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Northern Virginia Performances Announced

6/27/2014

                We are pleased to announce that 1st Stage of Tysons has invited The Actual Dance as one of their summer hosted productions.

                1st Stage was founded in 2008 and has since become one of the premier locat theater destinations in the Washington Theater community.

              The theater's name is a bit of a double entendre in that their goal is to serve as part of the first stage of young emerging and non-traditional artists.   The Actual Dance in many ways fits that description, with the exception that I see myself as being in my 4th Stage of life. That is I'm not particularly young. And yet I am very much an emerging artist.

                There will be five performances each followed by a discussion.   Tickets to these shows can be purchesd at the 1st Stage web site.

                These performances will also feature our new direction provided by my New York based director Kate Holland. In addition, we will feature live music with Eli Zoller our music director and guitar player coming down from New York to play, and local cellis Stephanie Herman joining him.

The Dance that we ALL dance: June is Gay Pride Month

6/20/2014

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June is Gay Pride Month. Gay Pride month makes me think of my friend and one of the great supporters of the Actual Dance, The Rev. Gregory L. Johnson, Director of Care for the Family Caregiver and Community Outreach at EmblemHealth in New York

Greg and I met for the first time about a year ago in New York through the good offices of Intersections International where I was serving as a Senior Fellow. I had just begun performing The Actual Dance. I was invited to lunch with Greg and Bob Chase, the Founding Director of Intersections. The luncheon was magical. Something that was “meant to be.”

            Greg has imagined and created an award winning program at EmblemHealth called The Care for the Family Caregiver. It has an ever expanding outreach through web presence, social media presence, and organizations like NYCFCC (New York City Family Caregiver Coalition). He has received numerous awards and recognitions within the fields of health care, family caregiving and service to others.   He currently serves the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City as Minister for Family Caregiving and leads its weekly Prayer Circle Services.

            Greg saw immediately the value and relevance of The Actual Dance as what he calls “another face of caregiving.”

            He did because Greg has experienced the Dance twice in his life with those he has loved most in the world.   Greg’s life-partner of 41 years, Joseph Polacek passed away in 2011. Their adopted son, Wayan Suardika, passed away in 2005.

            Greg does not shy away from his orientation. He is indeed proud. He reminds me of how hard and difficult that path has been and must still be for those who are in same-sex relationships.

           Being present when someone you love is grievously ill is difficult beyond words. Yet it can be beautiful and dignified. As I say in The Actual Dance it can be “the ultimate consummation” of your love.   Having to Dance in an environment of judgment, hostility or hate is an indignity and it is wrong.

            The reminder then in the month of Gay Pride is that “everyone will one day dance.”    Mortality is not selective. As odd as it sounds, there needs to be an equal right to Dance openly and fully for everyone.

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LEVELS OF LOVE

6/13/2014

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               I just finished reading Levels of Life by Julian Barnes. It is a book about life and loss and love. Exploring and understand what “love really means” is a part of my own journey to understand The Actual Dance.

                Strange thing to say, I know. I wrote the play. I should know what the heck it means. I thought I did, at first. Now after nearly fifty performances I realize that I am only beginning to gain insight and understanding into the complex subjects that the show illuminates. It is about what love really means. And what life means. I am also, thanks to this book, now understanding that it is also about the quilt and fabric of the relationship with the person whom you love.

                At the recommendation of a friend I read Julian Barnes’ expression of the red hot, unrelenting grief he experiences at the sudden loss of his wife of thirty years.   It took only 37 days from diagnosis to the death of his wife.

                There is a lot to appreciate about the book. The odds are if you are reading my blogs about The Actual Dance you are engaged to some degree with the loss, or anticipated loss, of a loved one.   This book is worth the read. This blog is not however a book review. Rather, I want to share some insights I gained from reading the book relative to my own experience and to what is offered in The Actual Dance.

                At the outset I want acknowledge how much I love Barnes’ observation that when “you put together two people who have not been put together before … and one of them is taken away. [W]hat is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.” (Levels of Life, p. 73)   Another way of saying perhaps that 1 plus 1 equals two; but 1 minus 1 can equal minus 2, not 0.

               Barnes never talks about what the 37 days from diagnosis to death were like. Instead, he jumps into and stays with a description of the inconsolability of the loss of the “person you love most in this world.” (The Actual Dance.)

