It is Monday the 26th of February, the beginning of the week following the presentation on the 22nd. Claudia is already in Vienna on her way to Salzburg. I’m about to fly off to Brazil. And Amanda and Daniel spent the night last night in a half abandoned public hospital in San José de Maipo after Amanda was stung by a bee at an asado and had to be rushed there when she couldn’t breathe anymore. They gave her a shot of adrenaline, which did the trick, but also made her think she was having a heart attack. They kept her there overnight for observation in case she had a relapse. So Daniel and Marta (Amanda’s mom) were given their own beds for the night to keep Amanda company while I had to find my way back to Santiago along with Gerardo and Claudia from Sevilla. Car, Metro, Bus and Taxi. After several hours we made our way home, cooked a Spanish Omelet and Humitas. Drank wine, told jokes and went to bed.

Somehow I see this bee-sting incident as part of the whole process of ON EARTH. It’s not just that our running tag line is that anything that happens to us in these days is part of the project. I think there is something more trenchant in the whole thing. Something about how rapidly things shifted from general well being, fun and relaxation to a life threatening situation which changed all of our plans and we unexpectedly found ourselves in strange places and strange situations which required quick thinking and all of our mental and physical resources to deal with it all. One minute we are eating a barbeque, people playing ping pong, listening to music, talking, jumping around a field covered with women’s underwear that the wind had blown off of a clothes line, dog barking at a stick she wants someone to throw, people sitting in the sun. A free Sunday after weeks of intense work, after visiting family friends who have a pet puma that they saved and who lives in a cage with three dogs. After climbing up a mountain side and bathing beneath a waterfall. After talking intermittently through the day about the project and what happened and how we plan to continue. Then our plans for the evening, coming back to Santiago to have dinner with Anne, to enjoy our last evening together in Chile before we all flew off in different directions. And after all of this, enjoying, relaxing, reflecting, talking, planning, such a tiny thing as a misstep without shoes in a field of grass covered in women’s underwear and we find ourselves scurrying around our own mortality.

Somehow a large part of the project so far seems to be about unexpected changes of plans. About placing our wills against forces of nature and chance only to realize that we are so much smaller and more insignificant than the environments that we inhabit and which move us. And it seems that one of the great tasks within it all is to be flexible enough not to be broken or killed and to try to enjoy the trip. To find the moments of joy and brilliance and then to try to figure out a way to tell the story. To tie it together in some way that it makes sense, and can be put in your pocket and taken with you and shared.

So February 22nd 2007 is a case in point perhaps of this nascent philosophy of ON EARTH. In the next entry, I will try to explain what happened. Both what we planned and then how it actually turned out. The day took some last minute unexpected twists and turns. Look for “1 month on earth – part 2″

Cabula6 en Santiago de Chile – un diario vivo de nuestras vidas al intersectar con la ciudad de Santiago de Chile.

El Proyecto “On Earth” comenzó el primero de febrero 2007. siguiendo el patrón de nuestros movimientos migratorios nos preguntamos “Como llegamos aquí, al lugar donde estamos en este momento?”

Durante las últimas tres semanas nos hemos tratado de recoger y seguir los momentos más interesantes que han salido a nuestro encuentro -momentos que nos han tomado por sorpresa mezclados con una idea vaga de lo que quieriamos encontrar.

La muestra del 22 es una especie de diario vivo, un documental de nuestras vidas al intersectar con la ciudad de Santiago de Chile. Quieremos compartir nuestra experiencia, la gente que encontramos en el camino, las cosas que nos afectaron, como vivimos y peleamos entre nosotros y la forma en que tomamos desiciones durante este tiempo específico en la ciudad.– una ciudad con sus propios temas, luchas cotidianas, ritmos. Una ciudad cuyos patrones se modifican, aspectos de su vida cotidiana desaparecen, medios de transporte que cambian su estructura… que desaparcen.

Fecha: Febrero 22
6:30 pm en la sala de danza de UNIACC,
Salvador 1200, Santiago. Chile

Concepto / Idea : Amanda Piña, Claudia Heu, Daniel Zimmermann, Jeremy Xido
Performance: Cabula6 y Nada_producciones
Production manager: Anne Reungoat

ENTRADA LIBERADA
RESERVAS: areungoat@uniacc.cl
UNIACC, Av. Salvador 1200, Providencia
www.cabula6.wordpress.com

