Feeding the Music

My fingers are reeking of chopped garlic, I’m up to my elbows in autumn greens and chicken, and trying to figure out whether the Turkish musicians need rosewater for their tea, if the Spaniards would blanch if I added zucchini to their beloved tortilla Espanola, or the Indonesians would dismiss my basa gede. Over a lifetime of becoming an artist, never in my wildest dreams was it ever my intention to become den mother to scores of musicians from around the world. But here I am, cooking again for the third straight time for the International Body Music Festival happening here November 1-6 in San Francisco. 

Among other things I am a part-time caterer. Jupiter and Uranus are close to conjunct in my 5th House in Cancer, and Ceres is in my 11th House in Capricorn. I do fret about nurturing others — that comes with the territory — yet that fretting makes me feel totally alive and completely aware, especially when I’m at the stove. Thank goddesses for Capricorn, which helps me plan enough ahead of time to spring into improvisational dishes if something fails in my plans.

Up until a few years ago, even as a dancer and an actor, I thought music and musicians were part of a religion and a priesthood — an exclusive club that was not for me. It wasn’t until I started taking class with Keith Terry, percussionist, dancer, teacher and maestro of body music forms from around the globe, that I began to recognize a form of musicianship inside of me.

The body is the first instrument. The first music we hear is in the womb. Inside our mothers, we heard their hearts beat as we were nurtured safe in a cocoon of flesh and blood. We joined with them in a musical duet of life. That instinct from the womb is a natural legacy, a global commonality.

For me, music in my body always begins with a rhythmic impulse. Got to have the right beat to dance. I grew up in the 1960s, and sweet soul music from the Motor City was part of my childhood soundtrack. I love to dance, and when the right music plays, my nerve centers and my reactive brain go into the space that lets you release yourself from mundane reality. To me truly dancing is being in the music, letting yourself loose to feel it. Whatever spheres of the brain that aren’t working in unison suddenly cohere and I relax, inhibitions released. As my body moves, I integrate my head with my heart. As I matured along with my dancing, soon to be followed by my drumming, I grew to learn the sound of the drum represented the pulse of the world. We still need to hear it like our own mother’s heartbeat.

When the student is ready, the master appears, and so was the case for Keith Terry’s re-appearance and influence in my life. We had met 30 years before when both he and the company I was dancing with shared a double bill at Laney College in Oakland. Keith is someone who was born to be a musician, starting as a drummer at the age of five, in a family living on the land in rural Texas. He started drumming for bands that played for, among many tap greats, Honi Coles. He soon moved to San Francisco and became a member of the Pickle Family Circus orchestra.

He moved away from drums and started applying the same rhythms he played on his drums to his own two feet. When I first met him, he was doing a ‘duet’ tap dancing on bubble paper to the ‘music’ of a dozen or so wind-up toys. He grew to use everything available from stomp to clap to slap to vocals to make music, and learned from others as far away as India, Spain and Turkey on everything from flamenco to kathak in India to kecak in Indonesia. Thirty years later I came to learn from him, hungry to incorporate music further into me, making my body feel the music with not only my ears but my own two hands and feet. The experience was like learning a new way to breathe.

When Keith won a Guggenheim award in 2008 he used the money to create a festival that was an invitation to body musicians from around the world: musicians who sang, stomped, clapped and moved making music using no instrument other than themselves. It was in early December 2008, during the time of a lovely and rare Venus-Jupiter conjunction that the International Body Music festival was born. That first year, I volunteered for hospitality, insisting — out of experience and compassion — that no one visiting our festival would eat cold and soulless food when they’re so far away from home. That year we had 14 members of a Brazilian body music group — Barbatuques — in from Sao Paolo. We also hosted artists from the furthest northern reaches of Canada doing Inuit throat singing and two rhythm duets: one from Marseilles, the other from Istanbul.

It is my job, as it has been since 2008, to feed a hungry horde of musicians and techs over three days. It’s a challenge figuring out food that can both nurture and energize the body, keep the spirit clear, assuage the voracious appetites which every dancer has, especially after a show, and manage a menu to satisfy palates from around the world. That still is my job this next week. It is my duty and my pleasure to be mincing garlic, cutting up chicken, being sensitive to rice-eating, wheat-eating and potato eating cultures and come up with as many dishes as possible for a travelling band of musical gypsies.

The festival has since grown from our first year in 2008: last year, the 3rd festival was produced in Sao Paolo, and next year, it will go to Istanbul. The American leg of the show comes back every other year, and fortunately for us in the Bay Area, in San Francisco.

So Fe-911 this week is taking a needed respite from the very busy political world to be mother-nuturer-artist. And I simply just need the play. The video is the finale from the 1st festival: a collaboration between Oakland’s Slammin’ All Body Band, Keith’s group, and Brazil’s Barbatuques. My teacher Keith is on the platform, as always, keeping the rhythm and being maestro, which has always been his destiny.

Enjoy.