Writer and Professor Thomas Glave wrote our very first commissioned piece in January 2021, describing a quiet, reflective post-Christmas Brindley Place in the midst of lockdown. In December's offering, he reflects beautifully on that experience in a piece that moves fluidly through dancing and writing and the way that stories move us.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 12, December: Thomas Glave
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hi, I’m Thomas Glave. This is December 2021 and I’m about to read a piece entitled A Keynote in Three Parts.
FALLING AND WRITING (A KEYNOTE IN THREE PARTS)
Once, not so long ago, in that part of the world far across the sea, there lived a young girl who dreamt of dancing – in fact dreamt of growing up to become someone who danced constantly, as if no other way of being existed. During those early years, she never envisaged herself as a ‘ballerina’, so to speak, but simply as someone who yearned to, and was always beautifully capable of, moving her long limbs to music, and actually surrendering herself – surrendering what she would have called her ‘soul’ – to music. This girl grew up to become the great ballerina Suzanne Farrell, internationally renowned star of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet company, and the foremost interpreter, in the late twentieth century, of his ballets. At one point, in 1965 when she was twenty years of age and he sixty-two, she almost became his sixth wife. (Balanchine’s previous five wives had all been ballerinas.) But marriage and romance mattered far less in Farrell’s life, a life dedicated almost exclusively to her art, than her holy pursuit of dance, and to what dance critics and Balanchine himself, as well as other choreographers, began to observe and refer to admiringly, and often with utter astonishment, as her style of ‘off-centre’ dancing. In Farrell’s vision, ‘off-centre’ dancing was a means of attaining ultimate generosity and daring onstage, a supreme gift to the audience but also a gift to and from the art form itself. It presented moments in which the vulnerable performer, dancing out her heart and very being across an enormous stage, and ostensibly completely uncaring as to whether she might be taking risks that could hurl her directly into a disaster such as falling off her dangerous balances or worse, became something like a true force of nature, unrestrained by gravity or fear. As one critic familiar with Farrell’s work and Balanchine’s choreography for the New York City Ballet understood the dancer, Farrell’s off-centre dancing involved ‘astonishing pirouettes, during which...she showed not an eyelid flicker’s worth of concern over whether her partner would be there to catch her at the end. As a rule he was, though there close calls, and a few terrifying occasions when we thought that...she was truly going to pitch herself into the orchestra’.
Farrell’s wildness and even recklessness onstage, especially in startling contrast to her deeply taciturn, even aloof personality, beguiled countless people, myself included, all of whom wondered at and reveled in the utter freedom and daring of her artistry: a freedom from the self-consciousness that we all know as both writers and human beings, known and experienced by all artists. This self-consciousness includes the often gnawing fear that at some point, whilst working on this or that project, or having completed this novel or that play or poetry collection, we may end up making fools of ourselves in front of them: the people out there, actual or imagined (or both): the individuals ever ready, we often fear, to hold our work up not only to cold scrutiny but also inevitably to scorn; the people out there who will surely regard us not with the care and earnest concern for which we yearn, but with cold contempt; the people whose moist breath we can always feel just over our shoulders as we begin writing on a new blank page. What will they think, thosedisapproving faces both imagined and real. . .
Yet perhaps, like daring ballerinas and other artists, we eventually realise that our work, like the work of dancers risking everything on a stage before an unseeable audience enshrouded in darkness, always involves the greatest daring of our most secret imagining selves. In such vulnerability there can be – and there invariably is – the possibility for humility, our embracing of humility, as we grapple with the fact that such deeper giving in art always requires the jettisoning of our egos in service to the art form’s discipline and demands. A ballerina may indeed fall out of the next sequence of pirouettes or fouettés, but was she giving us all of her energy and soul when she did? We may stumble over a sentence or a stanza, or find that our hands were wrapped too possessively around a character’s throat in this chapter or that poem, or we may mis-hear the lyric’s begging us to reach for a smoother rhyme, but it always seems – at least until the final loss of our faculties or simple end of our existence – that we do have time to work and re-work, and re-work again, anticipating in calmness the inevitability of falling without engaging any fear of falling. And again, and again. We certainly have more time than ballet dancers, who daily strive for beauty and grace against the ticking clock of their aging bodies. As for the patience required for the doing and re-doing, trying and re-trying, the pandemic has impressed upon us nothing if not an understanding of the importance of patience. During the numerous hours I’ve gritted my teeth whilst thinking of the great difficulty, at least for me, in patiently working to inculcate patience, I remembered Farrell insisting that her pre-professional female ballet pupils take an entire ballet class, not only the class’s second half, wearing pointe shoes – ‘Because’, Farrell often told those eager teen-agers, ‘you don’t learn to dance on pointe by not dancing on pointe’. Like those dancers in their ballet studio or rehearsal hall, we know that we don’t become writers by not writing. Yet I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that tomorrow morning, like so many of us having to face that awful blank page, I remain fearful of falling, and of what ...