(BY THE WAY, THE SENTENCES BELOW THAT ARE CAPITALIZED LIKE THIS ONE ARE SENTENCES THAT CLAUDIA ADDED AFTER READING WHAT I WROTE. SHE ALSO INCLUDED A POST-SCRIPT AT THE VERY BOTTOM. IF AND WHEN AMANDA AND DANIEL HAVE OTHER POST-SCRIPTS AND VERSIONS OF WHAT HAPPENED, I WILL SEND THOSE AS WELL)

we arrived to chile on February 1st, the official beginning of our project. after a few days of getting acclimated, traveling to Valparaiso where we saw three buildings get destroyed in a gas explosion, and a day on the pacific coast watching the sun set over the pounding surf, we arrived here to santiago de chile. in a beautiful house on the outskirts of the city, up in the mountains, in a canyon with a blue-green river rushing through it that you hear constantly in the background. a san pedro cactus on the porch bloomed for the first time in 10 years a couple of nights ago. apparently if you cut off the skin of the cactus and cure it in some special way, you can ingest it and have hallucinations. we haven’t tried yet. we are waiting for the flower to close up and fall off before we take a sample of the skin.

Santiago is a vast urbanized expanse. but here where we are, it feels like the deep country. oh – at night there are a chorus of dogs split up between several neighbors that go insane barking for hours, locked behind fences, vocally fighting over territory. amanda and daniel refer to them as the dj dogs. they sound like samples of themselves played rhythmically on a loop that seems to last 2 hours each night beginning at around 3am. We all went over to one of the owner’s house last night and had a pow-wow with him about how to solve the problem of noise pollution in this sublimely beautiful place. we haven’t really been able to sleep, we told him. at least not between 3 and 5 every morning. It was a bit absurd as we sat there straining to hear his voice over his dogs’ barking just outside the window as he tried to explain that it wasn’t his dogs making the noise but rather some french guy’s dogs who was his neighbor. or maybe it was the rabbits that taunt and terrorize his dogs. or maybe the evil family that lives at the bend in the road with the two dilapidated cars that stand like sentinels on either side of an opening in a fence where those people’s ratty blue-eyed wolf like dog stands guard. dirty and unleashed. probably it was this dog that caused all the problems. this one comes and digs under his fence at night which is a provocation. we had to ask him to repeat himself several times because we couldn’t hear him over the noise his own dogs were making. it was hard to accept what he was saying with a straight face.

But enough of that. About the work.

well on february 10th, today, the whole system has changed. it has been “modernized” or even “europeanized” and now all the small bus companies have been squeezed out and a new large private company called “transantiago” runs the whole show with cards that go “beep.” the cards that go “beep” are called “bip” cards because that’s how you write the sound “beep” in spanish. and they work for busses and the metro. the new busses don’t cross the whole town any more but rather run locally, essentially bringing people directly to the metro stations. reducing traffic in the middle of town. reducing pollution. reducing open road bus races. it all makes good sense, really, but the flip side is that the sapos lost their jobs as of today. many of the bus drivers lost their jobs as of today. the small neighborhood bus companies are all out of business. the poorest people are now without work once again – the ones that kind of pulled themselves up by their bootstraps have gotten the boot. the musicians and clowns that would hop on the busses to busk are now forbidden from getting on board without the card that goes “beep” that they can’t afford in the first place. the europeanization – read as “rationalization” – of the santiago transit system has happened in a hard-core 21st century american-style capitalist way. corporate structures being set in place. companies with capital. lobbying power, etc, monopolized an enormous public service. it is fascinating to watch what the effect will be. on monday everyone goes to work (those that aren’t on vacation because of the summer, of course). everyone thinks it will be a total chaos. but more than anything, i think the whole thing sort of acts to further cover up the economic disparities that exist in this society. the poor are being hidden or sort of swept out of the way in this whole shift. i mean poverty isn’t being addressed in any way – it is just being brushed out of view from those that aren’t poor. this sounds like a non-sequitur. What I mean to say is that this very reasonable and appropriate way of dealing with urban problems of pollution and traffic, etc, is being done in such a way that the people who are getting squeezed are the people who have the hardest time in the first place. And no one is going to hear them when they make noise. when they complain and say ouch. and on top of it – perhaps just a minor point really, but somehow significant, i think – the sort of wacky strange individual and very human permutations that emerged in an unregulated system are going to disappear. the sapo. the vendors. the saints hanging from the ceiling. the kazoo-cumbia musicians. the clown that held a plastic gun to our heads and demanded we give him some change. the fact that a bus could be hailed anywhere like a taxi. or would let you off anywhere. the fact that the poorest “least significant” neighborhoods could figure out a way to create their own service. all of this is giving way to an overarching system that is painted white with a green stripe and that goes “beep” when you swipe a card.

