|
bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda
rapidly with
his two fingers, constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go
booda- booda- booda- bidda- beeda- beeda- beeda- bidda- booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda
, creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this
scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: "First, I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through
the sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way." I knew damn well I couldn't keep track of this, so I interrupted her:
"Just go ahead and do the dance, and I'll play along."
"But don't you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I've finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way." It was
no use; I couldn't remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real musician!
Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, "Mr. Feynman has a special technique for this type of situalion: He prefers to develop
the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let's try it once that way, and if you're not satisfied, we can correct it."
Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get
ready
to
go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was rather easy to make the
bzzzzs
and
bshshs
and
boodas
and
biddas
with my
hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover
blown.
The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren't many people in the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very
much.
Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the performances, we weren't sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the
choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second, that we're good enough to make music for a ballet and get
paid
for it was
surely
crazy! For me, who had never had any "culture," to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.
We didn't think that she'd be able to find ballet dancers who would be willing to
dance
to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one
prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it
very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms
really
sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I
saw how they reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had come to the performances, we realized that we were a
success.
The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape
of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African
phrases to sing at the beginning (
GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO
, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn't figure out how to
make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mâché were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed
to dance in front of them.
We didn't offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I
arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home,
listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.
"What's the matter?" he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, "
Tusks!
" Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive,
beautiful
ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers):
real
elephant tusks,
super
size, courtesy of Werner
Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for
choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this
time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers
there in France to do a small section of the ballet --that's how she entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left --a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their
regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a
ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn't a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges
afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
"Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing..
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
