercise devices, my daughter would have to be encouraged to move.

One of her favorites looked like a long spring clamped to an overhead doorframe. At the end of the spring, there was a plastic framed cloth baby seat attached, so that, suspended slightly off the ground, she could flex legs, feet and toes to propel herself to a gentle bounce. When her dad first put her into it, he insisted on playing music for her. He put in a CD while she bounced, and suddenly, the familiar vacant expression I thought had vanished, reappeared as quickly as my panic. For several frightening seconds, she held herself in complete stillness, as my mind raced to conclusions about what was wrong, but then, just as suddenly, she began a deliberate, measured bouncing, and a transformed expression appeared. Incredibly, she was keeping time with the music! This episode was a glimmer of what was to come.

As she grew, her affinity for music and rhythm was at times astounding, at times exasperating, and later, she’d turn every meal into a jam session, wielding spoons, chopsticks and feet with Gene Krupa-esque fury. She’d be a drummer, or some other kind of musician, I reasoned, and did my best to serve dinner over the din. Back then, it didn’t occur to me that music and dance go together like spaghetti and meatballs, and by the time she could speak she was begging for dance lessons.

***************************************

Six years of dance lessons have led to amazing discoveries for both of us. But I am only a spectator, coming along for a ride that has taken me to many unexpected places. Now, all her milestones are measured in dance: First dance class, first pair of jazz shoes, first dance show, first original choreography performed, first ballet role, first auditions, first summer dance intensive. Since that first dance class I’ve been peering through the panes of glass that separate the dancers from the parents in the lobby. I’ve grown accustomed to looking through those windows waiting for my daughter to emerge. As I watch, I never take for granted the thrill of seeing her light up when she is allowed to express herself through dance. A pensive, energetic, creative soul is revealed, and I can’t help feeling that it was worth all the worry and the wait. I’m the first to admit my mistaken impression and give her dad credit for seeing it coming. “One day,” he said, “she’ll show YOU!” Yes, dear, she most certainly has.