Circus- A Dada Poem

If you scroll down, there is a post where there are instructions on how to write a dada poem. I was curious and did it. This is the result.
The compilation of random words was taken from an interview with Salman Rushdie about his latest book. But because I cut the article, the name of his new book and the person that wrote the article were lost into the dissection.

Circus

Last clown remains
Last sigh beneath her feet
Falling Indian born beauties
When peace share a common language

Myth blending with grace,
into magic realism

Piles of junk for the grace of a lost God
Rusting worn metals,
preaching resistance to time

Veil
Harbouring

Grinding paradise fallen in love with a supermodel
Preposterous kind in a modern world
Poorly plotted, splitting wood and sound

Tightrope walker,
cooking while trying to return full of phoney outrage

Wanting to be Interested

"Soap Opera" by Andrea Gabilondo. Photo , Teresa Couto

An audience may sit waiting for a performance to begin, wanting to be interested, persuading itself that it ought to be interested. It will only be irresistibly interested if the very first words, sounds or action of performance release deep within each spectator a first murmur related to hidden themes that gradually appear.

Peter Brook

Arts

Picture by Armastaja

All arts are siblings
kindling one another,
jointly giving everlasting glow

Voltaire

Watching at a Tree

Picture by Armastaja

When I look at a tree

It gives me feelings of belonging
Being part of the vast Universe
Majesty, admiration, ancient security

Grandiose beauty
Its leaves already changing
Eternal maturity, cycle of life

I get closer
The perspective of its branches
Envelope me with a fatherly embrace
Far away, I can see the sky

Green multiple fingers moving with the wind
Designing shadows on the grass

Rough skin, hard and wrinkled
Like an elephant
Like a God of wisdom

Myth and life
Represented into a single tree

If I could stay under its shadow
If I could climb and sleep between its arms
If I could become a tree
And stay like that

Forever….

Image for a Choreography

Collage by Andrea for her next dance-theatre piece "Heaven"

Give me an image!!

We need an image!!!

Ok. I said

But…- I thought- it is still a couple of months before I begin to rehearse……so I can’t take pictures. Mhhhhhh…………………..I am not a visual artist………now what????

Ok. Gabi, I told myself, you will have to become an instant visual artist, let your intuition guide you....don't worry, make a collage, so this was the result for my next piece.

Mhhh...................I still can later take those pictures :-)

Flashes of the Moon

Picture by Armastaja

Flashes of the Moon

Take the body of my lover,
No, the cheeks of my nights awake.
And spin a broad, rough
Roof against the sky

In the high tone, Your tingling arms
In the process of transformation,
Trail in the Shadow

Take flashes of the moon
And through all, your arm
To avoid every ireful will.
You throw of speech.
And swelling now
In concentration

Some dance to be understood.
Some dance the moment.

Not you, yet still to move
The unborn thought.
To make us understand.
Avoid the obvious.

Peel the gold of your reflection.
No. its careful constructed box.
And the taut fleshy
Bellies of an asset.

Untoss the pillows of your dream.
And step through the veil of beyond.

Sondra Fraleigh

Moment of Rasa

Where the hand goes
the eye goes:

Where the eye goes
the mind goes:

Where the mind goes
aesthetic pleasure is created.

Parul Shah, Baroda, India, 1997

Somewhere I read that truly creative minds such as Grotowsky, Brecht or Brook, acknowledge their debt to the past. Such men build on what they find. We cannot escape our debt to the past even when it is necessary to break from it.

A sense of history creates a sense of humour and a sense of humility

To Make a Dadaist Poem

If the members of the Zurich Dada group aimed at negation/destruction in the social and cultural sphere, they gave it symbolic form in their graphic and literary work through techniques of structural and semantic breakdown. One of their main techniques was systematically to exploit random pictorial and literary effects. Its most usual form was a collage-based arrangement of materials, material that were often taken from sources not conventionally associated with the fine arts.

In Tzara’s “To make a Dadaist Poem”, he offered the following instruction:

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from the paper an article of the length you want to make a poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you

(Tzara, Seven Manifestos and Lampisteries, p. 39)

I will definitely give it a try

Elephants

In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants. Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.

All the flying grey elephants migrated to the source of the Ganges. They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth. When they moulted millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered them, and the Himalayas were born.

The blue elephants landed in the sea and their wings became fins. They are whales, the trunkless elephants of the oceans. Their cousins are the manatees, the trunkless elephants of the rivers.

The chameleon elephants kept their wings but agreed never again to land on the earth. When they go to sleep, the elephant always lie down in the same place in the sky and dream with one eye open. The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.


From the book “Ashes and Snow” nº 3 from Gregory Colbert

GREAT photographs, full of imagination and poetry!!!

http://www.ashesandsnow.com/

Mind your Step

Seis Caras, drawing by Yvette Boulet

Mi, Mi, Do……….pause
Mi, Mi, Do……….pause

The two notes began slowly to enter into my brain….until I had to stop……..Mi, Mi, Do…………..and ask……………Mi, Mi, Do……………”What is that sound?” and someone replied: “It is a voice, it says: Mind your Step”. Oh…I get it now, it is not Mi, Mi, Do, but Mind your Step, a warning to the absent minded travellers in Schiphol Airport, a warning at the end of the rolling floor that connects the different wings of the building and again and again: “mind your step”.
An hypnotic sound that seemed to do nothing to avoid tripping and falling.

Mind your step…….pause
Mind your step……CLASH
Mind your step……BOOM

A cartoon sketch.

