Dear Friends,
I turned 70 at this Contact Festival and it was a wonderful day. It started in the sauna at midnight. Then all the next day people kept whispering "Happy Birthday" in my ear and in the evening there was a teacher's gathering and we had a small party for me and for Paula from Argentina and people sang us birthday songs in Russian, Hebrew, German, Finnish, Spanish, Czech, Catalan, Ukrainian and some other languages I can't remember now. We were in a grove of pine trees just as I was on my first birthday party.
We are in a beautiful setting not far from a river and the woods are full of raspberries and small wild strawberries. Delicious.
The festival has been very good for me. I have gained confidence as a teacher and as a performer. The people here who are interested in the kind of work I do have been very supportive and I have made new friends. I have really enjoyed teaching and organizing student performances and yesterday I had a spontaneous performance outside with two students that was very sweet.
Caroline and I fly to Siberia tomorrow for another festival. We are not sure if we will be able to get on the Internet there or not. If we can, I will right more. Here, I have been very busy and now I have start packing to catch the bus to Moscow.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Moscow
Dear friends,
I am in Moscow and having a wonderful time. As usual, I am having technological problems, so I haven't blogged yet. I have been here for a week and two days.
I feel at home in Moscow. It feels somewhat like Los Angeles. It is big. The streets are wide. Most of the buildings are low. However, many of the buildings here are painted a beautiful yellow and were built in the 18th or 19th century. The subway is amazing. It is very cheap and incredibly efficient. I have never waited for more than 3 minutes for a train.
I have seen the Kremlin, Red Square, St. Basil's Cathedral, assorted other churches, and the family home of the Romanov tsars. The Kremlin was not what I expected. From growing up in the 1950's with the Iron Curtain, I thought the Kremlin would be massive, concrete and oppressive and the soldiers would march out onto Red Square and control everyone. In fact, there is not an entrance onto Red Square. The Kremlin floats in the air surrounded and supported by a red, brick wall and has many trees, open spaces, and beautiful churches. It does not look like a serious place from which to run a totalitarian government.
The light here is amazing. It starts to get light about 4 in the morning and is light until about 10:30 at night. Also, in the evening, the twilight lingers and lingers, not as in Los Angeles, where the desert night comes on quickly and efficiently. My childhood had long lingering evenings in the summer and I feel very safe as the day very slowly disappears.
Also Russians eat the same foods as Swedes pretty much, so I have had herring, rye bread and so on, and my stomach is very happy.
I have been busy with the Contact Improvisation and Performance Festival. If you are curious about Contact Improvisation, go to www.contactimprov.com and read all about it. I am here more for the performance part, not having done much contact for the last 5 years or so, but it is amazing to dance and perform with the other teachers who are very skilled and very creative. I am teaching voice production and the use of texts in performance. Tonight the teachers perform a great theater in Moscow and then we go to the forest for the festival itself.
There are 8 of us living in a small 3 room + kitchen + 1 bathroom apartment. It is like my hippie days when I lived in collectives. I need to escape from time to time and be by myself, but I like having people around. I get up the earliest and sit in the kitchen and then others get up and wander in. I like it.
I am not sure if there is an Internet connection in the forest or not. If not I will next write from Moscow on the 26th or 27th or from the capital of Siberia a little later.
I am in Moscow and having a wonderful time. As usual, I am having technological problems, so I haven't blogged yet. I have been here for a week and two days.
I feel at home in Moscow. It feels somewhat like Los Angeles. It is big. The streets are wide. Most of the buildings are low. However, many of the buildings here are painted a beautiful yellow and were built in the 18th or 19th century. The subway is amazing. It is very cheap and incredibly efficient. I have never waited for more than 3 minutes for a train.
I have seen the Kremlin, Red Square, St. Basil's Cathedral, assorted other churches, and the family home of the Romanov tsars. The Kremlin was not what I expected. From growing up in the 1950's with the Iron Curtain, I thought the Kremlin would be massive, concrete and oppressive and the soldiers would march out onto Red Square and control everyone. In fact, there is not an entrance onto Red Square. The Kremlin floats in the air surrounded and supported by a red, brick wall and has many trees, open spaces, and beautiful churches. It does not look like a serious place from which to run a totalitarian government.
