What’s The Buzz ?
Corner of Strada Statale 478 and Via Firenze, Sarteano, Italy, June 16, 2013
Posted on June 16, 2013
And here we begin our second performance of Ravel’s Bolero with six spanish thoroughbred horses that circle, inviting, hesitating and eventually urging the dancers within to emerge. The previous evening – a premiere of many sorts, including the Equus component to Lost for Words – the tension cut knife like through the communication between horse, rider and dancer so that what remained were merely fragments of a wish to explore the many arts of conversation. This time, however, we wordlessly alter the warm-up after a dancer has completed a short barre within earshot of the sound of wind that makes an oak tree sing as swallows above weave figures of infinity that I occasionally look up to register for later use. I wrestle with finding something innate to a piece of music that has been set to perfection by Maurice Béjart as I have been wrestling for some time now to find anything whether through music, movement or a mere gesture that is inherently beyond artifice. It is as I threaten to remain, impossible. As I finish my barre, the curtains of doubt are drawn aside so that I may once again face breath shortening fear, wishing once again that I had stayed home with a good book some place, any place else than where I currently stand. I am looking at the riders saddle up the horses and I see a sunday afternoon at a country horse show where children barter with parents for ice-cream and pony rides. I suddenly remember an interview I read in the New York Times some days earlier with Mark Morris who said that, “And so as soon as I was choreographing other people besides myself, which was very early on, I was making up stuff that I wanted to watch, as opposed to what I wanted to feel like.”
Giancarlo has choreographed the horses in such a way that permits me to engage with them as I wish. I may ignore them, I may mirror them, I may take off my jacket and explore how I may encircle them, as a portrait mid-air with the serenity that militates against them taking fright. In the field where we warm up together, some of the horses freeze when I use the jacket as a cape; it would have to be a horse called Artista that stops in front of me as he starts to jerk his head back to rear. Both rider and dancer, however, insist and even though his ears flick back for a moment, we continue as we were saying…I should be terrified, as I was the previous evening when one of the horses did exactly the same thing. Then, we were both put off when the horse stepped onto my wooden platform which is centre stage and froze as I froze and then we both flinched and stepped aside with perfect timing, as we mirrored each other’s fear. This evening, however, I want to use the dressage coat as a cape, or at least have that choice. And so, as I wave it even higher, though a little more slowly, to accompany Artista as he eventually trots by, I find the words that will make sentences out of the story I want to tell.
I remember standing in the middle of the stage on a wooden platform as the music started. I remember facing a line of six horses as they walk towards me in double file that parts around me as I follow the movement with the first rond de jambe with my arms tightly clasped behind my back with my head bowed beneath a top hat. I remember knowing as I released my arms gradually that nothing mattered more in that moment than simply allowing for the possibility of a dance as a pas de six that is worth sitting beneath a heatwaving sun for. I also remember deciding to take off half of my jacket as Artista strolled by and sensing the ripple of the adrenalin in his flanks, and knowing that neither of us may allow for but must dance our fear. Most of all, I remember the silence as I began and continued to dance, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied as I realise that there are some dancers you need to see for yourself.
Read more from Miriam Aziz – The Artist is at Large http://miriamaziz.wordpress.com/
The 
Here we are after an overnight stay in a carriage house by the sea before driving through Camogli towards San Rocco to stand by the church overlooking a cliff through skyscraper trees as a coastline where we stood years earlier, 
at 
celebrate the opening night as I finally draw back the curtains to see just where I come in. (p. 175, I checked at the traffic
lights which were, I hereby solemnly swear, red). I am a vanity case on this first day of February as I hunt to gather the ever elusive parking space otherwise known as a dodo as I turn to avoid communion with a tram that makes advances with high-frequency ardour and that is when I see it through pine trees, this light, this Rome on this day of yet to be filed as syndicated history and I hear another Nina’s voice who said to me before I left New York, that she did not so much envy me Paris as Rome. “It is the light, you will love that light.” Nina is almost right. I do love the light and as I later fly through a class of children holding hands, shouting out to Roberto, the fruit seller boxer, to keep aside two apples for later, I see, from the way that he smiles at me today, that between the light and I, there is a feeling we call mutual.
And so the Masters students in European and International Business Law at Université Paris Dauphine wrestle with definitions, distinctions and distractions as we try to translate Lost for Words into French. The attention to detail is similar if not the same that is necessary when drafting a contract, a negotiation strategy, a constitution, a legal treatise. They are then called upon to give ten minute presentations on European Union citizenship (2013 is after all the European Year of Citizens). These ten minutes are suddenly reduced to two minutes; some students are asked to present in English, some in French. One Russian student is called upon to make her presentation in Russian, but protests as she has prepared her notes in French. She thinks a little and then says that she will speak for 5 minutes in Russian and will summarise her points in both French and English. That’s called initiative; when you see that in action and when you see people think, innovate, create, it is a reminder that teaching is an honour. It is also where you learn the most, if you give students a chance to participate. At one point, one student says that she can imagine how she would stage a trial without words but has some difficulty explaining what she means, that is until two days later when we are in a dance studio. There I see imagination in action as we run through exercises adapted from dance / theatre; we try out a few mise-en-scènes that I invent until the students take over. During the trial without words, members of the jury suddenly turn their backs on the prosecutor. There it is again: initiative and creativity. These students are smart. They have alot to contribute about discussions about human rights in the EU, within the class room, in a dance studio and beyond. Within one week, I have seen a transformation from reticence and a little resistance to the courage and the confidence it takes to participate in class as a right to reply. In so doing, I have learned to understand how diverse the perception of law and human rights may be and how a participatory, collaborative model of teaching, fusing analysis and art may awaken the Gesamtkunstwerk in all of us.
This is what you do. You forget to change to the number 2 metro line that is the shortest way home as you smile back at a sign that says that this station is called Bonnes Nouvelles. Nice touch, you think but these words do not hit the spot. Patience is this hour’s virtue as you finally get up, mind a gap, head for a flight of stairs, then an escalator, then trample a few more stairs than are strictly necessary until you emerge through a wind tunnel with your back to what you came all this way to see. Its eyes bore through that center between your shoulder blades right through to the solar plexus and out the other side as you turn very slowly to savour the morsels of each second that bring you one step closer to seeing as believing that I think therefore it must be: Opéra Garnier.
