HARMATTAN THEATER: DUTCH COLONIAL PAST

The month long celebration of Dutch Colonial New York has been a mixed bag for some Manhattanites. The historic implications of Dutch colonial incursions include the violent and terrible acts the Dutch inflicted on Lenape peoples as well as on their neighboring tribes. The journals of Robert Juet, Henry Hudson's First Mate, is most revealing. His expressive daily updates on the "savages" and the particularly violent exchanges that ensued between Hudson's men and the indigenous peoples, suggests that the encounter was nothing less than bloody, tense, nerve wracking, and filled with racist stereotypes of who these native people might be. There fore, the month long celebration of the Dutch presence without its more explicit accountability about entire histories that were altered and complete populations that were decimated, makes the whole occasion of celebrating the Dutch presence for a whole month somewhat confusing for anti-colonial sentiments. Harmattan Theater's Mannahatta Yatra explores this ambivalence of celebrating the discovery of Mannahatta while also acknowledging the violence and brutality that the encounter between the Dutch and the Lenape peoples entailed.

MANNAHATTA YATRA/GANDHI/ SALT MARCH/DUTCH

Harmattan Theater is preparing a performance for October 2, the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. The performance is going to involve a walking ritual from Christopher Street Pier on the Hudson River Park up the waterfront to Pier 54. The performance will include the poetry of Dante Alighieri, and the words of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's famous act of walking as anti-colonial resistance was the signal of the dissolution of British rule in India. This idea of symbolic cleansing is very powerful. After a month of festivities celebrating the Dutch presence in Manhattan through September 2009, Harmattan Theater think it is a historically pertinent move to perform the physical act of distancing from colonial narratives of heritage by walking the contemporary Manhattan waterfront. The Dutch were traders of salt and sugar among other commodities for which they used slave labor ruthlessly. Using salt as a performance tool to mark the shift from the Dutch colonial moment to the contemporary New York of ecological reclamation, Harmattan is performing a New York ritual of walking the waterfront at dusk to the edge of Pier 54, where the waters of the Hudson will cleanse performers and participants of older, violent colonial histories, while citing them as well.

Labor Day and NYC Parking

People live in Manhattan so they can avoid having a car.  It costs 400.00$ a month roughly, to park your car in a garage in my neighborhod.  Your carbon footprint expands, and the whole point of living in dense urban areas is compromised by the usage of a car per individual on any scale, and certainly, on a downtown New York City scale.  Still, after schlepping for twenty years, the rituals of foraging for one's needs leads to the lure of the sort of clunkers that even CASH for CLUNKERS wouldn't trade in for.  This is the subculture of New York City car ownership: the peculiar rituals of moving your car from parking slot to parking slot, reading, dozing, eating, smoking, catching up on your reading, your phone calls,  your bills, all in the confined sphere of your downwardly mobile clunker that runs well enough to get you out of the city and back with surity.  The whole art of dodging the street cleaners, the traffic cops, and your more aggressive car parker, leads to a whole culture of life lived around a cheap car on New York's  streets, that are peculiar and unimaginable to most people in the United States.  More touching are the tales of hardened Greenwich Village car owners exchanging news, "Parking Joe on Bank Street passed away last week".  A car that doesnt serve you unless you are getting out of town- is a very particular concept to New York's Manhattan culture.  One doesnt use one's car even if one needs it, especially if you have a great Tuesday/Friday slot, or a Monday/Thursday slot.  It could mean untold hours looking for a parking spot later.

Hence, the sight of open, empty parking spots on a weekend like Labor Day weekend produces a lightness to the city's streets.  The cobblestone streets seem broader and more noir-ish.  The sky seems bluer on such days.  The streets feel quieter and calmer because they are quieter and less frenetic.  The air is sweeter for sure.  The Car People devour such a scene with a kind of desire thats hard to fathom if you havent sat for hours hovering by a potential parking spot, waiting for a street cleaning vehicle to do its job and speed by.  Labor Day weekend signals a break from parking as a survival mechanism.

69th Street Transfer Bridge, Manhattan

The bike path on the westside of Manhattan allows little known landscapes of the city to loom into view.  These aspects of the city startle, seduce and calm you.  A spectacular section of the bikeway along Manhattan's westside going uptown is the 69th Street Bridge.  Visually dramatic, bulky and charismatic, this bridge and its neigboring metallic structures sunken in the Hudson River, draw a scenario fitting an operatic staging.  It could be Faust's abode, or the grand temple of forgotten Native American spirits.  Harmattan Theater Company wrote to the Riverside Park South Trust for permission to perform in front of this extraordinary outdoor landscape.  The park's people were very uncomfortable about giving us permission to perform against the fantastical backdrop of the 69th Street Transfer Bridge.  But- the setting deserves a spectacular theatrical event that has the spiritual breadth of Christo's Gates, while also transforming the surreal landscape into a dream scape of a defunct industrial past, whose logics still haunt our understanding of modernity and its progressions.  Harmattan Theater company continues to dream a theatrical event that would put performers on the rusting, dilapitated bridge, with projected voices and buskins used in the Greek theater to raise the heights of actors standing on the buckled up railway lines.  

MANNAHATTA 400 years later

This is a big week for New York City.  400 years ago this week, Henry Hudson made a fateful journey up the Hudson river, floating past a rocky land mass lush with hills, forests, rivers and extraordinary bio diversity enjoyed by a diverse range of indigenous communities.  New York's future must learn from its pasts.  Viewing Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta cartographic rendering of Manhattan in 1609, helps us to reimagine a different approach to overbuilt sites.  What grew here in 1609 can influence how we develop in 2009.  This is not a nostalgic return to some pre-modern past, but rather an iterative ecological rethinking of built environments and their future potential. The meatpacking district is however an example of what should be avoided at any cost for future neigborhoods.  In September 2009, this neighborhood is a travesty of trashy high end commercialism and the erosion of a historic district's neighborhood identity.  The once sleepy Gansevoort Street, with its unusual historic origins in Native American village life, and later the site of one of New Amsterdam's Dutch forts, Fort Gansevoort, is now an unsustainable circus of human and vehicular traffic.  The area is not built to contain the large influx of people flooding its streets.  Furthermore, neighborhood residents  do not benefit from the exponential influx of foot traffic on its narrow cobblestreet lanes.  The demise of neighborhood restaurants, one of a kind small businesses and the ghostly hulls of former commercial spaces bear witness to the conflicting cultures of high end consumption and emptied out neighborhood spaces.