[now I'm all rejuvenated and rested]
SO YESTERDAY, THIS HAPPENED:
I have thrown these pictures up on every corner of the Internet I hang out on, but I haven't yet really explained what happened, except in a "LOOK AT THIS WILD AND CRAZY THING THAT WENT ON IN MY ACTUAL LIFE" kind of way. Considering that this was one of the more beautiful and powerful things that's ever happened to me, I feel like it might be good to do that now.
So yesterday, after world politics and economics and choir, I hung out in Catlett with the intention of attending a free workshop on Himalayan sacred folk music. I had no idea what this entailed! I know nothing about Himalayan folk music! But it sounded cool, and I didn't have time to attend the 8 pm performance because of homework and taiko (and also performances cost money).
The workshop was excellent. The performers were a folk singer from the Indian state of Uttarakhand called Pritam Bhartwan, and Stefan Fiol, an ethnomusicologist from the Cincinnati Conservatory who's been working in the region so long, his midwest accent has picked up Hindi consonants. They played us a jagar - a song for a possession ritual, to call a single god down to earth to dance in the body of a human medium. In this case the god was Goril, a local deity called upon to intervene on behalf of people who had suffered injustice. Jagar can go eight or nine hours, the folk singer explained in translation - he was just showing us a small part. He sang us an epic ballad, and then a festival song, for which we all learned a sung response and a happy, shifting, stomping folk dance. He spun around our awkwardly shuffling crowd with his dhol drum flying, and his colleague chiming in at the ends of verses in a harmony that only kind of ever resolved itself, that woke up the blood.
Then, at the very end, as we were gathering up our notebooks and slipping back into our shoes, the ethnomusicologist stood up and asked for volunteers to dance onstage at the 8 pm performance. "We'll have traditional costumes for you," he said, "and we'll teach you the dances beforehand!"
That was the first time that evening I thought, This will never happen to me again. Taiko and German essay be damned. I was the first one standing awkwardly beside the stage, kind of wondering if he'd been serious.
He had. At 7 pm I stood in the green room behind Sharp Hall, with a pile of riotously-colored cloth in my arms and a Hindi folk singer and a college professor having a heated discussion behind me over how the hell one tied on a headscarf. I had to roll up a foot of heavy, pleated skirt to avoid tripping and killing myself, which is why in the picture I appear to have actual shape to my hips. At one point I turned around and ran right into a bindi, which someone had apparently been holding poised on the off-chance my forehead should end up in their field of aim.
This was the first time that evening I thought, Holy shit, this is actually happening in my life RIGHT NOW.
Then came the nose rings.
AND OH WHAT NOSE RINGS THEY WERE.
I did not have sufficient hair to pin the chain in place, so it is pinned to the side of my headscarf, because otherwise all the weight of the ring is in the fake clip-on nose ring applied to my nostril, which hurts like a bitch. I swear I am going to make good on my secret longing to get a nose piercing after this, if only so should I ever again find myself being asked by a Hindi folk singer to wear a Himalayan bridal ring in my nose, I can proudly wear it in its intended form!
...This is never going to happen again. But I still kind of want a nose piercing.
ANYWAY.
There were seven of us - three identically-dressed ladies, three identically-dressed gents, and a German teacher who'd been conscripted to play two large, intimidating trumpets in the last number (all audience volunteers). In the ten minutes before the performance started, we were hastily given all our cues. Verbally. "Please listen," Pritam-ji said in the hall, while Dr. Fiol traced short lines of red on the men's foreheads and I tried unsuccessfully to adjust my nose ring without shoving my finger too conspicuously up my left nostril. "When I sing--" and here he let loose with a string of beautifully-sung Hindi which sounded to my untrained ears a hell of a like like all the other beautifully-sung Hindi I'd heard that day-- "You will do so--" and he demonstrated a twirling step which we all promptly half-killed ourselves attempting to imitate.
The conclusion was: "We'll cue you! You'll get it onstage. Just have fun!" and then we were in the theater, and this was about when I got nervous.
Then Pritam Bhartwan started performing, and I ceased to give a fuck.
Folk singers, he'd explained to us in the workshop, occupy a special place in North Indian culture. He was fairly low caste, as the musical profession tends to be - drummers must work with dead animal skins to practice their art, and are polluted by this. But they are necessary to fulfill a vital part in society. Pritam-ji is a musician, and his father is a musician, and his father's brothers are musicians, and their father was a musician, and his sons will musicians, and they have always been musicians. There is nothing else they can be. Music, Dr. Fiol translated for us, is as much something innate to his very being as something he does. It is in his blood. He is specially equipped to perform what he does.
And the thing is, it's not simply performance. Asked the origin of the music he played, Pritam-ji gave us a brief history lesson on how the rituals had come to them in the years that India was converted back to Hinduism from Buddhism; but that the drums had been created by Shiva, and given to the musicians to speak to the gods.
