It has been a cold winter, the first normal winter in years. The Androscoggin River is clogged with ice on its way to the ocean. As we drive along it I think of the rivers I have known. First is this river’s tributary, the Little Androscoggin, which begins at Bryant Pond and is swelled by the outflow of Penneseewassee Lake and Bird Brook; at its headwaters I grew up with the changing stream that flushed and withered with the seasons.
Further, on the other side of the country, at the banks of the Umpqua River where my father was raised, I remember a dance celebrating the river by a troupe wearing a giant fabric lamprey costume. The hours and days spent looking from my rock ledge into those deep waters formed me as well.
Today, I am on the banks of the Androscoggin, which begins at Umbagogg Lake and winds eastward across Maine until joining the Kennebec in Merrymeeting Bay, to see a dance that has already started by the time I arrive.
Performance of Long Live the River (photo: Andrew Estey)
Long Live the River is a product of collaboration by a trio of artists: Meghan Brady, Aretha Aoki, and Ryan MacDonald.
Ryan is on sound. Seamless, fluctuating sound spilling from synths, flashing lights, wires, keyboards, and inexplicably, a potted plant. His dialogue with the dancer is equally seamless. Sometimes his sound drives her movement, other times she seems to drive the sound. His sound is rich and multilayered, sampled or synthesized and blended so deftly it takes you over easily and stimulates subconscious fantasy, the pulsations of my blood and body, working rhythms. I feel these pulsations like ripples through clear water. I find it comforting.
Aretha dances. Her movement is athletic yet restrained. Her clothes are simple, comfortable, and unadorned. She balances on one leg, she spins, she holds her foot, extends her arm, and through it all not the slightest tremor. Her discipline, her commitment, and her stamina are immediately evident.
Meghan has made a big blue painting. But it is more than just a painting, it is also a backdrop for the performance. Big painting is complicated. The intent of the artist, their handling of the paint, and elements of personality trail significantly the primary gesture: the monumental gesture. The rumpled paper on which it is painted, the distance from us behind the fourth wall, its setting as an environment inhabited by a moving body, all give it a gentle animism despite its size, and a soothing dignity that washes the room in blue light.
It makes me think of coloring, which is a present verb and also a gerund, a verb that functions as a noun, as a thing. The mark and the gesture of coloring.
Performance of Long Live the River (photo: Andrew Estey).
Inside, the room is filled with blue light and pulsing rhythm. I scan the crowd as I join it, unreadable faces, expectant postures. We watch the dance together and become part of it. Quickly a change takes place. I first notice the change in the painting, in the shapes, but of course it is happening in my mind. Shapes resembling the sun, some waves, a mountain, become Sun, become Wave, become Mountain. It is almost not a painting at all but a symbol or collection of symbols. It has created a new world and replaced the old one.
Beginning in my imagination I feel the presence of the river, each event of the performance like an ice floe bobbing past, a constant yet uncertain stage upon which a dancer’s feet yet rise and fall.
Her face is immersed in the act of dancing, cycling through expressions, and touches madness once or twice. The sound flutters between delicate atmospheres and club beats. Blue light shines off the walls and pools on the floor that the dancer’s feet pad across. In the stage lights she almost fluoresces against the ultramarine.
The dancer is on her back now, limbs raised in front of the footlight so that her titanic shadow on the blue painting floats like a drowning giant.
Performance of Long Live the River (photo: Andrew Estey).
Still too alert to relax, I start to think of what it means to live now and provoke a pointless frustration better left undisturbed. The river flows into our small time, our meaningless time, and out again. Our small reality is not an option, this meager time is not enough.
She slumps into a corner, arms splayed against the perpendicular walls, as if the river coming down upon her back was split and diverted past her open palms. Her pants are smeared with dust danced out of the cracks of the floor, like the lamprey dancers in my memory stamping the dust up from the ground to powder their legs. At times I do not know which is the dance and which the memory, or which river I picture, at what time and at which place. They are the same river passing before me and in my mind, the Little Androscoggin, the Androscoggin, and the Umpqua.
So easy to forget all we have to do is watch and listen. What we bring with us is always interfering. I just sit and watch and contemplate distant distances.
Smiling, a baby crawls across the floor toward center stage, and the father slides out to grab the baby’s foot and draw them back. A ripple of amusement runs through the crowd at this human gesture. Comparing the dancer to the baby, we notice just how much a body changes when it is performing, how much our humanity shifts and becomes remote.
That brief moment of disruption makes me suddenly self-aware. I remember positions of postmodernism on truth, irony, drama, spectacle, magic, style, and manage to hold these warily at arm’s length. I wonder what everyone else is thinking, wonder about their expectations, are they uncomfortable or enthralled? I notice most people have their arms or legs crossed, or both. How long has it been since I have dropped my expectations and simply looked, how little time have I given to this, my attention, how much have I overestimated my willingness for deep thought? It was a small muscle gently renewed, and I felt sad wondering why it is so uncommon.
Close to us now the dancer stands facing downstage to the painting, utterly still.
Still like the ice-bound river.
Still like the bare-limbed tree leaning over the water.
A group of new arrivals trickles around the dancer on their way to their seats and they suddenly seem as if they are a river in miniature. Like a rock amid the flow the dancer is surrounded by a crowd of moving bodies. The dramatization of a river by this impromptu band of actors creates a subtle shift, rattles free new understanding in me. Stillness is a disaster. Stillness is a calamity . . . which dance am I seeing? Peace is there, it has to be chosen, and it also feels impossible to choose. Remaining still in an unstable world is unbearable.
My sleeve is tugged, signaling it is time to leave, and we step out of the pulsing room filled with blue light and in that moment I feel connected to the artists and to the river in that room and feel that all rivers are the same river, always beginning, always ending, always returning at once to their common source, to where they always flow yet never fill.
Performance of Long Live the River (photo: Andrew Estey).
Performance of Long Live the River (photo: Andrew Estey).