Dreamt a delightful dream last night; today received word from my beloved.
Her voice a hundred times over rested on my chest; I fell asleep.
The heart ecstatic at being ever so pressed warmed the cold, grey afternoon.

- See: Writings

:: note :: ... inspired by 30 Sijo Poems translated by Chung Chong-Wha ...

-clown posses for a photo behind a glass door during the International Day of the Theater celebrations in front of the Ruben Dario National theater in Managua, Friday, March. 27, 2009. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

- See: theater

:: note :: ... WTD blog ... put on a red nose the freedom & responsibility of unfettered play ... play behind reflective glass ... the street as stage ... the theatre building as backdrop ... open the door to be to see to dream ...

An ArtLab / aneco project. Rolling composter installation by Wendy Peart located on Saskatoon City Hall grounds.

... caged material for composting ...

"As visual imagery, I believe the organic form can incite basal, yet complex, reactions that arouse viewers to acknowledge their relationship within the intricate ecological world," writes Peart. (ArtsBoard)

- See: Sculpture

:: note :: ... have loved this piece in all its seasons ...

Joni Mitchell:green flag song "a new body of photographic work by iconic singer/songwriter and visual artist Joni Mitchell"(Mendel Art Gallery).

... had read that Joni was angry ... entering the gallery room for green flag song was more oppressive than angry ... the dark grey walls with over 120 green & rose hued grainy images hung in vertical triptychs were uninviting ... hurriedly left the room forcing myself to re-enter & each time staying a little longer to digest the images ... pictures of war, terror and solitude evoked pathos ...

... on a bench lay a piece of corrugated cardboard ... the catalogue ... a beautifully crafted work of documentation ... lost myself in words, songs and photos of the artist at work ... returning gaze to the walls noticed none of the individual images were particularly arresting it was their context which provoked ... the process of broken televisions & disposable cameras heightened the sense of decay, waste & destruction ... i reflected on a reading from the previous day ...

"When you put feelings into words, you are turning on the same regions in the brain that are involved in emotional self-control," Lieberman said. "It regulates distress," ...( reuters)

... maybe it had worked for the songs Joni had written after a ten year hiatus were powerful & shining ... the original LA exhibition had no publicity ... being bold i rationalized these works were an exorcism of sorts and speculated with each further showing the artist was further removed from the anger or pain ... like waking from a nightmare and having to talk it out to make sense of the terror ... thanked Joni for sharing yet fled the exhibition and its relentless commentary on the past eight years of horror politics ...

... outside huge soft snowflakes drifted down from the grey sky ... held out my hand to catch one watching it melt ... exactly what i needed ... shine on ...

- See: Art

:: note :: ...an npr songslideshow, youtube & other previous reviews ...

... why my icon is king kong was thought provoking ... the web (flickr, twitter, friendfeed ad infinitum) relentlessly demands an image ... for years cast about changing icon and have settled on this black&white photo of the northern lights (aurora borealis) ...

history ... it is a photo my father took while working in Fort Churchill Manitoba Canada ... he had till then devoted his life to plasma physics & upper atmospheric research spending nights on the lookout tower photographing the sky ... my mother found the negatives in one of the clean outs following a moment of transformation (birth/life/death) ...

title ... from the beginning (2002) called my blog if & later as my presence webbed out adopted the tag ifsphere ...

place & imagination ... the icon spells if ... the solid tower & wave lights ... visualizes the splendour of the night sky ... hints at the mystery of l(if)e ...

"As the solar wind interacts with the edge of the earth's magnetic field, some of the particles are trapped by it and they follow the lines of magnetic force down into the ionosphere, the section of the earth's atmosphere that extends from about 60 to 600 kilometres above the earth's surface. When the particles collide with the gases in the ionosphere they start to glow, producing the spectacle that we know as the auroras, ..."(aurora borealis)

- See: icon

:: note :: ... what i love is though much thought goes into such things it is often an intuitive act and then only much later comes the articulation of the process ...

"Writing for the theatre is at its best an act of transgression - and
as teachers of playwrights, we should encourage our students to
step over the line, redraw the line, erase the line, even multiply
the lines so that we sit up, step forward, strike out.
I believe the job of mainstream culture and mainstream
theatre is to keep the peace. Our job, as teachers, is to encourage
new writers to break it, to disrupt the lie, to speak truth
to power. Think seriously about the word en-courage: What
are we giving our students courage to do, exactly? Not just
entertain.
Rarely do students of drama enter the classroom with
what we might call, for lack of a better term, "original minds."
Surely their originality, their agency for questioning and considering,
is there, but it has been dominated and subdued by
a culture that amplifies individuality over community, profit
over peace, property over human need. For we live in a culture
that is hostile to creativity and original thought that does not
serve capitalism, empire, and the most virulent by-products
of those forces: racism, homophobia, classism and sexism."
(Playwright Naomi Wallace delivered
this paper at York St. John University
in England, in collaboration with
Palatine and the Center for Excellence
at York St. John, in October 2007 /pdf)
(via Noises off: Lessons in teaching theatre)

- See: theater

:: note :: ... a wonderful debate with many links ...

There are no limits to the act of the imagination.
Herbert was the catalyst of creativity.
He demanded we play
& play is serious
& play is joyful
& play is painful
& play is life ... & death.

He has flown from this world of practicality.
The place he taught the practice of making the impossible possible.
I hold him here deep in memory.

I loved & fought him as if he were my father.

The last time I talked to him was too many years ago. He was enthusiastically discussing his upcoming role in a stage production of My Dinner with Andre. I wished to tell him he respected me more than I deserved. We weren't in his atelier but in a garden of paradise and I wanted this revolutionary veteran to know without his support I wouldn't be where I was or where I became. I didn't but we did embrace & in his grasp I would have liked to have been able to comfort his restlessness - the disquiet that lurked around his expressive power. Thinking back a crow was perched on his shoulder but my memory tells me there was no crow although I look at the face again to make sure.

He worked so hard to provide a place to activate dreams. He toiled always for the "next generation". He shifted the ground beneath his colleagues and now he has removed the staff. He plays, for the moment, in the unknown, inexplicable shadow. We walk transformed.

Vision & Liberation dear friend.

- See: Memorium

:: note :: ...email from Hilde informed me of his flight into eternity ... some scanned photos from where our time stands still ... don't know if it's 1978 or 88 or even 2008 ... we are locked in a room at the Dramatischem Zentrum Wien, eyes looking through each other, he recently returned from Bali, me leaving for Canada, both trapped in Krapp's last tape, rewinding over and over again searching for the exact spot where demons meet or at least trying to leave our senses while remaining perfectly lucid ... in the insanity found myself thinking about happiness and when you're happy you tend to lower your guard and face up to mirrors ... the curiosity towards mystery ...

"... Openness is not the enemy.
Openness is what protects these kids.
Openness is what draws people out into the open, like those Flickr photo collectors (you can be sure they are known to police, or at least, that they should be).

And openness is what allows you - and others - to talk to your kids, to give them the tools to protect them from danger, to given them the knowledge and the empowerment to stand up to those people whether they are total strangers or close family..." (Stephen Downes | comment 7)

- See: terms

:: note :: ... an issue that needs to be opened within our personal, private, public, institutional environments ... the struggle/choice to be open - when & how ... responsibility (the ability to respond) is threefold: me, my partners & my environment ... a personal attack requires healing and leaves scars ... living with scars ... be open, be sensible, be sensitive (full of senses) ... it is risk ...

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