And then he picked up the drum and proceeded to speak to the gods.
It wasn't a one-way prayer, is the thing. I mean, it was while we watched it, but normally rituals like jagar are done with the express intent of calling a single god to earth through a human medium. There is a jagar for every god, and Pritam-ji has hundreds in his head. When jagar calls a god down, he explained, the song must then change to find out what the god wants of them. The rhythm changes, the beat shifts, and how the god responds is an answer to a question asked by the musician. It is question-and-answer, call-and-response, and how can anyone not be impressed by a man who tells them matter-of-factly that his calling in this life is to wake up the gods?
Every morning and evening, the village musicians in a community gather outside the temple and play nine rhythms, with which they bring the gods down to earth to dance. There is a different beat for each of the nine steps. The first is played alone on the dhol, and in the second they add the diggi - because, we were told, Shiva created all the drums, and the dhol must first call the diggi into existence from nothing.
Fuck. I'm not explaining this well. This. Just. I watched a man talk to the gods yesterday. I danced on a stage with a man whose entire body was a prayer. I got to participate in this thing that has nothing to do with me, this centuries-old thing that is everything to a group of people I will probably never have any exposure to again. I was given the deep and humbling honor of seeing this ritual, of experiencing this music - music that's just heart-stopping when you realize what it means and what it is intended to do, how damn deep it goes, how much bigger it is than any of the people playing it or listening to it. I got to see that. In fucking Oklahoma.
As we stumbled confusedly around the stage I kept thinking-- okay well I kept thinking oh god am I spinning the right direction, which foot are we on, why did I not roll up this skirt more oh christ my nose ring, I look like I'm hula dancing what is even wrong with me, but under that I was aware, in a thrilling way, how impossible it was that I was there. How fortunate I was. How beautiful this was, how precious and rare. And at the end Pritam-ji gathered us all around him and took enough photos to fill up his camera card, and shook all our hands a thousand times, and we got back to the dressing room and for ten minutes all we could say was "Wow."
I took my bindi home and put it in the book of memories I keep. And we all absconded with our tiny pretend nose rings ("They've been up your noses," one of our dressing assistants said. "Take them as a favor to whoever's cleaning up"). ...And I still kind of want my nose pierced.
I tried to explain this to my mom when I called today. She laughed at me. "Who does that?" she said. "It's so like you. God, you're weird."
idk, man. If dancing with the gods is weird, I don't want to be normal.
I have thrown these pictures up on every corner of the Internet I hang out on, but I haven't yet really explained what happened, except in a "LOOK AT THIS WILD AND CRAZY THING THAT WENT ON IN MY ACTUAL LIFE" kind of way. Considering that this was one of the more beautiful and powerful things that's ever happened to me, I feel like it might be good to do that now.
So yesterday, after world politics and economics and choir, I hung out in Catlett with the intention of attending a free workshop on Himalayan sacred folk music. I had no idea what this entailed! I know nothing about Himalayan folk music! But it sounded cool, and I didn't have time to attend the 8 pm performance because of homework and taiko (and also performances cost money).
The workshop was excellent. The performers were a folk singer from the Indian state of Uttarakhand called Pritam Bhartwan, and Stefan Fiol, an ethnomusicologist from the Cincinnati Conservatory who's been working in the region so long, his midwest accent has picked up Hindi consonants. They played us a jagar - a song for a possession ritual, to call a single god down to earth to dance in the body of a human medium. In this case the god was Goril, a local deity called upon to intervene on behalf of people who had suffered injustice. Jagar can go eight or nine hours, the folk singer explained in translation - he was just showing us a small part. He sang us an epic ballad, and then a festival song, for which we all learned a sung response and a happy, shifting, stomping folk dance. He spun around our awkwardly shuffling crowd with his dhol drum flying, and his colleague chiming in at the ends of verses in a harmony that only kind of ever resolved itself, that woke up the blood.
Then, at the very end, as we were gathering up our notebooks and slipping back into our shoes, the ethnomusicologist stood up and asked for volunteers to dance onstage at the 8 pm performance. "We'll have traditional costumes for you," he said, "and we'll teach you the dances beforehand!"
That was the first time that evening I thought, This will never happen to me again. Taiko and German essay be damned. I was the first one standing awkwardly beside the stage, kind of wondering if he'd been serious.
He had. At 7 pm I stood in the green room behind Sharp Hall, with a pile of riotously-colored cloth in my arms and a Hindi folk singer and a college professor having a heated discussion behind me over how the hell one tied on a headscarf. I had to roll up a foot of heavy, pleated skirt to avoid tripping and killing myself, which is why in the picture I appear to have actual shape to my hips. At one point I turned around and ran right into a bindi, which someone had apparently been holding poised on the off-chance my forehead should end up in their field of aim.
