I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [185]
Despite being in his late eighties, George Kennan made the trip from his home in Princeton to Brooklyn for our premiere. After the show, Kennan sat on a fire escape backstage, talking and laughing, smothered in Russian children.
For one Event, A Day in the Life of Coney Island, thanks to a conversation at a party, Jim Wolfensohn agreed to underwrite the cost of bringing close to twenty lifeguards from Bondi Beach, Australia, to spend several weeks in New York, to dance and star with over a thousand children. The youngest Aussie was a seventeen-year-old knee-dissolving nymph; the oldest, a leathery, muscled forty-year-old man. They were all triathletes and beautiful. When they’d walk in their surf club uniforms to our rehearsal hall, pedestrians gawked and cars stopped. The cast on our theatrical beach included Penelope Hope, a four-year-old Shirley Temple type from East Hampton, Long Island, and a whole community of senior citizens from Chinatown, led by a ninety-year-old Chinese tai chi master. My sister, Ninette, joined them in their dance. Jim Wolfensohn became a dear friend and has supported NDI ever since. In an Event in 1989, Jim’s daughter, Sarah, a superb pianist, played the harpsichord in a scene from the French court where Cardinal Richelieu presided, a hundred secret agents (children dressed as rats) as his spies. The court jester? Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias, head of Bell Labs, whose discoveries were such as to seriously support the theory of the big bang. As in all our shows, there were dancers—so-called challenged—who performed alongside all the other stars. Dancers in wheelchairs and children with hearing and visual challenges have always graced our stage.
And then there was our India Event. Ted Tannen, from the Indo-U.S. Subcommission, and Richard Lanier, from the Asian Cultural Council, said to me, “Don’t you want to do something with India? We may be able to find some funds to help.” Over the next two years, Carrie and I traveled to several places in India, mostly southern. We arranged for our New York teachers to tour, as well, and brought Indian artists over to work with our children. It all came together in a mystical performance at the Majestic Theater, performed over two weeks. Red Grooms designed an extraordinary set, and, with Tom Burkhardt and Andy Yoder (his assistants) using electric knives, turkey slicers, carved out of foam a moveable Indian temple, then painted the entire temple in garish colors. Bob Mitchell, one of theater’s great scenic artists, designed and had built a golden staircase, rising up to a chakra of the sun. Great artists from India came over to perform with us, headed by Mallika Sarabhai. Michael Moschen, who had just won a MacArthur “genius award,” mesmerized cast and audience as Hanuman, the Monkey King. There were beautiful children from the Dhananjayan Academy of Dance in Madras. The music was a mixture of Western and Indian, under the baton of David Amram.
By far, Rosebud’s Song was the most complex production ever attempted by NDI. Named for Rosebud Yellow Robe, the great-great-grandniece of Sitting Bull, Rosebud’s Song theatricalized humanity’s relationship with nature and the environment on a global scale. Two thousand New York City children represented sunlight and water, as well as varied life forms from land, sea, and air. I needed representatives to portray every human culture on earth. How to do it?
I solved it by seeking children from cultures that live in earth’s most extreme conditions—highest, lowest, coldest, hottest, driest, and wettest—and thereby encompass the globe. Carrie packed her camera. She had been the photo chronicler of NDI from its first days, and there is nobody who is a better traveling companion. She traveled with bags of films, lenses, cameras, a case of bottled water, her suitcase, which encloses, among necessities: travel books,