During infancy, before we use words, we have only physical senses and conscious awareness. Movement, vision, sounds, touch, reflexes and emotions become the sum total of our experience. For most people, their earliest memories start from the age of two, when they had enough words to make simple statements. Words allow us to express, judge, store, and repeat the experience for later use. Those who study Human Development know this early learning phenomenon as learning from Bottom Up, versus the way adults learn, from Top Down. Adults use their past experiences to recognize, categorize, and make sense of new ones. Infants don’t have a filing cabinet full of past experiences to compare with, nor language to describe with and file in retrievable order. For babies each moment is untainted, unprejudiced, and pure. Each experience contains a powerful impact.
Those who attended Liberator experienced this bottom up style in the performance, a dance/movement production which made that same powerful impact – an emotive and unforgettable event. Watchers found that no script was written, no direction given by word, no linear guide of what they should understand, think, feel, or believe they were witnessing. The audience became a part of the act, equal as trees and grasses that stroke the wind, or as earth and water that breathe beneath the sky. Each person had freedom of opportunity to employ their own interpretation of the dance, the movement, the music, the emotions expressed, raised, and felt. Each person was deeply touched and moved by seamlessly woven story-in-action.
The dance/performance Liberator is based upon a real past event – an airplane that crashed during WWII over Porlock Marsh – as remembered by an old man who witnessed the scene when he was a boy. The boy certainly had language, but with little experience of the world, how could he make sense of war and death and devastation and hope and love and all the implications and feelings that encompass war? For him, witnessing that plane crash was a Bottom Up experience. For us, Liberator was a chance to participate in our own act of creativity as we watched the beautifully choreographed and emotively danced and played performance.
Liberator
A man and his long armed jacket
Whose arms become wings
Spread-eagled over the land we call Home
Leather helmet and goggles
Speaking of a time
Of a movement of people
Of armies, forces, guns, and planes
And a war to end all wars
Of three boys and a girl
Running through woods
Hiding in marsh grasses
Playing beside skeleton trees
In the shelter of a stone barn
Fiddling with radio knobs
Their innocence seeking music
But receiving the voices of battle
Of victories and losses
And a snare drum rat a tat tatting
As air-ripping sounds stream down from overhead
Bullets strafing the stone walls
Skudding and thudding the marsh mud
Children hiding under the radio table
Shuddering in terror
Running outside, following the pilot
He who flies for their freedom
Who leads them to safety
Whose movements encourage, embrace
Who thrills and instills a passion for living and loving
For the joy of being alive
Man body entwines with boy body
The knots of family and country
He who guides them to classrooms
Who teaches them strategy and planning
Who tries to stop them from straying into danger
Who suffers their innocence lost
Who dies in the marsh
And shows them the face of death
How it does not move
How it stops loving arms from holding them safe
He who remains still
And useless
Leaving only war and the hope of peace behind
Melts into earth and the setting sun
In a cauldron of flaming clouds
Snare drum playing a funeral beat
drrrat… tatttt… tatttt
Horn crying Taps in plaintive single notes
The Last Post – Day is Done
Sixty onlookers walk in silence
Following steps of those gone before
Having once learned the history
Yet only now understanding
That history is just
His Story
Our Story – our shared experience
And our silence
Bleeds
Just as they who went before us bled
From a desire for freedom
Like a living, breathing animal
Like a bird that soars
Like a helium balloon with paper planes tied to its string
Rising to the heavens
Like a note that never stops playing
A drum that is never truly silenced
A movement, a dance of life
In the meadows, forests, and marshes of this earth
A voice, a cry of hope
The human condition
A Yearning for
Liberty
Liberator was nothing less than an act of devotion. It moved me to tears many times over. The devotion showed in so many ways; it came from inspired individuals, some from this community and others from elsewhere, and it grew into a greater community of people honoring the past with their passion for art, their creativity, their skills, their time, their presence, each one sharing in the freedom of expression that many of us take for granted – until it is lost – or stolen.
Liberator became a passionate expression by adult and child performers who dedicated more than skill, practice, and time by living and breathing Liberator’s soul in their hearts, minds, and bodies from early this summer to its evening culmination in autumn.
Not a single thread of the Liberator was woven without love. Every moment of each event thrummed with intensity from the direction and choreography to the performance; from the designer, producer and graphic artist’s work to the providers of setting and space; from the makers of airplane fuselage and costumes to providers of period props; from the sound designer to the still photographer and videographer; from the production assistant to the behind-the-scenes crew who ran about, collected, dropped off, showed up, dug in and did everything they were asked; from the 1940s double-decker bus and driver to the creator of Delicious Feasts that formed and furthered more bonds of community; from the shared food, the laughter, and stories to all the people who came to listen, watch, follow and experience this dynamic Exmoor event.
The Liberator was born of a memory, an idea, and a desire for expression. In its production and performance it gave birth to new community, new memories, new ideas and a greater appreciation of the sacrifices that were made to preserve our freedom and the right to creative, artistic expression.
Well Done, everybody. Liberator was simply AWESOME.
For information on Liberator, more photos and biographies on all involved, visit the website: http://www.stackedwonky.com.
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