Under Water Rock Out

An AMAZING night last night

They put a big floating stage in the sea about 100m from the shore.

A band started playing and people started stripping off, jumping in the water and swimming out. My friends had come to the beach without their swimming things, a form of self-torture to my mind, so I left them and joined the dancers in the water.

It was blinding. Two reasons I think.

Firstly, there's no precedent for under water dance moves, so you just move instinctively any way you want. You're free.

Secondly, no one can see you. I loved this part. You can shimmy and shake all you want, and it doesn't matter an iota what you look like. I probably looked like the love child of a spastic alien and a mermaid, but who cared? Not me.

Thirdly, you're also dancing with nature. It sounds hippy but it's ace. The sea has its own ideas about where your body is going, and you have to dance with that too. You are dancing with the sea. Under the full moon and beautiful wispy clouds going past.

Ok, one more, you're weightless. 

As the set went on the band heated up and we water dancers got more and more wild, till the singer was rampaging round the stage like Dionysus, the guitarist was doing a solo in an almost complete back bend, and we water dancers were hitting and kicking the water like crazy to create a massive, splashy, collective climax.

Amazing.

Samba De Roda

Samba de Roda totally rocks. "De Roda" means in a circle; it´s samba singing, dancing, drumming and music playing without any audience, everyone involved. Videos to come soon. I´m going to see if we can find it in / bring it to England.

Sydney

I met Sydney on my first night here in Salvador.

The night was electric. Magnificent.


I´d taken my first five steps into town with some brandnew friends when, as if from nowhere, appeared a funky band of female drummers marching through the streets, wiggling and banging out fantastic rhythms. My new friends and I, grinning ear to ear with the delight of finding this place and each other and the music and the fantastic chayasa bar we´d just come from, after whatever miseries we´d all just left behind, started Boogying On Down. 

"Eh you dance good" said Sydney, appearing out of nowhere, dancing artfully beside me. "You come my Samba classes," he said, "I teach you good." He grinned and boogied away down the street, revealing his  Dance school name and email address on the back of his t-shirt.


I can spot a potential great facilitator a mile off and he was one. He had the perfect fun fed energy.


Well, sir, I thought quitely to myself, You´ve just talked to the right person.


The night rampaged on in an explosion of magnificence generally involving wonderful people, wonderful music, wonderful dancing.

I bumped into Sydney again later and we ran around town, high as kites from each other´s energy, Samba dancing here there and everywhere, him teaching me this and that, everyone staring at these two larger than life balls of energy rampaging around town. 

... 

I´ve been trying to go to his classes and it turns out they don´t exist. I asked him for the email address on his shirt the next day, and it turns out it´s not his. He speaks better English by a long way than other potential facilitators I´ve met here, but he can´t read or write, I´ve realised. Many people here can´t. 

He was messing me around with info about classes so I made what I realied is a professional mistake and came straight out with what I wanted and why. "I´m here to make connections with amazing people," I said. "Maybe you could come over for a month and teach dance in England. Maybe. But Sydney, I need to see you teach a class. When are you teaching a class?"
 

That night I saw him lead the dancing in a big procession through town. They do this great thing here where three or four dancers stand in a line at the front doing some simple repetetive moves that the crowd copies and it is GREAT fun. He was fab. "Come see my dance school!" he said afterwards, and I followed him to a tiny favella room, his home, where he sleeps on a thin matress on the floor. "Sydney, this isn´t a dance school," I said. "Yes! Yes! I teach samba here...." 

Jesus, I think. This guy´s probably on crack. I´ve got a good instinct for people and I can tell he´s good. I´ve no need to fear. But by this point I´ve 98% rejected Sydney as a person to work with because he´s not always honest and it would clearly be just too difficult to work with him. But that aside, we´ve become friends and I want to help him a little bit.


His friend Macambira has a little drum school I´m going to in a minute. Macambira has an A6 piece of paper with his weekly class schedule printed on it, B&W, nothing special, but it does the job. 

"Why don´t you have one of these?" I asked Sydney just now. "I don´t have the money", he said. It´t not really that, though, I think; it´s because he´s illiterate and he hasn´t figured out how to get around that barrier yet. "I could make one for you," I said. "But I need the information about when and where you teach. Can you find a consistent place and time, and let me know, and I´ll make you a flyer if you want."


