Last of it

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson
After a long TBA coma I have begun to feel the nascent threads of inspiration wending their way through my daily life. As I remove coats from my closet and catch up on laundry, I pull vagabond programs from pockets and smile as the image of a body in movement or a face lit in stage lights flashes in my memory. Snatches of song and bits of dialogue continue to resonate in my mind, long after the performers have made their way home.

photo credit: Serena Davidson
And home is a strange and delicate thing. I am thinking of Bebe Miller’s “Landing Place,” and the small house that was constantly in danger of the activity that surrounded it. How fragile it seemed, set beneath the stomping feet and rolling bodies. It was as if the tumult and turmoil of our daily lives could crush the tiny thing. I feel like one of those dancers, holding myself out, teetering forward again and again until a shoulder or hand is placed beneath me- supporting me and carrying me. I’m home now, more often than I am out among you and I am wondering where my home will shift. Where, in the rolling tide of this world, I will find a safe harbor to place it.
I have taken away this sense of humanity from the festival. More so than I have from any other. Whether it is Nature Theatre, explaining the grace of our daily actions or Stan’s Cafe, piling us one by one into mounds of association and identity or Jerry Quickly, seeing the deep and undeniable humanity in his Iraqi minders, I wonder why the best of the festival this year (in my opinion) was steeped in this need to remind us of our human core.
Jerry Quickly- God, I wanted more than anything to embrace that man as I watched him tell it. Because, his show wasn’t necessarily couched in politics, though there was that; rather, it was couched in what it means to be a person in hell making connections with other people. There is a place in war and death and destruction when suddenly we are all raw. We are all made up of the same finite and destructible stuff. That is when we are equal and war and hatred make less sense than they ever did. Jerry Quickly walked on the moon. Thank god we have poets to come back and tell us that it doesn’t just look like a bright blue marble from up there, but that it looks like peace and loneliness and we better start doing something about it.
Strange how the festival was book ended in such a lovely way. It starts with a woman who looks up at the moon, dreaming and thinking of home and ends with a man who has been there and thought he’d never make it back.
“Hello. Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?”
Posted by P.A. Coleman

“Me”
To see more TBA photography click here: Serena Davidson Photography