Last night, the full moon of May, was Buddha’s Birthday. Buddha – pioneer of the notion and discipline of Mindfulness. It’s taken a very long time for Mindfulness to really catch on, but it seems to be a Good Thing, on the whole.
A milk white moon rose over the ridge between Bolehill and Gorsey Bank, the blackbirds in full throat, fields gold with buttercups, and verges deep in Sweet Cecily and Pink Campion. Last week the swifts arrived – on 6th May as predicted. I was anticipating seeing those familiar shapes high in the sky, but was met by a stream of them, as I crossed the orchard, swooping and circling over my head in a joyful and noisy aerial display. Waking one morning at dawn a few days ago, I heard the first cuckoo, and tonight the larks were singing in a clear blue sky above Middleton Moor. It feels new – all of it, even though I’ve lived through decades of springs. This year spring seemed to creep up and take us by surprise. Winter scarcely touched us, but for the dark long nights. It was mild, often sunny weather. As the weeks went by, it didn’t seem possible that we’d got away without the blizzards, deep drifts and banks of snow of winter 2012-13. But Easter came and went, and it became apparent, amazingly, that winter was over. Teaching Pilates this morning, I was talking about flow – one of the six fundamental principles of Joseph Pilates’ teaching. It’s always good to come back to these principles, to ground the exercises, to be mindful of concentration, control, centring, breath, precision, flow. They can be usefully applied to any activity – but breath and flow seem particularly to underpin everything. Movement rides the breath – breath, a circular flow – patterns of rhythm, shape, speed and dynamic shift into new patterns – continual movement. Between classes, I write – I need to complete a full draft of my novel by the beginning of September, to leave time for a final draft and copy editing, and there’s an awful lot of work still to do. For too long writing has been a struggle, I’ve had a sense of pushing against the constraints of my own mediocrity, a restriction of flow, without much release or sense of any achievement (not in myself anyway). Except for the occasional time, like working on Meetings with Ivor, it’s been relentlessly challenging. But just a month ago I reached a new phase with writing, indeed with many things I’ve struggled with for a long time – everything seemed to fall into place and become easier. I don’t know how this has happened, but it’s a good feeling I don’t take for granted. Since then the internal voices have become clearer, there’s a sense of purpose to each chapter. I don’t know if I’m writing any better, but I look forward to the hours I can spend on it. I’d never been clear about the end of my novel, but as I walked last night it came to me at last, playing out in my imagination so vividly I regretted the lack of paper and pen – why do I always forget? Sometimes, the best times, all effort relaxes – breath and movement in flow -- and it’s great to be alive.
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I took two weeks off teaching over Easter – two weeks when the cherry tree showered the garden with blossom, the Blackthorn bust into flower, and I saw the first swallows flittering over the gardens of Gorsey Bank. It was good to let go of all responsibility, to walk around town in the damp twilight, or cross the stream into the fields to catch the last of the evening sun – to have thinking space. During the day I worked on my novel, ‘The Green Table,’ focusing on the three main characters, trying to get inside them, to see the world through their eyes. It wasn’t exactly moving me nearer to completion, but felt absolutely necessary. I’d reached a kind of impasse, close to the climax of the novel, yet unclear of anyone’s direction or fate. I remember Hilary Mantel talking about listening as part of writing – listening to the imagination, waiting for the voices – the interior drama. Over the next few months, whenever I can, I’ll walking and listening, listening and writing, until the shadows become fixed and clear.
The other day I had the fleeting and chilling notion that I was like a God deciding the fates of people who, as far as I know, may exist in a parallel reality. In that situation it would be heartless to make decisions based on what makes the most gripping story, but conversely, for a writer, kindness might cause failure of authenticity. It’s a fine balance. The imagination is illusive – where do the ideas that flit through the mind come from? The first novel I wrote for adults, ‘Dreaming in Colour,’ was pretty damned awful. I couldn’t bring myself to read it now, but writing it was a tremendous experience at the time. I’ve rarely been so engrossed in anything – and so nearly unbalanced. How much easier it is to be a choreographer – at least you can see the work as it takes shape in the rehearsal room beyond the thinking mind. I recall the powerful sense that I myself was changed through creating one particular character, a dancer called Silas Hall. I’d recently seen Japanese dancer, Saburo Teshigarawa, and Silas emerged from the memory of Teshigarawa’s wonderful piece ‘Beyond Zero’. Silas lived in my imagination for a long time. One particular day, weighted down with stress, I had the sudden feeling that he stood beside me. It was like greeting a beloved friend, like sunlight breaking through cloud, an unsettling and wonderful experience. I don’t consider writing to be therapy. Often it’s the hardest work. But at times the relationship between the writer and her characters feels tangible and equal. Who is controlling who? Perhaps, when a character comes to life, it’s as close as the writer can get to standing apart from the familiar self? But it’s more than this too. ‘We left the church accompanied by a recording of Neil Diamond singing Forever in Blue Jeans, through the churchyard and across the lane into the cemetery. Ivor was lowered into the ground by Aidan, Denis, and the others, and we threw yellow roses onto the coffin. Last of all Jacky let his cap fall into the grave.’ From Meetings with Ivor (available as free pdf download through the Writing section of this website. Paperback book - £4 including postage) At last the short portrait I wrote about Ivor, the old man I encountered on the road to Biddulph Moor, has gone to print, and should be available to buy online next week through the writing section of this website. (A pdf version is already available).
