The Christmas Twins

The dancing crocheted garments of the Christmas twins.

The twin brothers Greg and Gary Christmas were born in Boston in 1931/2 (two seconds before and after New Year's Eve), a striking mixture of Afro and Native American origins. They toured the world in show business, dancing with The Supremes, Tina Turner, Diana Ross and much more, then finally settled in Amsterdam, where they served coffee and snacks in their highly colourful Backstage Boutique, dishing out bawdy humor, gems of personal wisdom, uncanny spiritual insights or surprising kindness to all comers. "Yeah, yeah, our mother's name was Mary Christmas". "You want my coffee or my body?"  For a while, my studio was situated near their café, so we became good friends. Inevitably, I dashed off a watercolour, as they gazed out of the window, commenting on the passers-by. "Oh, not her again! Hey, he's hot!" They liked my painting. "Not bad for a white man!"

Gary (left) only had three and a half fingers on the hand that crocheted the most snazzy dresses, skirts, tops, hats, even flowers. "It's show-time, honey - what's your sign?  Okay try this one on!" Greg (photo below) would supervise critically.

Their garments looked great on skins of all colour and one of their black friends modelled these fanciful creations as she danced for me at the studio. I used watercolour and oil crayons to make the garments unravel, jive or move across the page to various jazz classics, taking lots of liberties with the lyrics as they became more or less integrated into the picture.

Sophisticated Lady. And "You can have what you want if you handle what you got". 

"Ain't got no rest in ma slumbers, ain't got no feelings to bruise; ain't got no telephone numbers, ain't got nothing but the blues. Ain't got no coffee that's perkin', ain't got no winnings to lose, ain't got a dream that is workin', ain't got nothin' but the blues". As she stares hopelessly out of the window, I've turned her "dress" into a veil of sorrows. A real blues painting.

"Gimme a rhythm, gimme a beat, Gimme a rhythm, turn on the heat. I wanna be hot, I wanna be bad, I wanna be someone you wish you had". She's "wearing" a crocheted skirt that has got carried away with the jumping, barely legible lyrics. My oil crayons were really hoppin' with that rhythm.

I thoroughly enjoyed pushing my limits with this series - very saucy indeed for a shy English country boy whose headiest youthful experience was Worcestershire Sauce. Here's the link to those early days. This work might seem a far cry from the ethereal emotions of Kylián's modern dance with classical and contemporary music. But I'm having fun with lines and marks, tapping a different gut-level rhythmic energy, possibly long-hidden, laced with humorous mischief.

There were more paintings in this 1989 series, but in those days I was also hopping between Amsterdam and The Hague for other creative work with the Netherlands Dance Theater, to Birmingham for the first discussions with Simon Rattle for a performance and with the BBC for the television documentary about my life with music: Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra (1993). 

Gary and Greg are now undoubtedly in major show business on other planets, but they became a legend in Amsterdam's multi-cultural society and for tourists looking for quirky entertainment or spirituality, between the seventies and 2009. They left an indelible impression on this artist too. I miss them.

Five paintings of Kylian's Kaguyahime

My five paintings of Kylián's Kaguya-hime

The ancient Japanese legend of the ravishingly beautiful Moon Princess - Kaguya-hime (also known as the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), set to music by Maki Ishii, was made into a modern ballet in 1988 by choreographer Jirí Kylián. Here's a link to the story (too long to be told here) and the link to the complete eighty-minute ballet (a must-watch).

Kodo drummers and Circle Percussion combined forces with Gagaku wind players and dancers of the Netherlands Dance Theater in a rhythmic and mysterious performance of dance and light. This was perhaps Jirí's ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, later performed in Montreal and (twice) in Paris, conducted by Michael de Roo, the percussionist who played a leading role in the original production. 

Completely entranced, I sat in at rehearsals and performances (at times even standing in the pit surrounded by the drummers!) to create five paintings from this theatrical modern ballet. I used watercolour and oil pastels, and sometimes a spoon to scrape out lines in the wet paint. As you watch the ballet, you will recognize each of my paintings. Yet they are not mere snap-shots - I have transformed Michael Simon's stage and lighting design and Jirí's choreography into my own.

Like Jiri, for many years I have been attracted to and influenced by Asian aesthetics and philosophy. It has affected my choice of brushes, brush technique and pictorial design (Here's a link to my blog The Asian Connection). The origins, the music, choreography and design of this piece made it quite natural for me to use my brushes in a way that you might call calligraphic, where the gestures and marks of the brush follow a spontaneous inner choreography, an urge to arrange marks on the space of the white paper in a way that reflects the characteristics of the subject, yet becomes a design in itself.  

At the bottom of the paintings, you might notice some of the rhythms my brushes have followed, especially the village dances or percussive battle sounds coming from the pit, where you see the conductor at work, or ethereal fragmented scratchings. Also identifiable are the dancers and the drummers, the massive draped and knotted black cloth, the arrangements of the little black make-up boxes, the giant Odaiko drum that doubles as the moon.

