ON & OFF THE ROAD #7

Rhythm.

According to the world's synergetic repository of communal knowledge--otherwise known as Wikipedia--the word was only coined in the 16th century. A confluence of repetition and flow. Is it only in the last 500 years that we've found the luxury to notice? We associate the term with music. The regular whack of the kick drum and the swirling patterns of guitars and synths. A lot of so called classical music we don't consider very rhythmic. But actually I think the lack of a steady pulse is often much more in tune with the way we function. And rhythm is infinitely more than an elucidation of musical organization. Or rather, it's the other way around and our very existence unfolds as a dance choreographed to the symphonies of the spheres.

About once a week, from the back of the stage at the Stadt Theater Dortmund, pimped out in a polar bear cum Elton John costume, I sit at a grand piano and watch the utter hopelessness of Woyzeck play out in front of me. Every once in a while I sing a song, but now that the carousel of opening night is behind us, I get to think about what might have happened to the girl who sat in front of me in 7th grade home-room; what I need to buy for breakfast--and what these people are doing sliding around in the snow yelling at each other in German. In a sense, the play was finished after opening night. I never considered how little time it would take for the creation to calcify, but fresh pasta does not cook faster. These professionals talk about the post-premiere blues the way new mothers commiserate over their "loss." It is all about process and applause.  What comes between threatens to be incidental. Except that we're human and we're good at it. Good at what we do--and maybe by extension, the human part of it. Last night, when Woyzeck asked the Captain if he was kidding about the cuckolding, the surprising gentleness was returned and I felt as if the entire platform on which I sit, piano included, levitated off the snowy stage and flew right through a giant window. The elasticity of communication between all six of us feels like the dough between my palms when I'm baking bread. An equivalently life-giving force.  

We've all been flying too many kites here for the past few weeks, which makes progress difficult. On Tuesday, all the trains in the Ruhr region were definitely tuned to a different rhythm than the one I thought necessary. I arrived in Hamburg hours late for the Small Beast night, barely making it in time to hang the little lady and try on the Mexican wrestling mask that Andras had thoughtfully provided, (since I'd forgotten my own bacchanalian headgear). The Friday before in Dortmund, I perched Baby Dee and her golden harp on top of the bar and everything was perfect. Now everything was too big and too late, but in the end, it felt as if we made time slow down and the space shrink. And Little Annie, who has no rhythm whatsoever in the sense that a "musician" would count it, rides the currents and shapes of the air we share with her as no performer I have ever seen or heard. 

The visual artist John Baldessari is quoted as saying that "we learned a whole new attitude about what art could be--not expression, but investigation." In other words, as Calvin Tomkins wrote, "self-expression and personal choice were off the table." The word artist wiggled its way into our language about the same time as the word rhythm. And for the last 500 years, has been mostly attached to people able to bore a hole into the consciousness of the rest of us with their personal choices for self-expression. And then a lot of us moved to the cities and made more money and had more time and somewhere along the line Mrs. Cage and Mrs Baldessari went off the rhythm method. And now we've stepped through that giant window to a very small clearing where the investigation begins. Sometimes the line between investigation and expression wraps around us like a vine and suddenly we're able to navigate an immeasurable  rhythm capable of saving us from the hangman's noose and this week's election results. Little Annie singing Stevie Wonder does it for me. 

All it takes, sometimes is one word; one gesture.