Buried Movement at Park Street Church

Tonight I had the opportunity to play the kangaba (a little djembe-like drum played with the hands) for Sue Murad's performance art pieced.
The idea for Sue's piece centered around the idea of being Buried.  She sent out the word to create the collaboration between many different artists of many forms, and came up with the concepts, drama, and movement pieces.

I am currently in an Interdisciplinary Collaboration of the Arts class right now at school, so naturally, I was interested in Sue's work.  (I met Sue at an art night at our house through one of my roommates, Heidi)  Movement is a big part of what Sue does, and she choreographed a Nature Piece centered around the idea of Waves, and a Cultural piece that had 6 different movements.  Keep in mind, all of the pieces are centered around the idea of buried, being buried, or any form of bury.

The Nature piece was interesting because one person would come in at a time and sit on their knees first, hands on the ground, and would slowly arc upwards 'til their hands stretched towards the sky, then in a sway motion they would crash to the floor like a wave splashing.  Then another person would come in and sit in front of them and do a similar movement, and after a few people were doing the movement, you could almost close your eyes and hear the ocean as the sounds were rhythmic yet asymmetrical at the same time.  They would sway their hands on the carpets, sashaying back and forth until they would climb stretching upwards and crash.  The ocean is a blanket and buries and can suffocate.

The piece I musically participated in was the Culture piece.  They had on long sleeve orange shirts to show the brightness of culture.  But keep in mind buried.  We're all eventually buried.  This is one thing we share, whether we're buried by others in culture, or buried by nature.

I'm not going to give a complete rundown of everything, but I played different drum beats, some patterns, some asymmetrical noises that I tried to connect with the movements or concepts.  One piece was called pottery.  Ancient civilizations that are long dead were buried with their pottery, and it was a mark of their time.  I held my drum to the side, and would slap the wood, and pull upwards, trying to give the idea of making pottery, and slapping the clay onto the wheel.  I repeated these sounds because the repetition of those sounds is continual in making pottery.  That, and I didn't have any glass to break, nor did I want to clean that up.

Another movement was about tools.  We are buried with our tool, or our craft might be all we are.  We are a carpenter, we are an electrician, we are a chef, a homemaker, an artist.  You name it, but we are buried with these skills if not tools of things we've learned and acquired in our lifetime.

One of my favorite movements was the Brush.  Each woman came to lay on the ground almost in a running motion, heads together, so that they all looked like a bike wheel at the end.  The women one by one would come out, and there were several different movements about brushing hair, then the next would lie down.  For this, I couldn't help but imagine looking in a mirror myself, brushing my hair, and almost zoning out, just existing for a moment letting the feeling run through your fingers and head, feeling alive and numb at the same time.  In those moments, I have heard women singing to their daughters, and as those women grow up, sing to their children and so on, and I find a humming seems to happen a lot when women brush their hair in general.
So.  I started humming, and singing a hollow and haunting melody, almost zoned out, but thinking constantly of a mother singing to a daughter.  I kept thinking that this mother was almost urgent to tell  her daughter all these things, but could only speak them through a sad melody.  We are buried with our skin and bones and hair and whatever we are physically, this is what we are.

The last was a Make-Up movement and was really powerful.  As women we are buried with our looks.  For a lot of us, we've spent a lifetime trying and trying to alter our appearance and shape and craft it and mold it and we have wasted so much time.  What are we but aging and dying?
I drummed something out, a steady rhythm like we might listen to while we're getting ready, sculpting our faces.  Then there is this climax when we are finally finished, looking at this 'product' we've made, yet we, too, will be buried in the end.


Bottom line, this whole 'performance' was very moving, as it stirred me to think of our fate in so many ways, as well as all the people I've personally lost, and knowing what other's in the room have gone through.