He looks down, and then tells me that his classes don´t work because he doesn´t have a stereo and people like to dance to music. He can´t afford a stereo. He can´t afford cards and can´t pay rent on an indoor dance space. His face turns darker and his honesty gets deeper and he tells me he hasn´t eaten for three days. He rants about the economic situation behind the happy faces for tourists and how fucking hard life is here.

It´s clearly, famously true.


He reveals a totally fatalistic attitude about the lack of opportunity and support here. I´m struggling to figure out the chicken and egg relationship between his attitude and his situation.

And the entrepreneur in me starts roaring.

People, everywhere, somehow create projects out of nothing. I´ve seen it all over Brazil and India. I´ve done it once and I´m preparing to do it again. It´s fucking hard but if you are worthy of people´s trust, if you are doing something good, you´ll find what you need and you´ll make it happen.


I tell him as much. "You´re letting yourself down with your own attitude," I say. "This city is full of spaces and stereos. If you´re good to people they will lend them to you. If you tell the truth people will trust you. If you believe you can make things work you can make them work. But you don´t believe you can make them work and so they don´t work. Even here, right now, you´ve got an offer of free flyers, and you don´t believe it´s possible, so it´s not going to happen."

It develops into a passionate argument in a garbled mince of English and Portuguese about possibility, attitude and context. 

Until I walked away.


I´m leaving the day after tomorrow. 

And at some point in the mean time, I´m going to try to find out what it the Salvadorean equivalent of Grameen bank, The Hub, Unltd, the things that make it possible for people with nothing but talent to create something from their talent, like the organisations who have made my career possible, and if they don´t exist here, I´m going to wonder aloud why the hell they don´t.

:)

I recommend friday nights in Salvador, Bahia, and staying at the Centro Cultural do Bispo

I'm done hunting fun

Holi morning in India was one of the most fun mornings of my life. I didn't look for it. It found me.

I’m done fun hunting.

Fun hunting is no fun, no fun at all. You find simply the absence of fun 97% of the time, hang out with people who are far less fun than your real mates, work in a language so unfamiliar if feels like you’re trying to walk through solid air every day, sweltering heat, everything unfamiliar, all the time.

I’m going to change tack totally.

I’m here a month. For the first two weeks I’ve been working hard, almost incessantly, feeling a pressure to not let people down, to come up with the goods. So I’ve been looking very actively for, to over-simplify, fun.  And I don’t think I’ve ever had so little fun in my life.

So for the next two weeks I’m going to try Not Trying to have fun. For he who ties himself to a joy does it’s winged life destroy. Happiness By the Way. And all that.

I’m going to buy a bloody guitar, (I was a fool to come away without an instrument), work on another project entirely, get near to a beach again, and if I stumble across any fun at all, well then I do, and that’s the way it’s always been before, and if I don’t, then speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

The End.

Holi festival, India

I'm not in India. But the last post made me think of it.

Holi is super fun. A city-scale colour and water fight. Thanks to the good people via flickr  for pics

What Candomble is like

The Ceremony was in two parts.

The first part of the ceremony was a lot like the Sufi Zikhr I did in California; a proscribed and precise sequence of small, repetitive, rhythmic movements that everyone does together in form and formation, to live music played by people who are also committed participants. No-one has to make any creative decisions. It’s not about any individual. The individual is consumed within the group, which together becomes consumed, ideally, by spirit.

After the first part everyone went and had a jolly good meal, I made some friends and relaxed (having made an entrance like a  giant 100 watt lightbulb that set everyone blinking, a foot taller and seven shades lighter than any woman in the room). The friends were an English speaking (yippee!) young Swiss woman who’d grown up in Brazil, and a young Brazilian journalism student approaching her initiation into the Candomble community where she was not to be a Marie Santos, it was already decided, but something else, probably one of the women who looks after the MS trance dancers, wiping their brows, fixing their costumes continuously like fussy mothers… As part of her development into Candomble she’d had to spend two periods of 21 days alone in a bare room with food brought to her, to cleanse her. The worst thing about it, she said, writhing on her seat in an expression of unbearable frustration and desire, was going for 21 days without making love… for a Brazilian, unthinkable!

And then we all went back in for the second part, which was more like the Theyyam rituals they do throughout northern Kerela, India, in December and January. Some people (in this case usually about three men) get to have a pretty wild dance while everyone else watches and then has contact with them afterwards to soak up and perhaps communicate with the spirit that they've channeled through the dancing.