Serene Saturday...Spring is Here!

Spring has finally arrived! And on this first glorious day of spring, I find many ways to enjoy my time, unstructured. In the studio this morning, I work my muscles and make more material for the short piece I am working on. I feel I am getting close to having a solid bit of phrase work from which to base all other material for the piece. As I dance today, I realize again (as I often do), that one cannot force the process! I have to be happy with whatever work has been done at any given point, as long as it was done in earnest. Every day in the studio is a small accomplishment, which should in some way, be celebrated. Whether that may be with a proverbial pat on the back for a job well done, a little extra time to stretch at the end of rehearsal or Cold Stone after a good work out!

Today, I did make it over to Cold Stone for my usual: mint, with chocolate shavings and graham cracker crust mixed in. Last spring and summer, I was at Cold Stone so often, that the staff knew me by name, and exactly what I wanted. As there is every year, there has been a changing of the guard, as it were, so none of these youngsters today knew my name, or my order. But they will soon be up to speed!

After the ice cream, Robert and I ventured to the park for the first time in a great while, to collect sounds for our collection. Robert is a sound engineer, and loves sounds more than any one person I have ever met. He is fascinated with how waves travel through the air, and how sound can be manipulated. He loves both natural sounds and industrial sounds. He hears beauty everywhere he goes. My time with Robert always reminds me how much sound is filling our ears at any given moment, and how much of that sound we simply ignore. The faint rustling of leaves on the street, the persistent baying of a dog a mile away, the jolted sound of car wheels over a man hole the innumerable languages of the birds perched overhead, and the bouncing echo of hammers on hard walls. It is clear that much of man's inspiration for what we call music comes from our own environment, and our need to imitate sounds within it.

At this moment, I have just finished an amazing amount of reading for school. I am learning about African mythology, and parts of it that survived the middle passage, to become Afro-American folklore. It seems as though the one concept that has survived most prominently is that of the trickster in both oral traditions and literature. This trickster is all knowing in many respects, and in all of his incarnations, is a mediator between man and his Gods. Whether he is called Esu, Legba, papa La Bas or simply, The Monkey, he is the character who acts as the ultimate translator, and has a hand in what men will have chaos in their lives, and what men will have luck or prosperity.

More later!

~Cara