the last three months

I have not written (a blog) in a long long time. Perhaps the reason for that is being busy. Perhaps the reason for that is not wanting to. Perhaps it is time to break the silence.

To recap from July is to, by necessity, leave quite a bit out. However, the memories are within me, and I suppose that is the real place that they should be.

July held the Grahamstown National Arts Festival; 10 days of theatre, dance, music, art, film, and performance. I traveled the 12 hours (through the Transkei) with a group of students from UKZN who were performing a devised piece based on their work with Durban street children, called Draw Wings. It was a fantastic production, and I saw it a total of three times, clearly earning my title of the production’s groupie.

We were in Grahamstown for 3 days, during which time I saw 15 plays. Some were brilliant, others were mediocre, but even those plays were not an utter waste of time.

Of note:

1. Every Year Every Day I Am Walking. A play in French about the refugee experience. Physical theatre. Two actresses. Shoes to represent characters. Shoes crunching through sand. A fire. A giant bonfire on stage, burning a paper house, a girl. Smoldering ashes.

2. Stilted. A man on meter tall stilts jumping on a trampoline. About what it means to perform. Clowning dancing. Einstein on the Beach and Sigur Ros played; which took me back to another time. Quite odd in that way.

3. The Bonfire Theatre. They make plays out of the audience’s story. The project was a memorial project, for those who are not with us, for moments in the past. I was one of two who told a story. I spoke, or rather, sobbed, the tale of my Grandma’s last days. How she teased the nursing staff with stuffed ferrets. How I fed her her last meal, chocolate cake, on New Year’s Eve. I cried. And the ensemble made a play. It was an incredible lifting up of her spirit and her memory.

4. Blood Diamond. Performance Art/Instillation Piece in the Grahamstown train station. You enter the station and are given a playing card, you wait. Your card is called. You enter the platform, alone. The door closes behind you. A child, a small black child, appears out of nowhere and takes you hand. You walk, with this small boy, as he guides you through the experience of 1820 (or so) and the colonization of Grahamstown, the execution and oppression of countless blacks. A pile of rubbish sits in the middle of the train track. Heaping. Stinking. Black garbage bags overflowing, meters tall. Sitting in the heap, are children, scrounging for food. Eating what they find. Hums of tunes from men and women taking shelter behind cardboard boxes. Two men sit on a wall, watching, threatening as you walk by, they stare at you. You walk into a graveyard, home to bodies forgotten. Your child says thank you at the end, the only word spoken all night.

July 15th was Matthew’s 8th birthday. In addition to a lovely party, he was gifted a dog. A maltese poodle. We were told the dog was coming on Thursday, and he arrived on Friday. Matthew promptly named the dog Tiny, because he is so tiny.

Tiny is a funny little thing. Attacks leaves in the yard. Rolls over on his back if you walk near him. But he is still, to this day, untrained. The house is his toilet and everything is his chew toy. Part of training a dog, is training the people who live with the dog, and we all need to go to puppy school.

With the death of Michael Jackson, Durban came alive with theme parties. I attended the official Michael Jackson “Thriller” party at what must be the whitest club in the entire world. I bought a fedora for the occasion.

The end of July and beginning of August heralded the Durban International Film Festival, a smorgasbord of films, mostly from Africa. Again, I hit it hard, and saw 10 films in as many days. Documentaries on Durban street children, Vogue, and men who attempt to change the world. Dramas about Durban street children, the Mafia, and South African violence. Comedies by Woody Allen. A film set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; perhaps I loved it for its familiar skyline and accents, but it both warmed and broke my heart.

In the midst of all these films, school started up again. Except if you say “school” in South Africa, people assume you mean high school. So, rather, I ought to say, varsity started up again.

This semester holds a course called “Theatre for Debate,” which looks at, among many things, applied theatre, participatory theatre, Boal, Freire, and ultimately cumulates in a week long workshop/devising process in the Westville Maximum Security Women’s Prison. Needless to say, I am utterly excited about our work in the prison, upcoming in October.

I am continuing my IsiZulu class once a week, now at the pre-intermediate level…whatever that means. I am learning and understanding, but putting it all into practice is difficult.

In addition to the learning, I have been doing a great amount of teaching, including three classes at the varsity. I have been tutoring a Brecht practical class, in which we made a 10-minute piece using Brechtian texts and current newspaper articles. My group created a play around the idea of “what is a mother?” using Caucasian Chalk Circle and the recent story of the American woman who killed her friend and cut out her baby from her womb to raise it as her own.

Additionally, I am, still, teaching two monologue tutorials for first year students. They have had to write their own monologues for created characters as well as work on a monologue from a scripted play. Talents range dramatically.

My work at Cato Crest has been waning as of late. When I go there, I usually end up completing the teacher’s lesson plans for her, as she runs out of the room to do other things when I arrive. So, the drama literacy part of my time at Mayville Secondary School has ceased, to make way for standard lessons thrown upon me the moment class begins. I know that I could work hard and reshape what is happening now, but my energies, at the moment, lie elsewhere… to be discussed soon.