This was the first time that evening I thought, Holy shit, this is actually happening in my life RIGHT NOW.
Then came the nose rings.
AND OH WHAT NOSE RINGS THEY WERE.
I did not have sufficient hair to pin the chain in place, so it is pinned to the side of my headscarf, because otherwise all the weight of the ring is in the fake clip-on nose ring applied to my nostril, which hurts like a bitch. I swear I am going to make good on my secret longing to get a nose piercing after this, if only so should I ever again find myself being asked by a Hindi folk singer to wear a Himalayan bridal ring in my nose, I can proudly wear it in its intended form!
...This is never going to happen again. But I still kind of want a nose piercing.
ANYWAY.
There were seven of us - three identically-dressed ladies, three identically-dressed gents, and a German teacher who'd been conscripted to play two large, intimidating trumpets in the last number (all audience volunteers). In the ten minutes before the performance started, we were hastily given all our cues. Verbally. "Please listen," Pritam-ji said in the hall, while Dr. Fiol traced short lines of red on the men's foreheads and I tried unsuccessfully to adjust my nose ring without shoving my finger too conspicuously up my left nostril. "When I sing--" and here he let loose with a string of beautifully-sung Hindi which sounded to my untrained ears a hell of a like like all the other beautifully-sung Hindi I'd heard that day-- "You will do so--" and he demonstrated a twirling step which we all promptly half-killed ourselves attempting to imitate.
The conclusion was: "We'll cue you! You'll get it onstage. Just have fun!" and then we were in the theater, and this was about when I got nervous.
Then Pritam Bhartwan started performing, and I ceased to give a fuck.
Folk singers, he'd explained to us in the workshop, occupy a special place in North Indian culture. He was fairly low caste, as the musical profession tends to be - drummers must work with dead animal skins to practice their art, and are polluted by this. But they are necessary to fulfill a vital part in society. Pritam-ji is a musician, and his father is a musician, and his father's brothers are musicians, and their father was a musician, and his sons will musicians, and they have always been musicians. There is nothing else they can be. Music, Dr. Fiol translated for us, is as much something innate to his very being as something he does. It is in his blood. He is specially equipped to perform what he does.
And the thing is, it's not simply performance. Asked the origin of the music he played, Pritam-ji gave us a brief history lesson on how the rituals had come to them in the years that India was converted back to Hinduism from Buddhism; but that the drums had been created by Shiva, and given to the musicians to speak to the gods.
And then he picked up the drum and proceeded to speak to the gods.
It wasn't a one-way prayer, is the thing. I mean, it was while we watched it, but normally rituals like jagar are done with the express intent of calling a single god to earth through a human medium. There is a jagar for every god, and Pritam-ji has hundreds in his head. When jagar calls a god down, he explained, the song must then change to find out what the god wants of them. The rhythm changes, the beat shifts, and how the god responds is an answer to a question asked by the musician. It is question-and-answer, call-and-response, and how can anyone not be impressed by a man who tells them matter-of-factly that his calling in this life is to wake up the gods?
Every morning and evening, the village musicians in a community gather outside the temple and play nine rhythms, with which they bring the gods down to earth to dance. There is a different beat for each of the nine steps. The first is played alone on the dhol, and in the second they add the diggi - because, we were told, Shiva created all the drums, and the dhol must first call the diggi into existence from nothing.
Fuck. I'm not explaining this well. This. Just. I watched a man talk to the gods yesterday. I danced on a stage with a man whose entire body was a prayer. I got to participate in this thing that has nothing to do with me, this centuries-old thing that is everything to a group of people I will probably never have any exposure to again. I was given the deep and humbling honor of seeing this ritual, of experiencing this music - music that's just heart-stopping when you realize what it means and what it is intended to do, how damn deep it goes, how much bigger it is than any of the people playing it or listening to it. I got to see that. In fucking Oklahoma.
As we stumbled confusedly around the stage I kept thinking-- okay well I kept thinking oh god am I spinning the right direction, which foot are we on, why did I not roll up this skirt more oh christ my nose ring, I look like I'm hula dancing what is even wrong with me, but under that I was aware, in a thrilling way, how impossible it was that I was there. How fortunate I was. How beautiful this was, how precious and rare. And at the end Pritam-ji gathered us all around him and took enough photos to fill up his camera card, and shook all our hands a thousand times, and we got back to the dressing room and for ten minutes all we could say was "Wow."
I took my bindi home and put it in the book of memories I keep. And we all absconded with our tiny pretend nose rings ("They've been up your noses," one of our dressing assistants said. "Take them as a favor to whoever's cleaning up"). ...And I still kind of want my nose pierced.
I tried to explain this to my mom when I called today. She laughed at me. "Who does that?" she said. "It's so like you. God, you're weird."
idk, man. If dancing with the gods is weird, I don't want to be normal.