all we are saying is give peace a chance

David Dorfman and company were at BAM this past week, doing "underground" which is a tribute to the Weather Underground and social and artistic action. It was a beautiful show with lots of good sentiment. Questions on the back wall as well as vocally: have you ever killed anyone? have you ever wanted to kill anyone? have you ever loved anyone? are you a pacifist? In another section, one of the dancers tries to explain how if she killed three people, she could save ten. She gradually progresses until she says that if she killed a billion, she could save a zillion. My reaction was to ask myself if there was hope and then that came up in the Dialogue afterwards with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of the Urban Bush Women. She had been reading someone who was positing a theory of quietism. What is enough? You can always do more, and sometimes you have strength only to do less. The performance ended with the dancers throwing little magnetized light blobs against a metallic wall where they turned into a starry sky or fireworks display or bright future.

Another theme of the BAM Dialogue was that art is important in activism and a creative force in the world. Do your art, whatever it is. Do your part too, I guess. In the Sunday Times (that's N.Y. Times), there was a wonderful profile of Maxine Hayt and Marcia Tucker by Elizabeth Hayt (Maxine's daughter). Maxine Hayt, partly under the influence of Tucker, exercised her art because she had to. While it meant that she wasn't always at home, she enriched the lives of her husband and children while doing what she had to do.