The light here is amazing. It starts to get light about 4 in the morning and is light until about 10:30 at night. Also, in the evening, the twilight lingers and lingers, not as in Los Angeles, where the desert night comes on quickly and efficiently. My childhood had long lingering evenings in the summer and I feel very safe as the day very slowly disappears.
Also Russians eat the same foods as Swedes pretty much, so I have had herring, rye bread and so on, and my stomach is very happy.
I have been busy with the Contact Improvisation and Performance Festival. If you are curious about Contact Improvisation, go to www.contactimprov.com and read all about it. I am here more for the performance part, not having done much contact for the last 5 years or so, but it is amazing to dance and perform with the other teachers who are very skilled and very creative. I am teaching voice production and the use of texts in performance. Tonight the teachers perform a great theater in Moscow and then we go to the forest for the festival itself.
There are 8 of us living in a small 3 room + kitchen + 1 bathroom apartment. It is like my hippie days when I lived in collectives. I need to escape from time to time and be by myself, but I like having people around. I get up the earliest and sit in the kitchen and then others get up and wander in. I like it.
I am not sure if there is an Internet connection in the forest or not. If not I will next write from Moscow on the 26th or 27th or from the capital of Siberia a little later.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
On the Road Again
I am getting ready for another long trip. This time I will be going to Russia and Spain with a short amount of time in London and the Netherlands in between.
I am going to Russia to take part in two improvisation festivals. I will be teaching at the first one which takes place outside of Moscow. Then my friend Caroline Waters and I will fly to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, and travel south to the Altai Mountains where Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan all come together at the Russian border. We will participate in a second, more laid back, festival in the mountains and then will take the Transiberian Express to Lake Baikal (30 hours!) where we will unwind for a week. Then back on the train to Yakatineberg, principally known as the place where the Tsar's family were executed. Caroline will work on a project there and I will hang out for a few days and then I will go back to Moscow, fly to London, see friends, go to Arnhem in Holland, see another friend, and then south to St. Jean Pierre-de-Port in France where I will meet my friend Dennis Miles and we will walk on the pilgrim trail up across the Pyrenees and across the top of Spain to Santiago de Compestela. We hope to do this in about a month. I have 36 walking days at my disposal before I return to London and then Los Angeles.
Yesterday, the Fourth of July, Dennis and I walked about 7 miles west to Hollywood, up into the hills to Mulholland Drive and then back to Griffith Park Observatory (not a great picture, but you get the idea) to watch fireworks. This was a backpack test for me. I am wondering whether I will take my small netbook computer with me when I walk across Spain. The backpack with computer and everything I think I need in Spain weighs about 12 pounds. I walked with it to Dennis' house, about a mile, and decided to take out the computer for this test run. Without the computer (which weighs under 3 pounds), I was fine and with some training in Russia, I think I can do 12 pounds. We will see. We plan to walk about 16 miles a day. I can do without the computer, but what that means is that when I get home, I will transcribe the journal into the computer, a painful task. I just finished transcribing my last summer's journal.
People say to me, "A computer! On a pilgrimage?" People have been writing on pilgrimages since pilgrimages began. The number of journals written about the Santiago pilgrimage alone is staggering. If I prefer to write on a computer rather than a pen, I don't think St. James will mind. Pilgrims sometimes carry stones with them which they deposit at a cross along the way as an emblem of the sins they are expiating by their act of faith. My computer will be my stone although I will carry my sins back home with me. There is a story about the Ganges. A dip in the Ganges washes away all of your sins, but sins are like crows. They just wait until you get out of the river and dry yourself off and then they hop right back on again.
As Dennis and I were walking up Beechwood Canyon yesterday, we met a 19-year-old Brazilian who is spending a year traveling around the United States after his graduation from high school. He is a very mature young man and great fun to talk to as we wandered through Griffiith Park. He wants to make films so we talked a lot about Hollywood and movies in general. His favorite director is Bergman. My first Bergman film was Wild Strawberries which I probably saw in 1959 when I was twenty. It is strange when the currently young take up the passions of my youth. I felt the same way when my son as a young teenager became interested in the Beatles. It's my music. Find your own. And yet, it is also very nice to have a common topic that bridges the age difference. The young Brazilian was complaining that he couldn't find Fred Zinneman movies in Brazil. Does anyone else still know who Fred Zinneman was?
My son says my blogs can be no longer than 800 words or he won't read them, and I am at the limit. The next time I write, I will be writing from Moscow.
Luke
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