Then another voice soft and polite came from the loudspeaker “Mr X please proceed to gate 26”

A couple of minutes later: “Mr. X you are delaying the plane proceed to gate 26”

Pause

Suddenly a less than polite voice says: “Mr X you are delaying the plane your luggage will be off loaded”

Where was Mr. X? I thought there were many possibilities:

1- He is a terrorist
2- He fell asleep on a chair due to the hours difference
3- He got lost ion the Airport
4- He is sick and can’t leave the bathroom
5- He fell in love instantly and can’t strop kissing the girl

Funny for me, but I am sure not funny at all for Mr. X that for sure will miss his plane.

Then I wandered thinking about the choreographic possibilities of “mind your step”

I was interrupted by a voice:

“Ms. Gabilondo please proceed to gate 26”...............the voice was soft and polite.

Eclipse- Author unknown

I leave tomorrow.
I go on vacation yes and no
Part work, part family and part vacations

Important list:

1- Notebook on ideas
2- Book for the airplane
3- Digital camera
4- Tootbrush
5- Pen
6- Toothbrush 2 in case a lose toothbrush 1

And don't forget the suitcase!!

Synthesis

"Bramacharya" painted by M.Coffey


Once, Peter Brook was criticized of not being “original”. He was criticized of making synthesis of Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotovski and Oriental Theatre.

Aren’t we all a result of synthesis in our own art work???

Bach compositions were a synthesis of Italian, French and German music. He “copied” Vivaldi in a way of learning. (As I do when I write poetry LOL)

Telemann is another good example or Mozart who was a product of a masterful synthesis of all styles.

So well yes, my work is no different I have been influenced by Peter Brook, Reinhild Hoffmannn, Butoh and the many books I read.

We influence each other.

There are no original ideas. They can come out as something new, but at the end they are a synthesis of knowledge and experience.

The difference is the language we use to give them a voice of its own

Involuntary Thoughts

Thoughts

Time of involuntary thoughts
Building slowly from the cellar of a tired feminine breath
Humid, prolonged, heavy, vibrating….the source of a feeling
Ghostly shadows of the feminine mind
Invented geometry of emotions
Concave and convex reactions touched by the lethal venom of passion
Mysteries of a soul
Conflicts of gestures
Magic trance of involuntary thoughts

History of the Night by Borges

"Mujer" de Maria A. Sanchez

Her website: http://www.sandiafria.com/

History of the Night

Throughout the course of th generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Jorge Luis Borges

Your Breathing Bothers Me

Os Convidados


I have always seen a performance as team work.
No one is a star without the other, everybody is important in their own specific function.
Individualism is blended into the objective of the people involved, to give life to an idea.
What interests me more, is the creation of what has been inside my mind. It takes me months to give it a shape and to decide the expressive language it needs. I tend to do it with care and love.
Once in a rehearsal room, I am open to the comments and ideas of others, this idea that has been worked and reworked to create the heart of the piece, is not just something for what I should, alone, as the creator, get benefit. Around me, there is the team, with their suggestions and critics, a team that works together not just through the process, but through the different performances in different venues.

The team is made of people as involved as the creator- or so it should be- not because of ego or stardom but because they want to be as professional as possible.

We just need one person, to disrupt what should be the absolute pleasure of performing and setting the piece.
We just need someone disrupting the spirituality of people around, with personal and egotistical manifestations to make an event that should be happy…….sad.

For some people, they are the only ones existing in this universe, any little thing that is not adapted to them, becomes a problem.

If someone tells you: “Your breathing bothers me”, as the conclusion of successful performances, is like crossing the personal space of another, to whom just individuality is important and nothing else.

Arena Festival

Erlangen


Wonderful experience in the Arena Festival.
We met wonderful people, we saw good performances and I got invited to make a co-production for next year with the Festival.
So many creative projects for the future!
It is exciting.

So many possible themes inside my head

Creative process at work.

Algunos Pensamientos de Artaud

Light and Shadows

El diálogo- cosa escrita y hablada- no pertenece específicamente a la escena, sino al libro, como puede verse en todos los manuales de historia literaria, donde el teatro es una rama subordinada de la historia del lenguaje hablado.
Afirmo que la escena es un lugar físico que exige ser ocupado, y que se le permita hablar su propio lenguaje concreto.
Afirmo que ese lenguaje concreto destinado a los sentidos, independiente de la palabra, debe satisfacer todos los sentidos como hay una poesía del lenguaje, y que ese lenguaje físico y concreto no es verdaderamente teatral sino en cuanto expresa pensamientos que escapan al dominio del lenguaje hablado.

Mientras más sobria y restringida es la expresión más honda y pesada es la respiración, más sustancial y plena de resonancias.
Y a una expresión arrebatada, amplia y exterior, corresponde una respiración en ondas breves y bajas.
Es indiscutible que todo sentimiento, todo movimiento del espíritu, todo salto de la emoción humana tienen su respiración propia

Antonin Artaud

Reflection 

Aphorism

Painting by Armastaja


Poetry is like wine, a habit that develops with time, like most habits, like most art forms.
The more we read poetry, the more we appreciate it, just like jazz.
Until it becomes an addiction.

But now that I write this on my agenda full of scrabbles, during a short break before a performance, I take notice of the shadows.
The sun is low; swallows are brushing the sky with a breathtaking speed.
The sun is melting into the tree.

Is then that my mind changed to painting, then dance, then again poetry.

All is one

A painting that moves our spirit is a poetry made by light and shadows, like the landscape I am drinking with my eyes. At the same time it is dance it moves on space through perspective, just like poetry moves through images and rhythm.

Musicality of words…………….. The staccato or legato of colours……………….. The energy or suspension of a movement……………expression, feeling……..life.

The swallows are still flying, the sun still melting.

The wind on my face...............................