               What I understand better now having read the book is that there is a difference between the journey after the death of someone you love and the journey leading to the death. I do not know what to make of the fact that Barnes says nothing about those 37 days. To me, these are the most difficult days. When you read Levels of Life and get a sense of how deep and “hot” (my word) Barnes’ grief is as he describes it, then you will know that to say the days before the death are harder is really saying something.

             The days and hours and minutes of being present for the one you love as the “breathing becomes slower and shallower. … (a)nd then becomes slower and softer. Then the music stops!” (The Actual Dance) It is the time of anticipation of the unknown and fear of not being able to handle the emotional moments together at the end. It is sometimes called “anticipatory grief”.

             My own experience as expressed in The Actual Dance is similar to what Barnes describes for himself, in that he was there in the hospital every day. He talks about driving home wondering what “being alone” was going to mean. A phrase I use in the show. “I wonder what it is going to be like ‘being alone.’”

             The detail in the book though is provided in Barnes’ eloquent and various descriptions of the intolerable emptiness and “missingness” that he experiences. This too is part of “The Dance.” It has been said that The Actual Dance does NOT end with death, it continues until somehow the world we live in seems to come back into an operational focus that allows life to go on in some routine fashion.

             In the days and hours and minutes though leading up to that last breath, there is no routine to be found. Rather than moving away from the fire we are moving into the fire.

             Barnes describes the place not as fire but just as bottom or depth -- a Level of Life so to speak.

             What I have discovered in the writing and performance – and the ongoing revelation – of The Actual Dance is that the levels are also about love. A different book I once read, the title of which is long lost to me, described the beauty in grief can be appreciated as the opposite and equal level of love.   It was suggested and I would agree that the depth of the grief is simply an indicator of the much or the height of the love.   By that measure, Julian Barnes’ love for his wife was very, very high.

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SOLDIERS DANCE

6/6/2014

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                “There is dance. A dance that one day each and every one of us dance.” The opening line of The Actual Dance.

                Today on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day I remember all of those who fought and died on this day. I think about their dance and about the dance that each person they knew and loved danced on that day. I dance with all of them today.

                The spiritual ritual of confronting the end of your life and those of people you love – spouse, child, the solider next to you – is unique.

                I have never served in combat. I cannot claim therefore to know what that Dance might have been like 70 years ago.   There are though a number of first-hand accounts in the news today that give a small glimpse into the minds of soldiers who remember that day.   The New York Times carries a number of first hand recollections. A list of other similar stories is here.

                Despite the focus that combat seems to bring to the mind, there is a common theme in many of the stories of awareness of love and life.   It may have happened in the preparation. It may have been flashes on the journey.   It definitely followed them and their families the rest of their lives.

                A critic of the show, The Actual Dance, once complained about the central metaphor of the show and asked: “[T]he man gurgling in his own blood after a street corner holdup goes bad – is he dancing? The Sudanese woman dying in childbirth a hundred miles away from a medical facility – is she dancing?"   I would add to those questions: “The soldier storming Omaha Beach 70 years ago who is shot dead – is he dancing?”

                The answer is in this question: “Do we not all sense our own mortality and engage the world as something precious and true, even in the worst of circumstances.”    As I have said before, “An instant is a lifetime in the Universe.”   To say that there is “beauty and dignity” is to say that the discovery of the beauty and dignity is our destination. The place that we all can find and once there understand that “[t]he Actual Dance is the ultimate consummation of our love.” Perhaps I should have written the line with: “Love.”

                So yes, Soldiers Dance. Even and perhaps especially on D-Day they danced. Their families and buddies and perhaps all of us whose lives have been made free as the result of their incredible service and sacrifice dance with and for them in our unique way as we remember, thank, grieve and give them a place of honor in hearts.

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Northern Virginia Performances Announced

The Dance that we ALL dance: June is Gay Pride Month

LEVELS OF LOVE

SOLDIERS DANCE

Sam Simon

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FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTUAL DANCE
Contact Samuel A. Simon for information and media inquiries:
[email protected]
202-329-1851
www.TheActualDance.com

Northern Virginia Performances Announced

The Dance that we ALL dance: June is Gay Pride Month

LEVELS OF LOVE

SOLDIERS DANCE

Sam Simon

Archives

Categories

Archives

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTUAL DANCEContact Samuel A. Simon for information and media inquiries:[email protected]​202-329-1851www.TheActualDance.com​

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTUAL DANCE
Contact Samuel A. Simon for information and media inquiries:
[email protected]
202-329-1851
www.TheActualDance.com