Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf

We went to Lincoln Center on Saturday night to see and hear Ben Bagby perform the first third of Beowulf. It was amazing: as a performance, as a story, as a feat of memory and stamina. Over 1,000 lines of text (and I have trouble memorizing 15 lines!) in Old English, spoken, sung, declaimed, and everything in between. I was really moved by the story, too, the hero who sees a problem and decides, even though the monster Grendel isn't his own problem, that he should offer to deal with the situation when the king's men prove unable to help, even though it might cost him his life.

I saw Ben perform this once before maybe 8 years ago, at the Amherst Early Music Festival, I believe. His performance has developed a lot and is totally embodied physically with a wonderful play of gesture and facial expression to match the amazing variety of vocalizing. He uses his right hand to play the harp, and then to gesture, sitting almost all the while on a small bench. So the movement is very limited, and yet...clear, telling, exciting. I especially liked the many ways he managed to eat his hand and paw his face while imitating Grendel devouring the sleeping warriors, but also striking was Beowulf removing his helmet and his sword before the battle (because he has decided to do battle with his bare hands) and the way the repetition of the gesture of supplication or address to the gods created a gestural refrain through the piece. The shadows cast by his little footlights silhouetting his gestures were a nice addition to the performance.

I want to know what happens next--there were enough little hints as the narrative came to a close that sent me riffling the bookshelf to see if I had kept my tattered copy of Beowulf, and I think the sad answer is, no, I did not. I'll have to add it to the summer library list. Meanwhile check out the website www.bagbybeowulf.com where you can see upcoming performances, pictures, and purchase a DVD.

Great Moments in Gesture: the Kiss

So, my favorite "gesture" from The Elixir of Love that I was assisting on last month (New Jersey Opera Theater, directed by David Grabarkewitz) and that closed yesterday was the kiss. Is a kiss a gesture? I think it can be, in both the looser sense of "what a nice gesture!" and the more strict sense of physical expressiveness I am more likely to use. The characters use it to express themselves when words fail them, when knowing what to do fails them, and it certainly acts through the body on another person...a kind of gestural duet. This particular kiss managed to be both much awaited and come as a huge surprise, because all through the show Adina and Nemorino are fighting tooth and nail, even though he is in love with her and we come to see that she loves him, too. It got a different reaction from the audience each night: applause one night, a hushed "awww" the next, a moment of total silence on the third and last night, at least from where I was offstage right, a collective catch in the throat. But each time it was simultaneously shocking and satisfying, thanks to the set up and the moment's truthfulness, and I think these effects crashing up against one another made for another Great Moment in Gesture that I was happy to be able to witness four times over. I discovered that sticking around for the run of a show can be fun! I haven't had the opportunity or the need to do it for a while but hopefully there will be more assistant directing in my future so I'll be doing this a little more often and allowing the show, once completed, to work on me.

Gesturing in the Brain

Thanks to my friend Betsey who alerted me to this article in the New York times on 7/13/06, "Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor." With the help of an implant he was able in about 4 days to learn how to control "movements" to do simple computer tasks (open email, play a video game, draw a circle) by imagining moving his arm. The implant reads the electrical signals emitted by the brain's neurons. Brain science, and especially these mysterious neurons, are becoming more and more fascinating. I may start with Neuroscience for Kids, since my science is pretty woefully out of date. And then there is this NOVA segment on Mirror Neurons, the subject of a previous post here.

Elegy, vs. 2

I enjoy the symmetrical nature of the first two lines of this stanza (well, the art is in making them a little assymetrical, isn't it?), breaking up into the heady specificity of a single beetle, and the way the first line calls for a great sweeping movement, echoed in the next line but smaller and then fixed to a tiny point in the third and shifting the weight in the fourth. There's a physical score to this stanza that pulls you along into the weight shift and I find it one of the easiest stanzas to remember! Of course, it helps that it is also one of the first I learned...

Thought Made Visible

Found a brief and lovely essay by Lia Markey from the University of Chicago's Theories of Media site, on the topic of gesture. She quotes W.J.T. Mitchell, a professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and a theorist of media, visual art and literature, who writes: "It is not the gift, or what is said on the phone, but 'the thought' (that is, the gesture) that counts. Perhaps gesture is best understood as the moment when thought becomes visible, tangible, or palpable, staged and framed as form - something to be held and to hold us in mutual prehension." "Utopian Gestures, The Poetics of Sign Language," (a preface for a forthcoming text on the poetics of sign language), 2002.

Mirror Neurons

I've been AWOL for a few weeks, assisting on Elixir of Love for New Jersey Opera Theater in Princeton (there are still 3 more shows and I can highly recommend it: a funny, smart and moving production by David Grabarkewitz). I have been spending many hours commuting back and forth to rehearsal. I finally have an iPod and I'm enjoying catching up on my favorite shows from NPR and the CBC on the train. Here's a little tidbit of interest I listened to during my commute last week from a Studio 360 podcast.

Studio 360 in its 6/30/06 show (#726, Madness, Neurons, Poetry) had two segments on mirror neurons, something like shadow reactions in the brain, which were first discovered in monkeys and seem to have a lot to do with our reception of movement, gesture and art. Most interesting to me was David Freedberg discussing what he calls "felt immitative reactions"--that when we look at the body in motion, in life or in art, "we feel some kind of immitative sense within our guts" that we don't actually execute, but that makes us feel something, moves us. He is looking at responses to hand movements and gestures in pictures and how artists convey significant gestures. I can't wait to read of his work on this topic, and to hear about this scientific rationale behind something the ancients knew well, that gesture has a power to move you in a very real way. They called it moving the passions, we explain it with brain chemistry.

Elixir has such a moment that moves you out of your seat. I don't want to spoil the surprise, so maybe I'll wait until the final performance on Thursday, July 20 is over to write about it. And we'll see how the show evolves and how my perception of it changes as I watch the rest of the run.