composed of video I took both on the way into New York City on NJTransit and from Penn Station to Coney Island. again, quality is fucked from the web transfer, but you should get the idea. enjoy!
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2008
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
in and out of noo yawk ceedeh
[this is a section of an originally longer post]
The surf on Long Beach Island is usually placid, but this week was different. I’m not sure if there was a storm off the coast or what, but the waves were enormous. One of my great pleasures in life is swimming in high surf, so I was hooked. I wound up spending almost a full week at Barnegat Light, swimming in the ocean and stealing wireless off the beach houses to update the blog. The first few days were sunny, but towards the end of the week a thick mist rolled in, blanketing the coast with white for the rest of the week. It was the very beginning of the off-season, which is apparently the deadest part of the year. All the restaurants were closed and most of the houses vacated, and I had almost the entire beach to myself. The surf, however, continued at full force throughout the week. It was a tricky sort of surf, smaller waves leading you far out only to be crushed beneath the pulverizing masses of water that crashed beyond the first breakers. Intermittently, the big ones would come in close, tricking event the more cautious swimmer. The day before I left, a woman was led from the water stunned, bleeding from the lip and sporting a big bump on the back of her neck.
Soon it was time for me to move again so I could catch the video shoot in New York. With no intention of navigating the van through Manhattan traffic, I made plans to visit Princeton and take a train the rest of the way. It was my first visit back after graduation, and I arrived with my foot firmly in my mouth. I had never taken me long to become impatient with my older friends when they made a big deal about the strangeness of returning as a graduate. Finally doing it myself, I had only one thought: gawd, this is so weeeird!
...
Mary Anthony is a sort of grande damme of the city’s modern dance scene, and my sister had been one of her students in the late nineties. Now, Mary is 92 and still teaching full-time, her eyes still sharp and bright with an exacting command. She does not often dance like she once did on the great stages of New York, but now moves with slow grace and unbelievable dignity, still stepping with a cultivated, deadeye precision. When she is motionless, she stands strictly erect and radiates a nobly unselfconscious pride. She is universally beloved by her students, and she loves them back, so when my sister asked her to choreograph and dance to one of my pieces, she quickly agreed.
Enso is the piece that comes up when you open this blog; those of you who have listened closely or read its description already know that it’s all about circles. Mary caught onto this quickly, and used a system of improvisation based upon circles for her performance. However many steps out she took, usually with a specific gesture, she would then take back, answering those gestures. The morning sunlight was streaming through the tall windows in her seventh story Manhattan studio, and as she floated about, she moved intermittently in front of them, creating moving eclipses, shifting between dancing woman and burning silhouette. It was stunningly beautiful. My presence was pretty much extraneous; my sister was giving all the direction, Chris Scarafile, a talented filmmaker, was taking care of the actual shooting, and Mary was of course working her magic. That left me free to sit back and watch this magnificent old creative force moving, slowly, in circles across the floor of her studio.
The shoot took only a few hours, and afterwards I thanked Mary profusely and went out for lunch with my sister and Chris. Reflecting on the morning, it occurred to me that Mary had her own reasons beyond kindness to perform for us. She lived, worked, and slept in her studio, and her interaction was almost exclusively with her students, some of whom were serious and committed, and others who simply showed up for the exercise. Whatever the merits of the project itself, dancing for Enso also gave her a chance to catch up with a close student who had moved away, meet two other young people pursuing entirely different art forms, and of course, perform in a short film. I hope she enjoyed it, and I also hope she can make it to the film’s first screening, where she could hobnob about with a whole host of other young, artistic people.
...
