LET IT BE A DANCE WE DO

TIM BARRUS: DANCERS AND THE DANCE

She saved my life. I do not know if she sees herself as a dancer or not but she is one.

I was drowning then. In a lot of things. In the fragments one piece at a time. Way, way, way over my head. Lost in this morass of a thing I did not know how to escape from.

Did it have to do with another guy. It usually did back then. I don't give them that power anymore. I am content with how things are. My marriage is different. My relationships are different.

Because I have constructed the choreography of it to be different because it fits.

At sixteen, all I knew was this: the only way to get out of the situation was to get the hell out of Dodge. But I was sixteen. Most of you guys in Cinematheque left home before you were sixteen. More than a few of you were thrown out on your ear into the street. Leaving home at sixteen was a daunting idea to me back then. I didn't see any way out. So I blew my guts out with a shot gun.

Now, there was a way out. Most suicide attempts are exactly that. Out. Out. Out.

The first night in that hospital room, I vaguely felt her presence. Through the Demerol I knew she was in the room or her spirit was. You see, she has a very strong presence and she's very tall. She moved like a gazelle back then. I’ll call her AKS.

. . .

The recovery from the wounds took a while. She was there for me.

She would visit me in the hospital. She wanted to talk. I wanted to dance. It hurt to dance but all dancers know pain is nothing.

Survival took on many forms, wore many masks. I became a dancer. I danced on stage.

My family did not know I was doing this. I had to hide it.

My dad was a violent man. A man of fists and guns. Our family hid it like so many families do. But he would beat me to within an inch of my life. I cannot even begin to count the number of times he almost killed me. You measured up to his standards as a man or you didn't. I would be a dancer. We all know what that means, right. No dancer was going to live in my father's house. That ability to move to the music allowed me to leave the shell Tim Barrus lived in where he was afraid of Maynard [Barrus].

To survive, I danced. To work the pain out. Just out. Out. Out.

. . .

No one knew I had this Other Life.

The menial job I was supposed to have did not exist. Most of my time was spent in choreography and practice. People at Michigan State University thought I was a dance student. Often, I was the one teaching them.

We choreographed Macbeth once for the drama department which staged the play outside. All of this took me away from the guy who haunted me.

We also set Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to dance. All male cast, no less. Every now and then, my path and AKS' path would cross. Antiwar was thick as blood.

The draft board didn't want me. They said my wounds were too extensive. I didn't exactly tell them about the dancing.

What surprises me about dance (still) is how you're really not connecting to the other dancers, even when paired.

I tried that but there was really no one who wanted to be connected to. So you tended to simply connect to your own physical self. You could lose yourself in all that movement.

You know. Two of you are professional dancers now. Yes, even with HIV.

The one time I connected with the Other Dancer was when AKS came over to my house. I was married now and we lived in our own place.

I was alone that day. AKS drives up. Comes into the house. We didn't articulate anything. We just danced, we connected, and she left.

We went and lived our lives.

I continued to dance. I wrote. I published. I had a kid.

I am a grandfather now and good at it.

She adopted. I caused scandals (everywhere I went, usually). I still feel fervently about demanding change. I do demand it. Lately, from publishing. I was deeply involved in gay politics in California. Then the UN. Then photography. I still cause trouble. Sometimes a lot of it.

I taught in special education. I worked in psychiatric hospitals on intensive care units with adolescents. Often, I would get a lot of information from them in terms of how they moved. I taught dance to deaf children.

Dancers know.

I traveled around the world. A lot. I started working with boys with HIV/AIDS. We dance. Cinematheque is scattered now: Paris, Italy, the UK, LA, NYC.

The work is a challenge and a struggle. You know that.

It comes with a lot of pain. Pain is nothing to a dancer.

My wife and I love to dance. Late at night on a beach is good.

. . .

Having had both hips replaced, the dancing is different now. With Avascular Necrosis and my shoulders riddled with hairlines fractures, it's harder to lift my arms up, and forget about lifting a ballerina because it isn't going to happen, and I'm too old to be on a traditional stage anymore anyway.

. . .

I was living in San Francisco the last time we connected. This time drowning but drowning in a sea of death and AIDS. Everyone I know from that time is dead and I knew a lot of people.

