An Axial Moment: Passage of Health Care Reform Legislation

Last night's historic passage of Health Care Reform legislation struck me as a spectacular example of an "axial moment," as described the past two days in posts about the play Out of the Blue by Archipelago Theatre. Poet George Quasha, author of Axial Stones: an Art of Precarious Balance (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006) writes: "Sooner or later everything turns...when the axis is open or released, things turn freely, moving in and out of balance."  

The moment even had its crows, crowds of protesters outside the Capitol, and the rather bizarre shout of "Baby Killer!" cawed-out at anti-abortion Democrat Representative Bart Stupak. Congressmen John Lewis and Barney Frank were also harassed during the past few days, with vile and profane insults. Safe and civil discourse appeared to be precariously out of balance. (Joan Walsh has a good opinion piece on this topic over at Salon.)

Passage of the bill required compromise and suspended animation regarding one dimension of women's rights. A morning story on NPR by Andrea Seabrook, called "Health Care  Passage Hinged on Abortion Language" describes the drama (and the irony) well.

The "bipartisan in content, but not in context" Health Care Reform bill made me want to take a look at Quasha's website for examples of Axial Stones (he is adding more each week).

Here is what Carter Ratcliff has to say in the forward to the book, about  situations of precarious alignment:

Gathered into one another’s company, George Quasha’s axial stones establish a zone of riveting stillness. Yet each was brought to that shared state by a history—a tempo of events—entirely its own. It is the work of an instant to spot a likely stone, but it may take the artist days or years to see how two stones fit together to form a single piece. The fitting itself can be quick or slow. In any case, the process follows strict rules: one stone must be balanced on another, at a narrow point of contact, and no adhesive is permissible nor may either stone be modified in any way. The results are astonishing.

Click here for more axial art including a video of the axial stones in process.

Paula Rego's Crows Figure in 'Out of the Blue'

The paintings of Portuguese artist Paula Rego inspired visual elements of the Archipelago Theatre play Out of the Blue, with its preponderance of crow-like black-winged women, visible in this group photo by Jay O'Berski. Images for the show were created by Jan Chambers, and music composed by Allison Leyton-Brown.

I asked Nor Hall, dramaturg for this and many other Archipelago Theater productions, why crows figured in the work. As it happens, she had written program notes to address that very question. Even though I wasn't able to see the play, I find these ideas very interesting. I'm also recalling the times of year when dozens of crows descend on our yard, taking pause in the sycamore tree and white pines, noisy and en route to somewhere.

 
Why Crows

The old crow sees you without looking directly at you.  Crows just know.  They gather in groups called a riot, a murder, a mob, a brotherhood, a court, or an assembly—cawing in judgment and making asides. Clever creatures with a complex language system, corvids roost at the periphery of our day worlds where they maintain a raucous watch on the comings and goings of human beings.  They’ve been known to play ball, mimic songs, take rings, rearrange pages, shake shamanic rattles, change scenes. As tricksters and ambassadors of the wild, crows have long been regarded as messengers of fate.

Crows became essential to the show because they embody both the ordinariness and total mystery of things that happen out of the blue. When crows show up at particular moments, as they tend to--after a car accident, during a picnic--at moments along life’s continuum from catastrophe to celebration, its our signal that something has unexpectedly shifted to create an opening that wasn’t there before.

When we first started working on this piece Ellen was intrigued by the work of two artists--paintings of Paula Rego’s mid-aged dancers in black tutus standing and waiting for their moment, off-stage like crows in the wings. And the incongruously balanced stone works of poet George Quasha. He describes the axial moment that arrives suddenly to the artist who’s taken a “posture of chance.” “Sooner or later everything turns…when the axis is open or released, things  turn freely, moving in and out of balance.” (Axial Stones)

His choreographic language for sculpture next to Rego’s visual images of  stilled dancers gave us a way to imagine the ineffable opening, the precarious shift and sudden portal to another place that is meant when we report something as happening “out of the blue.” Our best hope is that the play will come to you that way, as a dramatic moment that captures the suspension of one state of being as it is struck by the possibility inherent in another.  

“There is no breakthrough without breakage.” --N.O.Brown

But how many can we take?

Counting crows,  “One is for sorrow, two is for mirth…”

--traditional crow augury

 

'Out of the Blue' from Archipelago Theater

I sometimes consider small theater companies to be islands of sanity, beauty, and evolution, and the name of one of them, Archipelago Theatre, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, evokes that for me. Over the past decade or so one of my friends, writer and dramaturg Nor Hall, has collaborated with the artistic director there, Ellen Hemphill, to create some remarkable productions. The most recent was Out of the Blue, an original work that, in the words of Hemphill:

centers on axial moments, those instances in time when the balance of life shifts unexpectedly – sometimes subtly, sometimes cataclysmically, but always irrevocably – and launches one headlong down an unforeseen path. In this work, we will explore the desire and effort it takes to create balance in our lives, those provocations that tip the balance and change life for all eternity, the ways in which we respond to those changes, and the synergy of multiple axial moments in collision. Out of the Blue examines what is certainly a universally human experience, positioning the sometimes weighty, sometime humorous arguments for destiny and free will squarely against the element of chance.

Quoting John Lennon, "Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans." This can be on a mythical, a global and more often, on a mundane daily level. With this large concept in mind, our intention is to create a series of scenarios that bring the characters to the point of change or transformation, most often as a result of something  "out of the blue." By creating two worlds of characters: the seen and unseen, we hope to to ignite the imagination of the audience with fresh insight into those moments we tend to forget. 

As artists we develop a sort of pattern recognition in order to see what's hidden in plain sight, out everyone's front door. Conveying the emotive power and precarious balance inherent in these scenes requires an unusual team of sense-based artists who can exquisitely craft a common language of movement, sound and visual image.

I'll write more about this tomorrow, from Hall's perspective. In the meantime, think about that notion of axial moments. What hits you, out of the blue? The photo here is by Jay O'Berski.