However, the fruits of my Cato Crest labor arrived when I was asked to be the guest speaker at the matric dance, aka: prom. I do not remember a guest speaker at the Enloe prom, but I did not argue, and instead wrote a speech to give that night at the dance. I was told that I must inspire the youth to stay in school, work hard, study, pass their exams, and go to varsity. Quite the tall order for a dance! So, I did what I could to satisfy the teachers’ requests, but also attempted to make the speech fun. I ended with a favorite anecdote, of a boy named Prince and a song called “It’s All Up To Me.”

Rotary is still going strong, and I attend every possible meeting at my club, Durban-Westville. A rowdy group, they always have something to say, and I come home every night with a ‘quote of the evening.” Reigning supreme may still be, not a quote but a movement: A Rotarian pulled me over to him by putting his finger in my back pocket and tugging. Yikes?

I have been asked to write the annual Westville Rotary play to be performed for the District Governor on September 21st. I have no idea what it should be about. Past plays have been spin offs of Snow White, Aladdin, etc.

And so August brought commitments and studying, but it also has been a time of strengthening friendships. Sarah and I (because we so often circulate the social crowd together) have been invited into a group of South African friends, and we in turn have invited them into our Frisbee world. It is a lovely exchange, full of laughs, braais, sport, and the occasional accident blue curacao. I have been spending a great amount of time with a group of Europeans, mostly German and French. They have introduced me to the nightspot that everyone else already knew about: Cool Runnings. Although it is mostly known for its drug scene, Cool Runnings hosts drumming circles on Thursday nights. We go and dance, and pretend we know how to drum (and decline the drugs, thank you very much). Unfortunately, however, the Germans are all but gone; one left this Thursday, and the other tomorrow…so I write tonight up until I get the call that says its time to go out.

Did I mention that I am in a play?

It is a devised piece about war, created in a collaboration of UKZN and the neighboring Durban Institute of Technology (the first time in 50 odd years that these two institutions have worked together). We began rehearsals on August 26th, and we open on September 14th. You do the math. Anyway you look at it, it’s a short process.

The play is a combination of dances, songs, movements, and mostly letters… written by soldiers home to their loved ones, and from those loved ones to their boys on the front lines. As such, our play is named FrontLines.

In preparation for the piece, we were asked to write our own letters, imagining we were soldiers, mothers, sons, etc. Well, I decided I did not want to do that, so I wrote home instead. Perfect timing, as it turns out, my Grandmother was going through all the letters her husband, my grandfather, sent to her while he was stationed on various ships throughout WWII.

She and my mother proceeded to go through these letters, from Pearl Harbor to the South Pacific, while my mom also found the letter that my dad had written to his mom, my other grandma, while he was stationed in Vietnam.

These were the letters that I submitted for our play. And tomorrow in rehearsal, I will hear someone speak my father’s words aloud. His letters are in our play.

I tell my cast members brief versions of the stories of my family. My grandfather commanding the USS Wasmuth out of Pear Harbor while Kamikaze pilots zoomed above. My father surviving Nam by luck. My cousin who was late to a meeting in the World Trade Centers and therefore survived. Their jaws drop. But they have stories too. Of the Border Wars. Of Soweto. Songs of the struggle pour out of their souls, while I must struggle to remember the order of the verses in “Where have all the flowers gone?”

I enjoy this devising process. I did not realize just how much I miss making stuff. Of being a part of something. My director brain still wants to butt in, although my performer brain is enjoying the exercise.

So that pretty much brings us up to date here in Durban. My future past December is uncertain at this point. I have applied for a job in Chicago, and if I get it, I will move to Chicago. If not, I will stay in Durban. Either way, I think I win. Over 100 people applied for this one position, and of those 100, 20 were chosen for further consideration. I am one of 20. That means I must be doing something right. And that in and of itself is such a huge honor.

I am living in a bit of a limbo right now, not knowing where I will be next year. Part of me wants so much to be in Chicago. But the other part wants terribly to stay in South Africa, and do some of these projects that I have started dreaming of.

I was speaking (rather typing) to Jon Levy yesterday (Jon, I’ve mentioned you in my blog now, as I promised I would, so I hope you have held up your end of the bargain by being a faithful reader), and he said that from where he stands, Chicago is in the past. He lives in New York now, and because of time zones, Chicago is in the past, literally. Chicago is my past, too, I lived there for four years. Is a return to Chicago now an attempt to recreate what has already happened? Must I instead look forward, eastward, for my present?

I do not know if I have these answers. And I am glad that the full weight of these decisions does not rest fully on my shoulders. If I get the job, I go. If I don’t, I stay. I win either way. I just wish I knew, then I could imagine my future more clearly.