About every twenty years, I try to connect with AKS again. I find her. She responds. It is not unlike this dance we do. Touch. Respond. Connect.



MARY: A RESPONSE

The figure of AKS -- not so much the actuality but the idealized memory of her -- is a recurring figure in just about every culture: the compassionate woman, often portrayed as a mother with a nursing baby. In Catholic cultures she is Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Buddhist countries she is Kuan Yin, almost as familiar a figurine as Buddha. “The root meaning of karuna (Kuan Yin) is said to be the anguished cry of deep sorrow and understanding that can only come from an unblemished sense of oneness with others.”

In the Plains tribes she is “White Buffalo Woman” and in the SW tribes she is “Yellow Corn Pollen Woman.” In Peter Pan she is Wendy maybe. In “Pinocchio” she is the Blue Fairy (in some versions she has turquoise hair), the figure who -- young mother-like -- gently urges the little puppet to behave in a way that will make him become a “real boy.” In “The Wizard of Oz” she is Glinda, the Good Witch, who knows how to get Dorothy home (and her little dog, too).

Tim, of course, didn’t look all this up on the Internet -- he just slipped his dancing friend into this universal role of a woman who holds out her arms, not sexually but to connect as a human being, especially in a situation deserving of compassion. I went looking through my mythology, psychology, archetypal, and feminist books for more, but found that most were focused on female figures of force, justice, and change -- pretty militant stuff. From the Seventies. Or else they confronted and encouraged sex as the only intimacy, the other big part of that cultural revolution. We seem to have lost the dimension of compassion that used to be the specialty of saintly actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, and Deborah Kerr. They didn’t have to DO anything, just be there and SEE it all.

A writer in an encyclopedia suggests: “It may be worthwhile to bear in mind that, although Carlo Collodi wrote Pinocchio at a time and within a culture wherein the routine beating of children was often carried out in the widespread Eurocultural belief that early and frequent exposure to such brutality would improve their prospects for eventual moral goodness, Collodi's Blue Fairy affords her wayward beneficiary every opportunity to do the "Right Thing" on his own with no particular coercion or threat applied on her part. She allows him to wander by his own free will back into his own world of error again and again, relying on his own memory of her goodness toward him even while suffering in the throes of his own self-induced difficulties. This "meta-parental" treatment on her part gives Pinocchio's final transformation and entrance into full humanity to be the genuine result of his /own/ correct decisions - and therefore his own to keep forever.”

This opens up some very interesting things for Barrus to think about. His mother, faced with a brutal husband, did not oppose him or protect her son. This denial still wounds, but it has been at least partly healed by “good fairies” -- some of them in the sense of homosexual. (The original compassionate god from which Kuan Yin developed was male. The AIDS plague called out mothering/nursing skills in many men, something like what the plight of the wounded Civil War soldiers called out in both Florence Nightingale and Walt Whitman.)

Which brings me to a whole online course on the meaning and transformations of Pinocchio!

http://www.fathom.com/course/72810000/sessions.html


“The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film” is a whole lecture series (complete with discussion questions) by Rebecca West!

“The story a rich fund of themes, motifs and images for exploring such still highly pertinent issues as the limits between the human and the non- (or post-) human, the toll of reaching responsible maturity and the place of education in that process, the function of transgression both for individuals and for society, and the ways in which dominant attitudes toward paternal and maternal roles have come historically and currently to have an essential impact on our collective concept of humanness.” Doesn’t that sound like Cinematheque?

“The contemporary Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni, whose humor emerges in great part out of the Tuscan tradition of the novella, especially out of the beffa, or trickster story, as well as out of a very personal sort of bricolage of popular and high cultural references, has recently filmed his version of Pinocchio, starring himself as the puppet.”

West discusses at length the Spielberg re-take on the story, which is called “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” in which the puppet is a robot child.

Is there a dance version of Pinocchio with a role in it for Barrus’ tall friend, a compassionate Blue Fairy who is there, understanding, but not intervening or controlling? Puppets dance, but not as well as people. The difference is in the heart. And sometimes it's not mythic -- it's real.