Archive for January, 2013

From an Island, #4 (Homage to Rauschenberg’s ‘Pelican’)

Posted in Art and Culture, CAPTIVA, Dance, Life and What about It, So&So&So&So, Theater with tags , , , , , on January 29, 2013 by Louise Steinman

"Homage to Pelican"
No sense trying to sleep during full moon madness, the night after our “Homage to Pelican,” for me a joyful return to the zone of performer’s mind, the thrill of improvisation. And especially meaningful to be performing with Susan Banyas, with whom I danced and made theatrical mischief for many years as the expandable duo So&So&So&So.

To plucks and clunks of John Cage, Carrell escorts Lucinda up onto the chairs (Rauschenberg’s “Ancient Incident”) where she sings in soaring soprano:

OSPREY
OSPREY
ROAM FREE

IBIS!
IBIS!

MALIA HELD
A PELICAN

(etc)

Susan and I glide around on Bob’s black rollerskates (the very ones, yes, that he used in his 1958 “Pelican”, now with fraying shoelaces) adorned with our palm frond parachutes, gently propelling Lavinia and Kate off-balance (they are our Cunningham-Carolyn Brown muses), blue bicycles spiral on the grass in the distant lawn. I’m told an osprey flew over (cue osprey!)the performance during the final moment, wriggling mullet in his talons, illuminated by the sun.

And then there was the egret who wanted some ice:

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From an Island #3 the pelican rescue

Posted in birdwatching, CAPTIVA, Life and What about It, Travel with tags , , , , , , , on January 26, 2013 by Louise Steinman

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Some of the strange events on the island this week, among them the rescue of a great white pelican at sea. Our hero, Matt (long-time Rauschenberg “can do” guy) is at the helm when we notice the injured bird… is a fishing line wrapped around his neck? He can’t lift his wing and is unable to fly. Matt doesn’t hesitate. The rescue will commence! Bill takes the helm, others shout out directions as he aims the pontoon straight for the pelican. After several tries, Matt lunges over the bow of the boat and hauls the giant bird onto the deck. Great white pelicans have a wing-span of 9 feet! Our pelican struggles, then settles down, Malia’s calm hand on his beak, stroking him, talking to him. Matt examines the bird– there’s a bloody gash under his right wing. Our resident painter, Lucinda Parker, offers art history commentary, Leda and the Swan, while others wield cameras, cell phone to call CROW, Center for Rehabilitation of Wildlife on Sanibel. We stare into the eyes of the pelican on the journey back to Captiva, where Carrell awaits on the dock of the Fish House with a pelican-sized cardboard box to transport our friend to medical help. I am happy to report today that Patient #142 is stable.

Another strange occurrence– standing on the lawn near the mangroves as a shrieking osprey clutching a wriggling mullet in its talons circled three times over my head. Flying fish! How strange to spend your life swimming in the sea and your death high in a tree.

I’m still searching for a double-spiraled lightning whelk (one in a million), there are preparations afoot for a Mullet Parade at Jensens tonight

LeBrie Rich and one of her original felt mullets

LeBrie Rich and one of her original felt mullets

and then there’s the appearance of a mysterious boar…
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From an Island, #2

Posted in birdwatching, CAPTIVA, Life and What about It, Literature, Travel with tags , , , , on January 18, 2013 by Louise Steinman

Jon asked for more pictures from Captiva, so I’m thinking, which ones? The strangler vines that remind me of Daphne turning into a tree?
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I wish I could show you the turtle that Lucinda saw in the jungle, the one with the delicate sepia pattern on its cream-colored carapace, but s/he hasn’t revealed her/himself to me yet. Whenever one of us sees some new wildlife, there some anxiety about having not been observant enough to see it when it’s a combination of attention and LUCK that brings it about. Bill was able to show me where the screech owl sings and Lucinda had heard him in that spot already several times.

Yesterday I watched an osprey devour a mullet for lunch. there was only half a mullet there by the time I happened on the scene… usually it’s still wriggling as it’s devoured, now that’s, as Beckett would say, “lepping fresh.”
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“After lifting its catch from the water, an osprey turns the fish’s head forward, thus reducing wind resistance while flying back to the perch.”

In his new memoir, Nick Flynn notes: “Mimesis, it would seem, can only come from close attention to the world, and this attention (as Weil points out) is a type of prayer, another (possible) way to escape the cage of ego.”

Drawing the little blue heron on the dock of the Fish House was today’s prayer, my blue pencil following the rotation of his body as he warily watched me watching him.
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On an Island

Posted in Art and Culture, CAPTIVA, Dance, Life and What about It with tags , , , on January 12, 2013 by Louise Steinman

“Odysseus asked to spend eternity making his way from a war indefinitely far in the past to an island indefinitely far in the future.”

I’m presently on an island. I’m sitting on the dock of the Fish House, reading The Lost Books of the Odyssey. A pelican drops scissor-like into the sea. A pair of dolphins are breaking and breathing and arcing in the channel. The same ones, perhaps who awakened the photographer who was sleeping here the other night, woke her at 4 AM. To be awakened by dolphins! That’s the magic of this place, Captiva, where I am in residence with a group of ten other painters, dancers, writers, performers.

Walking back through the jungle to our cottage at dusk from the dance studio with Susan, we’re talking about how we began making theater together years ago, returning to our sources. I’d just read aloud to her a poem by Robert Creeley, “Histoire du Florida,” about age, that ends: “Come out, while there’s still time to play.”

Then a bobcat lopes across our path, taking our breath away.

Captiva is where Bob Rauschenberg lived and worked for decades, and his compound—with studios and houses, lawns and jungle– is now, thanks to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, being opened up as an artist residency program. We’re the pilot residency (hey it’s a difficult job, but someone’s gotta do it), helping to tweak the studios and the protocol so that generations of artists after us will create here in these remarkable spaces.

Reading in Calvin Tompkin’s Off The Wall, about Bob’s trip to India, the sight of a golden sari trailing in mud made him realize: “that everything is relative, that everything is acceptable , and that you don’t need to be afraid of beauty either.”

which applies, I think, to this vision from the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge, from yesterday:

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