ARRIVAL: Spring Stories
Spring 1999
A pageant in three parts: arrival, disconnection, search for place/home. Performed at Karuna Conference Centre and surrounds, Katoomba; Gundungurra country.
Stories of arrival…birth…nature…dislocation…impact
Remembering northern ancestral beliefs, celebrations, symbols, deities and writing which welcome Spring and celebrate nature and fecundity.[1]
I want to tell
you a story
a story of my people
Many years ago in the lands of my
ancestors,
Ireland...England...The Netherlands,
in the time before,
the time before the one land became
three,
there was a mighty freeze,
a long, cold Winter.
Then imperceptibly,
gradually,
the ice began to melt
and on this barren land
life
a different kind of life
appeared.
A Garden of Eden.
And into this Eden arrived a people.
Small groups
two or three families together
living off the land
and the gifts this land had prepared.
An equal relationship,
taking
and if needed moving on,
allowing for regrowth.
At the same time
on the other side of the world
was another land not yet on its own.
Its story also was of a long, cold
Winter,
one of flood and storm,
freeze and thaw
erosion.
It too had a people
in small groups,
living on what the land had to offer,
moving on,
allowing for regrowth.
For more than forty thousand years [2]
it seemed,
in most cases,
an equal relationship.
Then my ancestors arrived
to this land
on the other side of the world.
They had changed.
They had learned new ways,
new ways of controlling the land
and all it had to offer.
No need anymore to listen
to see
to learn
to understand
They came
and recreated this new land to suit themselves.
“This is what we know”, they said.
“This is what we need to survive.
This is what we need for ourselves.”
But in the recreating
and the ignorance of their recreating
they changed forever
more quickly
more permanently
this Eden.
They say it is dying
the earth
They say with each arrival
the difference disappears
all becomes the same.
Sameness is another kind of death.
They say with each small change
the balance is tilted
the whole is affected and begins to readjust.
They say it’s evolution
progress
the future
change for the better
change for our survival...our
immortality
That is the dream.
But where have we come from, we who
dream,
and what is the future we are dreaming
of?
For if the dream becomes the reality,
what is the reality of the place we
have come to out of our dreaming?
Do I like what I see
of the present,
of the past,
of the future dream?
Do I want to stand still
hold on to what I know,
what I understand?
Do I want to go back
is it possible,
desirable?
Or do I want to move
allow change
adapt?
And can I agree to only part
without taking the whole?
If I hold on to what is,
or go back,
I am left behind,
irrelevant.
And if I let go,
accept change,
what is the future we are dreaming for
ourselves
and our children?
What I see I love
and mourn its passing with passion.
What I do not see,
have never seen,
have never heard,
never experienced,
I do not miss at all
And that is the reality.
© A. Maie, 1999
💥in
the early 1900’s movement analyst and teacher Rudolf Laban’s whose Sun Festival was performed as part of
the 1917 Nonnational Congress, a conference on the occult. Susan Manning[3]
suggests that this gathering was a protest against the war. The performance began at sunset and ended
twelve hours later at sunrise and occurred in three different locations. The parts were Dance of the Setting Sun, Demons
of the Night and The Victorious Sun,
a style of performance as a ‘nature-based’ rite of passage. This event was one of a number of non-traditional
artistic and spiritual explorations occurring at the time.
💥during the same period my great uncle, Francois Constant
Ledeboer (‘Peck’), after whom my father was named, met Rudolf Steiner and
joined the community in Dornach, Switzerland which was set up to explore the
meeting points of science, art and spirituality. According to my Opa, Peck was an architect
and ‘played a mean mandolin’. He and a Russian artist evolved a system of grinding coloured plate glass
in various depths to let the light shine through which became the windows of
the community house. The Goetheanum contained
a number of theatres which became centres for performance. Peck is buried beside Steiner.
💥in the 11th
century in Bingen, Germany, the abbess, artist, composer, playwright,
philosopher and visionary Hildegard von Bingen began creating her extensive
body of work. According to Wikepedia “There are more surviving
chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle
Ages”. In 1989/1990 as Double Vision we choreographed and
performed Veri Fidei to a number of Hildegard’s
sequences/chants at the Adelaide Festival Fringe, as well a play on her life, O Ecclesia, written and directed by Pat Lewis and Jolyon Bromley.
Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, p. 46
1. O branch of freshest green,
O hail! Within the windy gusts of saints
upon a quest you swayed and sprouted forth.
2. When it was time, you blossomed in your boughs—
“Hail, hail!” you heard, for in you seeped the sunlight’s warmth
like balsam’s sweet perfume.
3. For in you bloomed
so beautiful a flow’r, whose fragrance wakened
all the spices from their dried-out stupor.
4. And they all appeared in full viridity.
5. Then rained the heavens dew upon the grass
and all the earth was cheered,
for from her womb she brought forth fruit
and for the birds up in the sky
have nests in her.
6. Then was prepared that food for humankind,
the greatest joy of feasts!
O Virgin sweet, in you can ne’er fail any joy.
7. All this Eve chose to scorn.
8. But now, let praise ring forth unto the Highest!
[1] In the tradition of the First Peoples near where I live, the Dharawal weather calendar notes that September-October is the season Murrai'yunggory—cool, getting warmer, the time of flying foxes (Ngoonuni), and the appearance of the bright red Miwa Gawaian (Telopea speciosissima....waratah).
According
to the journals of the First Fleet officers (Hunter & Tench), in
August/September members of the nations around Sydney/Warrane would gather for ‘dancing’.
According to Hunter in August 1791 'a number of natives not seen before' visit the settlement on their way to dance at Kamay/Botany Bay and more than 20 call in to the Governor’s house
on the way back, while on the north shore the Gamaragal men carry out fire burning practices when there was
no rain, and the women are fishing.
In the tradition of the Euahlayi people who live in north-western NSW the dark spaces between the stars in the Milky Way is called the celestial emu Gawargay. In August and September the emu is perpendicular to the land, pointing towards the horizon. This is the time the male emu stands as the chicks hatch and the cold weather is left behind.
For the Noongar people of
south-west WA, when the days are
warming, the magpies start swooping and yellow blooms start appearing, they
know it is the season of Djilba
(first spring). Djilba is a transitional time of the year, with some very cold and
clear days combining with warmer, rainy and windy days mixing with the
occasional sunny day or two.
Traditionally, the main food sources for the Noongar are land-based grazing animals included the Yongar (kangaroo), the Waitj (emu) and the Koomal (possum).
[2] This has more recently been extended to 60,000+ years.
[3] Manning, S.A. Ecstasy
and the Demon, Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. California, University of California, 1993.
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