HARMATTAN THEATER OCT. 2, 2009

Harmattan Theater performed Mannahatta Yatra at Christopher Street Pier on October 2, 2009, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday.  The performance consisted of a group of performers walking from Christopher Street Pier south past Pier 40 to Tribeca, ending the performance with a ritual at the Port Authority Wind Tunnel.

Sea Salt, Hudson River Water, jute rope and the single stringed Indian peasant instrument the Ekhtara were the props in a performance of ecstatic walking.  The performance emerged out of a need to respond to the celebrations of the Dutch East India Company and the celebrations of Dutch heritage that invoked the Dutch East India Company and the insignia of the VOC, the corporation's acronym.  For New Yorkers hailing from former colonies of the VOC including NYC, the uncritical celebrations of windmills and dutch clogs without the full accounting of the Dutch East India Company's colonial violence inflicted upon the Mannhatans of Mannahatta, demanded a symbolic transition from September 2009, a month of Dutch reclamations of Manhattan, towards a period of cultural healing, symbolised by the Gandhi march.

ROBERT LEPAGE: LIPSYNCH/BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Robert Lepage's eight and a half hour Lipsynch running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this Fall is searing and funny.  Drawing upon formal elements very resonant of Arianne Mnouchkine's piece earlier this year, Lepage deploys vignettes, frames of storytelling, multiple interlocking narrative structures, mobile sets, flashbacks, mother and child themes, and the return to childhood as an overarching preoccupation.  There is startling similarity to both Lepage and Mnouchkine's shows this year: both open with the death of the mother, and the search for her story.  In Lepage's epic journey, the audience is made to commit to a theater of endurance.  You have to stay with the text's intricate flows to comprehend the confluence of random lives connected by six degrees of seperation.  In Lipsynch, the exquisite investigation of the structure of voice, speech, intonation, pitch, timbre, scale, magnitude and silence is a thrill to watch.  One is drawn into the mechanics of speech experimentation, led into the neural workings of the brain, while also being drawn deeper into the unresolved death and violence of crossed lives.  Dream like sequences transport the audience to the galactical spheres of Lepage's genius, while the excessive irony about filmmaking and its workings, distracted from the intensity of the long immersion into the pathways of memory and forgetting.

CHRISTOPHER STREET PIER/HARMATTAN THEATER/OCT.2

Harmattan Theater performed Mannahatta Yatra today at Christopher Street Pier. Marking Gandhi's birthday, Harmattan Theater performed a walking journey from Christopher Street Pier to the South of Hudson River Park along the waterfront. Sea Salt, Hudson River water, the Ekhtara and Cymbals were the props of the nomadic theater piece. The philosophical imperative behind Mannahatta Yatra is the idea of walking as a means of reclaiming territory. Walking along the 2009 Manhattan waterline is a way of citing the 1609 waterline, which is now hidden by landfill. The use of salt is to both signify the importance of salt in anti-colonial struggles, of which Mannahatta is implicated, as well as the symbolic shift away from the colonial references of the Dutch in Manhattan. The Dutch East India Company, of which much celebration was invoked in September 2009, traded in salt along with other spices, in their colonial outposts. Salt is a metaphor for cleansing, transformation, symbolic rerouting. The principles of Tantric Trance performance as well as the physical practice of endurance in Marina Abramovic's work were inspirations for this environmental performance. The performers in this hour long performance comprised of: James Cascaito, Carole Nicoli-Smith, Victor Marshall, Ariel, Jose de Jesus, Dil and May Joseph. The piece was choreographed and directed by May Joseph.

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.