Working on Ivor was a welcome distraction from the much more difficult task of writing The Green Table. Often I could hear his voice, and I vividly remembered our encounters. The letters I sent to the editors of the Leek and Congleton newspapers, resulted in many phone calls from people who knew Ivor. I had a sense of how rich a life can be, and how much, and how little, we can ever know about a person. ‘People die, and you wish you’d asked them things before they’ve gone,’ said one of his friends. This is exactly how I feel. I often drive past his house. It’s empty, the paddock is long in grass, there’s brushwood across the entrance. I miss him a lot. I’m reading Hitler’s Dancers, by Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, a history of German Modern Dance and the Third Reich. I discovered it when I was researching for my novel – looking for work that would give me a deeper understanding of dance in Germany and The Netherlands during the 1940s. It’s a compelling and chilling read. I thought I knew my dance history, but this book sheds a new light particularly on the work of Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman, and raises questions about their collusion with the Nazi regime.
Lilian Karina, born in Russia, was one of the many dancers who had to flee Germany. She made it to Sweden, where though she was badly treated, she managed to survive, and where she lives still. She writes, in brief, of many of her colleagues, who, being Jewish, homosexual, or Communist, were brutally treated, lost their work, their home, often their life. In many cases all documentation is either lost or, even now, suppressed. They were the dancers who disappeared. Those who continued to work, who developed their careers through the regime, cannot possibly have been ignorant of what was going on around them. In all other professions they would have been called to account after the war. Is it that dance isn’t deemed important enough for such scrutiny? Or that the devotees of Hitler’s Dancers conveniently forgot what happened between 1933 and 1945. These are questions Lilian Karina can’t answer. But without making any excuses, it has made me think how easy it might have been to collude, and how difficult – the cost of one’s career – not to. Times were different then, and it’s easy now to make judgements. Nazi Germany didn’t arise from nothing – there was already a culture of anti-Semitism, and racial ‘hygiene,’ there were many who argued on the side of eugenics, body fascism has always been an uncomfortable aspect of dance training, and in certain factions of modern dance there was already a predisposition towards the occult, dance as spiritual practise – much favoured by the Nazis. Dancers and choreographers – like all artists – are vulnerable to public opinion, and highly ambitious. A choreographer needs dancers, musicians, a theatre, funding, and above all public and political approval in order to continue to create ballets. In Nazi Germany, culture was totally bound up with politics. If you were out of favour, if you disagreed with the regime, it was not only the end of your career, but possibly your freedom and your life. Kowtow to Hitler and Goebbels and your career was made, albeit at the cost of your soul. Hitler’s Dancers was much criticised when it came out. Many people were angry and disturbed. I don’t know what the truth is, but it’s provided another perspective to this fascinating time. In the end Laban fell out of favour with Goebbels. There are letters to prove how he begged to stay on to complete his work in Germany. He failed to regain approval and had to flee to England. Mary Wigman stayed in German and made her career. We can never know what went on in these dancers minds – is it possible to ‘play the game’ so successfully, or did they wholeheartedly believe in Hitler’s vision? Is it possible to believe in part? Whatever the truth, it’s provided a fascinating and insightful read and much food for thought. I recommend it to anyone interested in modern dance. Fifteen years ago, when I moved to Thorntree Cottages, there was a line of saplings planted along the wall of the orchard - cherry, pear, plum, and apple. Every year the plum tree produced a sweet golden-green fruit on one branch, and the rest of the tree was barren. By the time we bought the orchard, five years ago, the tree was about twelve feet high, and no longer producing plum, but instead a small yellow fruit a little bigger than a damson. We thought it had somehow transformed into a Greengage – perhaps the original sapling was grafted onto Greengage root – but further research revealed it most likely to be a French Mirabelle – though our French neighbour swears that it’s not. Whatever it is, the tree is now huge and lovely. The trunk forks from the base. One side, supported by wooden props, forms an arch over the gate. In March and April it’s thick with white, sweet-scented blossom, and humming with bees and butterflies. In July and August it’s so abundant in mirabelles that we collect buckets of them every day, giving them to neighbours for cooking and preserving – they make delicious sour-sweet jam and compote. Lying in bed at night, you can hear the quiet plop of fruit falling onto the roof of the shed and the lawn. They lie, plump, warm and marble smooth, in the long grass, and the air is filled with the yeasty smell of fermentation. Here are George Peck’s wonderful photographs, taken a few days ago. This weekend, as I was driving, I got to think about lost places of my childhood, places that are now either inaccessible, or changed beyond recognition. A place I remember with much fondness is the Pillar Hotel in the Langdale Estate, our holiday destination every July for at least eight years.
