Saving Life

I went to a powerful work of art: Noche Flamenca, starring Soledad Barrio.

Flamenco. The shepherds come down out of the Andalusian hills and walk onto a stage in New York. They begin with a prayerful kind of clapping, rubbing hands together and pointing them at the dancers’ feet. The singing is like an exhalation of breath that was inhaled a century ago. The language of these songs isn’t spoken anymore, but the message couldn’t be clearer.

The dancers arch their backs and lift their arms above their drumming heels. Is the audience seeing what I’m seeing? I have this painful hologram before me, hovering in the theater air -- my old friend is dying. These artists with the yelps and claps and stomps and cascades of guitar notes are rising in the air above the cliff’s edge of death. It’s a conjuring up, a home-made resurrection.

Oh, the promise that Flamenco makes! How does this resurrection work? Do I look directly into the eyes of the person in my life who enjoyed living the most? Because that’s what I’m doing. I look around me, at my fellow audience members. Have each of us experienced that same excruciating loss of that particular loved one? -- the one that made us admit once and for all that life is completely unfair? Is everyone in the audience sitting in the Andalusian hills with the body of that special person who had that fire of life?

The Spanish Civil War is tonight’s theme, and suddenly Soledad Barrio is whirling across the stage toward us. This performance honors the volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Americans in the late 30’s who joined the freedom fighters in Spain, as fascism became more deadly. Soledad is a resurrected Mother Courage. She rushes around the stage in the tumult of battle, holding the hands of the heroes on the field in their last moments. They look up into her eyes with the light of a good life and then she rises and dances above us. She slowly begins a series of circlings, tighter and tighter with her fierce anguish. What is she doing? She’s a savior. She’s saving life.

The magical adjustment of Noche Flamenca is complete. We have forgotten about our $45 seats, the Playbills and our winter coats. Then the battle evolves into a standing ovation. Oh! I remember now - this is Art, and these are renowned artists who will now go to their dressing rooms with our flowers. We gather our coats and look for a scarf under the seat, and then turn and - in that instant we are hit with what awaits us beyond the Exit door. New York City and the United States. The wholesale theft of public life. The sentimentalizing of war. A climate changing to drown our children. We sure do need some conjuring of new life, some whirling back at advancing death…

We want to keep dancing as we walk home. We manage a kind of comic matador and laugh. But then the resurrected memory of our dear friend, the one who gave so much life - waits for us, waits every day, moving the edge of death under our dancing feet. It is how we get in shape to change the act of living. Our loved one whispers to us that the unfairness of life is crucial to saving life.