Above, white-clad villagers fight with the emperor's soldiers in black to "possess" Kaguyahime, accompanied by macho percussionists who leap up onto the stage to compete with crescendi against each other.

The Emperor arrives,  enshrouded in a mass of shimmering golden parachute-silk, into which the Princess becomes temporarily entwined. But inevitably and sadly, she must return to her natural habitat, the moon, as we are dazzled by a wall of mirrored (moon) light. What an overwhelming experience!

Commemorating tragedy through dance

Commemorating tragedy through dance

As the world commemorates 1914 and the first World War, I think back to Jirí Kylián's modern ballet Soldiers' Mass (Field Mass), created in 1980 for the Netherlands Dance Theater and still painfully relevant. Described by a critic as "a poignant commentary on the devastation, absurdity and futility of war", it was in fact a deeply-felt protest. 

The music was composed in 1939 by Jirí's compatriot Bohuslav Martinu, to a text by Jirí Mucha, after Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia and World War ll was escalating rapidly. It was written in memory of a battalion of young Czechoslovak soldiers who were all killed the day after they went into battle in France in World War I. What makes this work even more personal is that in 1968 Jirí was exiled from his homeland Czechoslovakia, due to the communist invasion. 

As I made sketches during the creation of this beautiful tragic work, it made a terribly deep impression on me, as a pacifist. Twelve beautiful young men on stage were "standing in" for their fellow men from any country you care to mention, who were drafted or volunteered to unite in fear, senseless obedience and death, acting out what we call the "theatre of war".  A baritone and chorus sing the Mass and at a certain moment the dancers join in, singing a Mass for their own death. Crying out against the inhumanity of man. One long sinister dull red stripe on the horizon repeatedly emerges and disappears in the deep blue night. Click here for a montage from the ballet then press Play.

Gerald Tibbs, Leigh Matthews, Glen Eddy. Photography: Jorge Fatauros

(acknowledgement to Jirí Kylián and the Netherlands Dance Theater).

Soldiers' Mass l (Kylián/Martinu) watercolour and oil pastel, 50 x 70cm.

To occasionally give harsh accents (tracer bullets?), to this watercolour, I use oil pastels here and there. They resist or cut through the subtle effects of the watercolour. This device for intense colour provided a lot of expressive potential in most of my dance works in the nineteen-eighties. There are more to come.

Soldiers' Mass ll (Kylián/Martinu)

Dances with Jirí Kylián

Dances with Jiří Kylián

This year I'm taking time for more retrospection on periods of enormous creativity, for example in the nineteen-eighties, when I was not only painting landscapes in Burgundy near Chablis, but portraits, musical subjects and more than anything else, dance. 

I had discovered Jiří Kylián, the amazing choreographer from Prague who would redefine modern ballet for me and perhaps for the world. In the late 1970's he began to create one masterpiece after another for the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague, works that were soon touring internationally.  I became a regular presence in their dance studios, sketching like a man possessed, as I witnessed his choreographies taking shape. I wonder whether Jirí will ever know what an influence he had on my work in that period and how much I loved watching him and his dancers. His musicality and the imaginative ways with which he could give profound personal expression to dance (often reflecting his cultural roots) remain a great inspiration - to this day.           

Photoshoot with Jirí after the hanging of my mural for the Nederlands Dance Theater (1987)

Jiri's Overgrown Path to the solo piano music of Janáček, expressing both agonizing loss and fond memories (those of Janaček and Jirí, I believe), inspired a series of watercolours. As the haunting tones of the piano float in space, dancers meet, embrace, take their leave and part for ever.

Overgrown Path I (Kylián/Janaček), watercolour 70 x 50cm, 1980

Overgrown Path ll, (Kylián/Janaček), watercolour, 1985/7.

Jirí's Sinfonietta (1978) was perhaps the masterpiece that took the world by storm. Janáček's exuberant fanfare - a celebration of Czechoslovakia - was danced with astonishing brilliance by the Netherlands Dance Theater, as they leaped across that eighteen-metre stage (to get that thrill, watch the video here). The leaps, the gestures to the skies, are there in my watercolour, but instead of the decor of subtle greens and greys, my exhilaration at the sounds of those wind instruments compelled me to choose the warm colours you see below.

Sinfonietta (Kylián/Janáček), watercolour and oil pastel, 1986/87.

Actually, many of my finished watercolours were developed sometime after the rough sketches I made in the theatre. I needed time to "choreograph" my gestures in the empty space of my paper, as explained in my blog The beauty of space and silence. I was gradually worked towards two separate one-man shows in The Hague in 1987 and 1989. I look back with fond nostalgia to that era with Jirí and his dancers, when every day I left their studios walking on air, a would-be dancer whose technique happened to be painting. Perhaps the highlight was a modern ballet Invention for NDT in 1989 (co-created with Philip Taylor), when my kinetic painting flooded the dancers with colours as they danced across my huge white decors. But that's another story, that I posted here.