Back in the day – late 1960s into 1970s – the people I knew never went abroad. Holidays were more likely to be a week on a farm in Criccieth, a visit to an aunt in Suffolk, or Butlins in Blackpool. In the seventeenth century the Langdale Estate, by the fast-flowing Great Langdale Beck in Elterwater, was the site of small woollen mill. Later it became a gunpowder factory. In 1931, during the depression, the gunpowder factory ceased to be profitable, so it was transformed into a wild and magical holiday resort with a small campsite, and barn dwellings for rent, and The Pillar Hotel, looking like a Swiss chalet, in the centre. Lush and luxurious baskets of geraniums hung all along the wooden veranda. There was one large light dining room with windows on three sides. A gong would sound for dinner, and every day had its particular set meal that didn’t change by the year. On Mondays a whole baked onion arrived with the meat, and there were exotic puddings with names like Peach Melba, and Pear Belle Helene. Three plain white bathrooms were shared by the guests of ten bedrooms, so creeping out at night to the toilet we children ran the embarrassing risk of meeting an adult in pyjamas. The estate was wild and lovely, with waterfalls, woods of larch and spruce, a clear stream where trout basked between emerald weeds, and a hill we climbed every evening to watch the sun set behind the Langdale Pikes. There were old tennis courts, surrounded by Rhododendron and bracken, and Langdale Beck we reached by clambering through the ruins of part of the gunpowder factory. The riverbed was glorious – great slabs of slate, carved out into gullies and bowls, smooth as silk with the endless rush of water, and pools of icy green water that made our bones ache as we slipped into it screaming. One year it was in spate, wild and rushing and white. We slept and woke to the roar of water. Another year there was a drought – a trickle of water between the rocks and boulders, and flickering lights in the hotel that relied on hydro-electric power. Year after year the same visitors arrived for that last week in July, and became our friends. Year after year we played scrabble together, children and adults, in the sitting room after dinner – with at least five tables of four, forming a kind of scrabble championship. It was during that week that I discovered the world of trolls too – trolls of the 1970s with their brilliant coloured hair and simian faces. I looked forward to that week for months, and back home in suburbia I missed the mountains and rivers more than I could say. It all ended when Mr Baines, the congenial owner, chef (with Mrs Baines) and only waiter, left the hotel and bought a café in Ambleside. The regular visitors drifted away. We returned for one more holiday, but it wasn’t the same. Not long after, the Langdale Estate became a luxury timeshare. There was much building, the wilderness was tamed, the beck-side flanked by smart apartments. What happened to the hotel, I don’t know. People have different expectations of holidays now. I hoped to find a picture of the old hotel on the internet, but there’s nothing. I wouldn’t like to go back now. They were brilliant holidays. Two years ago the pond on the orchard was nothing more than a newly dug hole, clear water and pond liner. For the last three weeks it’s been bubbling with frogs – swimming, sunbathing, spawning, the orchard full of their soft rumbling sound, all day, all evening. Their mysterious arrival has delighted all of us, especially the children, who spent hours on Saturday lifting them out of the water and watching them hop around the rocks. The frogs seemed quite unperturbed to be handled – sat for a while, then plopped into the water and swam back under the chick weed. This morning they seem to have gone. Is it the absence of sun on the water, are they hiding at the bottom of the pond, or now they’ve spawned have they’ve returned where they came from? My young neighbour, George Peck, took these wonderful photographs – how full of character the frog is. Often when I can’t sleep, I go back, in my mind, to my grandmother’s farm in rural Nottinghamshire – Stanton-on-the Wolds. I walk past the brick pigpens, down the cobbled lane to the yard, where skinny black cats cluster round a dish of milk and bread – into the room with its surround of Belfast sinks, and smell of raw egg, where we helped my aunt size the eggs on a strange Bakelite object with a pin that popped through a slot. I go on into the kitchen, where damp kittens nest in a box under the sideboard. The sun slants through the window, and cats tiptoe along the edges of furniture. I hear the loud voice of my uncle, and the sound of his wellingtons slapping the stone flags. Out in the hall, beyond my grandmother’s sitting room, I’m lost. Try as hard as I may, I can’t recall my uncle’s study – only a memory of him sitting at a huge untidy desk in the half light of evening. It frustrates me that I can’t remember accurately and there’s nobody left to ask.