anyway, our first day of rehearsal “ON EARTH” here on monday was in a rehearsal studio at a university called uniacc. we had our open dance training with us and students from the university as well as some dancers that took a 7 hour car ride up from concepcion to participate. we all got sweaty, finished up class, clapped, went and got our coffee and mate, came back into the studio, started to talk, batted around some ideas and wound up getting into a big fight. it’s sort of hard to explain or understand the dynamics that led to this, but the way we solved it was interesting. we decided to get out of the studio – something we wanted to do anyway – and decided to ride the busses for the week until the change of the transit system took place – today. WE AGREED THAT IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE TO BE IN A ROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF SANTIAGO AND FOLLOW CERTAIN IDEAS OR INTERESTS WE HAD IN EUROPE. A MAIN QUESTIONS ALWAYS WAS HOW DID WE COME HERE and we decided to see what would happen. what would come to us. WHAT WOULD INTEREST US. we could do whatever we wanted on the bus. sometimes we took pictures, or talked to people or filmed or just sat and sweated and jiggled up and down. A KIND OF ATELIER ON WHEELS. sometimes we wrote in our little books. other times we just tried to find seats that weren’t in the sun. and we rode the busses – the old yellow buses called “la micros” – to the end of the lines. to the outlying neighborhoods. and there we would get out, stretch our legs and walk around. on one of the rides we met a group of men who were about to be squeezed out of their work. who actually lost their jobs today, the 10th of february. yesterday, the 9th, we went back out there and asked them if we could rent one of the busses on the 21st and 22nd for our performances here in Santiago. rent is the wrong word – if we could pay for the gas they would provide the bus and a driver to pick people up from the rehearsal studio (they would have to pay a typical fair of 380 pesos, of course) and drive them all back to this neighborhood where the wife of one of them would have drinks and food ready. we will pick up a band on the way that will play in the bus, as well as people who sell ice cream and hand out political flyers, etc. it will literally be the last ride anyone will have in one of the old yellow busses in santiago de chile. it will be a swan song, i guess, to an entire aspect of life. a sort of memorial service. i think that at this moment the project that we have been calling “on earth” is largely about death in some way. it is about being here in the moment that we “perform.” about being alive in this very moment on earth and being conscious of the fleeting moment that we share together for the length of the evening or afternoon. IN THIS PIECE “ON EARTH” BELONG OUR DISCUSSIONS, MEETINGS, FIGHTS, DECISIONS WE MADE, HOW WE CAME UP WITH THE IDEA OF THE YELLOW MICROS RIDE, A KIND OF DOCUMENTARY and this act of being present seems ultimately dependent on the awareness of dying and something other than being present. whatever came before and whatever will come after. and those things both inside the moment and outside the moment that texturize it. thicken it. the interplay between literal material facts and our imaginations. between things that happen and stories we tell. oh, and we figured out that whenever we perform this piece, which might largely consist of our telling the story of how we got to the very moment that we are telling the story we are telling, it will be called something like “three weeks on earth” (this will be our first performance) the next one in may in vienna will then be “three and a half months on earth.” the name will always be a running account of how long we have worked on the piece. that is, the accumulated amount of time since february 1st 2007, when we officially started the project.

we’ll see how it goes, but it is a fascinating thing to be doing. and i feel way out of my comfort zone. i think all of really feel like this. claudia, amanda, daniel and myself. it feels like dangerous territory. a huge improvisational performance piece that really relies on a type of meditative space in the act of its creation. i still have in mind that the end of every performance consists of literally burying a time-capsule, the contents of which, will have been gathered during the performance. we’ll see….anyone have any idea how we can get our hands on astronautic time-capsule material? something that can be sealed and will last for 10,000 years?

the footage from the demonstration today is amazing, by the way. really amazing. curious to see what we do with it.
here i am including some photos from the busses this past week. just for fun.

hug from us all
jeremy

PS (FROM CLAUDIA) when we rode the bus one day , a woman – francoise – came in and gave a “speech” about the situation of the musicians from the 10th on.
we started to speak with her and she told us about a demonstration on the 10th.

when we came to the demonstration, there were around 100 musicians all ages, with and without arms, clowns and poets.
i was impressed how amazing they improvised together. it was very alive and wild,hopeful and sad. ……….and also very funny.

there we met Nino, the head of the union, of all musicians and poets and clowns.
we will meet him and a couple of the others next week,and ask them, if they want to join our “yellow micro tour “on the 21st and 22nd.
if yes ,it will become a very full bus.