November 27, 2004

Well I'm back

An interesting evening: a reading and the ballet. I generally have to work hard to convince myself to go out again once I am home, and after a long week it was difficult to go back into the cold and leave a warm house, a pre-schooler getting ready for his bath, and a soft bed. But I did, and am glad.

Beth Powning reads well. I haven't read The Hatbox Letters but from the two excerpts I heard, it is, at least in part, an intensely nuanced exploration of loss and loneliness. In other words, although I recognize the artistry, I doubt I will read it any time soon.

There is an interesting congruence between Powning's novel —

When Kate Harding, recently widowed, receives nine antique hatboxes — family letters, diaries, and memorabilia — from Hartford, Connecticut, she finds herself drawn back to the childhood summers she spent in Shepton, her grandparents’ Connecticut house.

and the ballet, Les Portes Tournantes, in which there are also documents from the past in the form of "a mysterious black book."

It appears that this evening was my time for dabbling: first a reading from a book I likely won't read, and then the first ballet I've seen in well over a decade. The first Act failed to draw me in, though the second did, despite my reservations about the narrative as some sort of wish-fulfilment story for children of divorced parents, and my discomfort with the theme of two mothers who leave their children. Boy children. (Wonder what my little sprout is doing? Is he upset that I went out? Why am I here watching a narrative about abandonment since to do so required me to temporarily abandon my son? And of course, when I got home I found that he had had a fine evening with his father, played for ages, and went easily to sleep. So.)

One thing I found interesting about the performance was the consistent focus on other forms of artistic production: one character is a painter, and paintings are a significant part of the set. Another is a musician; a "string quartet" dances their performance with their instruments. The artist's mother, danced by the magnificent Evelina Sushko, was a pianist who accompanied silent films in Cambellton, N.B. Textual documents — the mother's unmailed letters — are central. And of course the ballet itself is based upon Jacques Savoie's 1985 novel.

But much of this is still dabbling. The fact of the matter is that I could not bring myself to care very much for any of these characters, Powning's or the dancers' (with the exception of Sushko's solo in which she gives up her infant son. Yeah, there's a theme here). I was irritated with Powning's widowed Kate; she seemed so solipsistic, so bogged down — or even luxuriating in — in the minutia of her existence. (Big caveat: yes I know I only heard two small sections.) Jaded? Cold? Tired? Insensitive? Overwhelmed? In denial??? You be the judge.

Turned on the ignition in the car afterward and was blasted with some screaming metal on the campus radio, flipped to the "Golden Oldies" station but it was even more maudlin than usual, so settled on the CBC. And caught the tail end of the last in this year's Massey Lecture series, A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright:

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Finally, some perspective. There will be no readings, no ballet, after the apocalypse. But on the plus side: no critics, either.

Globe and Mail review of the ballet.
Part one of the Massey Lectures is available on audio.
A Short History of Progress available from Anansi Press.
Interview with Ronald Wright. And another.
Wright's novels, A Scientific Romance and Henderson's Spear.
Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme: The Maya's ruined temples reveal a frightening message for us all, says archaeologist Ronald Wright (originally published in the Globe & Mail 08/05/2000).

Scribbled at November 27, 2004 12:01 AM AST | Hmmm? (0) | TrackBack (0) | Link Cosmos | More? art/kultur, books/reading, nature, eh?, parenthood, politics, sf




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