Help Wanted: Aerialist

Image: Young woman, walking.  With a suitcase.  Era: early 1880's.  In the distance the red and white stripes of a circus tent.  A wind picks up.  A poster whips through the air.  It catches under her feet.  It says: Now Hiring: Aerialists and other Fantastic Acts.

Perceptual Blindness and the Elephant in the Room

"NASA conducted an experiment in a flight simulator in which commercial pilots were tested to see if they would notice distractions on a runway during simulated landings. Those who were trained pilots did not notice and landed directly on top of the distraction 1/4 of the time, while untrained pilots didn’t know what to expect of a typical landing and thus saw the distraction."    http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/16/how-perceptual-blindness-works-humans-sometimes-completely-ignore-things-that-are-in-plain-sight-try-the-test/

Rumi's version of the Story of the Blind Men and the Elephant:
"Elephant in the Dark" (trans. Coleman Barks)

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.
No one here has ever seen an elephant.
They bring it at night to a dark room.
One by one, we go in the dark and come out
saying how we experience the animal.
One of us happens to touch the trunk.
"A water-pipe kind of creature."
Another, the ear. "A very strong, always moving
back and forth, fan-animal."
Another, the leg. "I find it still,
like a column on a temple."
Another touches the curved back.
"A leathery throne."
Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk.
"A rounded sword made of porcelain."
He's proud of his description.
Each of us touches one place
and understands the whole in that way.
The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are
how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.
If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together,
we could see it."

Something about Perceptual Blindness Theory, elephants....

drowning in charmion

Image: Dancer (Teddy) begins to receive all the coats.  I don't know what leads up to this, but.... he is there and one by one (like I did at the end of "When Small Birds") exiting dancers put a coat (not gently necessarily) on his outstretched arms.  Until he is really weighted down by all of them, and just when there are too many too hold - gazillions drop down from the ceiling, drowning him.

Image: Sometimes it's too much.  They want to escape Charmion.  Close one's eyes.  Like all the dancers who whine, "I don't want to think I just want to dance."  They try and "run" away.  Repeatedly (and who catches and who runs keeps changing)  Technically: two dancers stand fairly close together, as a third dancer comes rushing at them they extend their arms to each other, thus "catching/preventing" the running dancer from breaking out of the space.

Inside the coat of a trapeze artist

Images:
At the start: Charmion is there.  In that glorious yellow victorian dress, with the coat over it - but the coat is open.  Things happen.  Then Charmion closes the coat, and turns to walk away.  That action - the closing of the coat and the turn to walk away seems to pull all the light and the illumination out of the space, causes the tent to get sucked up into the ceiling.  Our eyes follow it up.  It seems to get sucked up into nothingness.  A small, dark hole we are left looking up into.
This distracts our attention momentarily from the world around us to the world above us. That is how we make the next action happen.

A contrary thought:  The coat - what if the world is actually taking place inside the coat?  Charmion, looking down on us, is the size of an elephant.

"I have been Charmion and I have been one of her children"

whereas "small elephant stories" was a collage, i am hoping that "when the elephant comes crashing through the roof" is a braid.  i would like to be surprised to discover how Charmion can make a trajectory through several stories, and how the imagery, visuals, movement and music are woven together by her presence.
thinking about the word "crashing" - what has crashed through the roof of your life? what have you crashed through?
bulls crash through china shops, but this elephant comes through the roof.
a mistake, a sneeze and suddenly the world turns upside down.

Gaelyn wrote in his class assigned review of "small elephant stories":
"The literal narrative, within which each smaller story stood poised, hit very close to home. In a less than abstract sense, I have been Charmion and I have been one of her children. I have been left suspenseful in the mystique of circus and dance, and have also disappeared. The text laid bare personal histories which I avoid, not dissimilar to the alchemy of butoh. The entire project was a milieu of heavily weighted histories, ones which supplied a canvas on which I could reconstruct my 
whims, emotions, questions and desires—my elephants."

I, too feel like I have been Charmion and one of her children.  I like the way of thinking of the piece as a canvas on which the audience can reconstruct their whims, emotions, questions and desires - 
their elephants.

One of the elephants in my room, is that I have been focused on circus elephants.  The most horrible existence for these magnificent creatures - and yet, I am drawn to a romanticization of it.  I need to continue to unpack this. 

Physically today I played some more with the gesture motif, Rosie's "sifting fingers, shoulder rise and drop" 
I read Ralph Lemon's essay, "What was always there" in "Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion".  I know Ralph but I hadn't known of this project of his.  Read more in the "Reading Responses" pages. There is something about his awkward attempt to dance in the situation which he put himself, confronting the worlds of difference/distance.  A crashing through the roof of sorts.