We only ever visited Laurel Farm in Whitsun and August – leaf shadow, shafts of sunlight through grain dust in the chicken sheds, the dirty yolk of shattered eggs in the straw, and the soft rumbling song of the chickens. We walked with my aunt, down lanes deep in cow parsley and may blossom, to feed the chickens and collect the eggs. Early in the morning I lay under piles of eiderdowns in my grandmother’s bed, and heard the men calling to each other below her bedroom window. I was a child of suburbia, and this was a kind of paradise. Yesterday, nearly forty years later, we went back to the farm for a visit. The present owner, very kindly, offered to show us around. It’s become gentrified, all the outbuildings converted into houses, a smell of wealth. The egg room, and my grandmother’s kitchen have been demolished, the kitchen garden buried under a patio. There are no chicken sheds, no cats, no paddock where Friesian cows graze around a track leading to the church. I looked from the outside, through plastic framed windows that had never existed then, unable to see the interior of my grandmother’s sitting room, or climb the narrow stairs to her bedroom, to hear the click of the latch as the door opened. We crossed the field to the church, saw my uncle’s grave. I longed to stand in the churchyard and feel the quietness of the dead, but we were being shown around. Our hostess was a talker and had much to tell us. Until yesterday I’d forgotten the sharp, vertiginous ache of being shut out, of something being so near and yet unreachable. Laurel Farm was lost to us very suddenly. My uncle died in January 1977. Neither my sister nor I went to his funeral. Overnight my poor grandmother lost her beloved son, her home, and her much adored cat. I remember my mother, usually so cheerful, returning from the funeral and taking to bed, her face grey and old and exhausted. It’s not that I idealise my mother’s farming family. They were an odd bunch, volatile, unforgiving at times, with inexplicable estrangements, and much whispering behind closed doors. There were whole areas of the farmhouse where we children weren’t allowed, and a sense of claustrophobia that became more apparent as I grew up. But I loved them, and I loved the land – the wide sweep of the wooded wolds, the restful sky, the soft red brick and steep pitched roof of the farm, the shadowy interiors full of sounds and smells. I should have known – or perhaps I hoped it would be different. What once existed, and was loved, has gone forever, reachable only through the mind, unreliable memory, the imagination. I read the following statement in Judith Mackrell’s Dance Blog last week.
Beryl Grey and Gillian Lynne acknowledge that today's performers are technically impressive, but it's a trend they don't care for. Grey feels that contemporary ballet is too much like "a circus" and both she and Lynne argue that gains in physical expertise are being made at the expense of emotional depth and dramatic expression: ballet as empty acrobatics, ballet as extreme physical sport. Mackrell goes on to suggest that the two Grande Dames of ballet are following the ‘natural order’ of one generation criticising the work of the generation that follows. Maybe this is true, but I know that for many years I’ve felt the same. So much contemporary dance and ballet leaves me cold. As far as contemporary dance goes, it’s often the fault of the choreography, but in relation classical ballet, I’d still rather watch Margot Fonteyn, even on film, than Sylvie Guillem – for all Guillem’s beauty and astounding technical brilliance. Although perfection pleases my mind, it becomes tiring to the eye, and the heart. Is it that musicality and theatricality, maybe even subtlety of dynamic, become eclipsed by the acrobatic? I don’t know. But there's no going back, and I wonder how much further the technique can be pushed before ballet really does resemble a circus, and what cold wonders the dancers and choreographers of tomorrow will produce? Despite being an advocate for excellent teaching, and life-long training in all the arts, perfection unsettles me. I was working in Japan some years ago and was taken to see a puppet performance by a Master Puppeteer. I understand how many years it takes to create such a Master, how revered he is, and how children and adults in training spend hours every day over each tiny action – a training that’s repetitive, rigorous and impressive beyond anything we know in the West. So I expected great things. It was truly amazing – like magic – but within a short time I felt so oppressed I couldn’t wait to get out of the theatre. By the end, some hours later, it had done my head in! So many many years of effort, resulting in a flawless portrayal of emptiness in the guise of a simple folk tale. Conversely, one of the loveliest moments I’ve ever experienced, was over twenty years ago, after a rehearsal of Ruckblick, by Amici Dance Theatre. I was gathering my things together to leave, when I caught sight of a young woman with Down’s syndrome dancing with another woman. Her face was open and radiant, her graceful movement embodied joy, and the flow of communication between her and her partner seemed to fill the room. In a second all notions I’d ever had about beauty were turned upside down. She, a woman who the world might see as flawed, was beautiful, enchanting beyond words. It was as if I was really seeing – through the eyes, to the heart – for the first time in my life. I walked out into the sunshine, and sat in the churchyard on Brompton Road, unable to rush through the city for my train home, deeply shaken, and profoundly happy. |
AuthorTricia Durdey dances, writes, and teaches Pilates. Archives
October 2017
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