Princeton was only a few stops later, and I debarked neatly just before 10. I looked out over the motionless parking lot and happily saw the familiar site of my van, as yet untowed. Others poured out of the cabin, dispersing to taxis, a bus, finding their cars and generally disappearing into the night like the fractious sparks of a firecracker. I turned on the platform as the train began to chug away and another hurtled through the station in the opposite direction. I was leaving the city, where trains run and connections are made, where people zip past and into each other, colliding, missing, getting married, losing touch, hurting each other, saving each other, desperately searching for or escaping each other or maybe just glancing off each other in a pinball machine of human interaction, until they grew to old to move, and then simply drew circles whose gravity could maybe draw others in. I was about to drive all the way to Maine, where I knew nobody, trading in the urban marketplace for whatever treasures could be found in solitude. Behind me, the steel rails hummed busily, while up ahead, the highway silently beckoned into a cool, fragrant night.
Soon it was time for me to move again so I could catch the video shoot in New York. With no intention of navigating the van through Manhattan traffic, I made plans to visit Princeton and take a train the rest of the way. It was my first visit back after graduation, and I arrived with my foot firmly in my mouth. I had never taken me long to become impatient with my older friends when they made a big deal about the strangeness of returning as a graduate. Finally doing it myself, I had only one thought: gawd, this is so weeeird!
...
Mary Anthony is a sort of grande damme of the city’s modern dance scene, and my sister had been one of her students in the late nineties. Now, Mary is 92 and still teaching full-time, her eyes still sharp and bright with an exacting command. She does not often dance like she once did on the great stages of New York, but now moves with slow grace and unbelievable dignity, still stepping with a cultivated, deadeye precision. When she is motionless, she stands strictly erect and radiates a nobly unselfconscious pride. She is universally beloved by her students, and she loves them back, so when my sister asked her to choreograph and dance to one of my pieces, she quickly agreed.
Enso is the piece that comes up when you open this blog; those of you who have listened closely or read its description already know that it’s all about circles. Mary caught onto this quickly, and used a system of improvisation based upon circles for her performance. However many steps out she took, usually with a specific gesture, she would then take back, answering those gestures. The morning sunlight was streaming through the tall windows in her seventh story Manhattan studio, and as she floated about, she moved intermittently in front of them, creating moving eclipses, shifting between dancing woman and burning silhouette. It was stunningly beautiful. My presence was pretty much extraneous; my sister was giving all the direction, Chris Scarafile, a talented filmmaker, was taking care of the actual shooting, and Mary was of course working her magic. That left me free to sit back and watch this magnificent old creative force moving, slowly, in circles across the floor of her studio.
The shoot took only a few hours, and afterwards I thanked Mary profusely and went out for lunch with my sister and Chris. Reflecting on the morning, it occurred to me that Mary had her own reasons beyond kindness to perform for us. She lived, worked, and slept in her studio, and her interaction was almost exclusively with her students, some of whom were serious and committed, and others who simply showed up for the exercise. Whatever the merits of the project itself, dancing for Enso also gave her a chance to catch up with a close student who had moved away, meet two other young people pursuing entirely different art forms, and of course, perform in a short film. I hope she enjoyed it, and I also hope she can make it to the film’s first screening, where she could hobnob about with a whole host of other young, artistic people.
...
Princeton was only a few stops later, and I debarked neatly just before 10. I looked out over the motionless parking lot and happily saw the familiar site of my van, as yet untowed. Others poured out of the cabin, dispersing to taxis, a bus, finding their cars and generally disappearing into the night like the fractious sparks of a firecracker. I turned on the platform as the train began to chug away and another hurtled through the station in the opposite direction. I was leaving the city, where trains run and connections are made, where people zip past and into each other, colliding, missing, getting married, losing touch, hurting each other, saving each other, desperately searching for or escaping each other or maybe just glancing off each other in a pinball machine of human interaction, until they grew to old to move, and then simply drew circles whose gravity could maybe draw others in. I was about to drive all the way to Maine, where I knew nobody, trading in the urban marketplace for whatever treasures could be found in solitude. Behind me, the steel rails hummed busily, while up ahead, the highway silently beckoned into a cool, fragrant night.
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