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| Thursday, December 20, 2007 01:31 PM |
| The Most Boring Experience of My Life |
 by Fëanor |
The most boring experience of my life happened last weekend when poppy and I went to see the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The first part of the show was actually really neat. It was a southern poet reading English translations of the poetry of Rumi to musical accompaniment, provided by a drummer and a cellist. He was a very good reader, the musicians were very good at backing him up, and the poetry was quite lovely. It made me realize how much I miss reading poetry and hearing it spoken.
Then there was a short intermission, and the actual Whirling Dervishes part of the show began. Well, sort of. In fact, a man in a white robe came out on the stage, asked us to please hold our applause until the end, and then performed the traditional Muslim call to prayer, at a very high volume. (Someone behind us complained, "I wish there were subtitles." All I could think was, are you seriously that ignorant that you don't even know the gist of what he's saying right now?) Next a bunch of musicians slowly filed out onto the stage and took their places. Then they began to play, and to sing. And neither very well. Or at least, it didn't sound like it to our Western ears. It was very repetitive, pretty slow, and actually kind of annoying (which, we discovered later, is actually on purpose, to put the dancers in a particular state of discomfort). They played and played. It seemed to go on and on. I nearly fell asleep multiple times. But where were the dervishes? Where was the whirling? Poppy whispered to me at one point, "I think they're invisible."
But finally, finally an older, august gentleman paced slowly on stage, followed close behind by a group of younger men. (At this point, somebody behind me - I'm pretty sure it was the same genius as before - said excitedly, "Look honey! Those are the dervishes!" And then actually repeated this, as if it were not already abundantly clear to anyone not blind or suffering from serious brain damage that these guys had to be the dervishes.) They moved across the stage in a slow, formal way, bowed, and then knelt down. And sat there for a while. Then there was more slow, ritual pacing and bowing. Then finally, some whirling. Slow, boring whirling.
Poppy and I had both assumed that the whirling dervishes, who supposedly are able to turn and turn and turn without falling over because they are in a religious ecstasy, would be spinning very quickly, to fast-paced music, and that it would be physically impressive and visually stunning. Instead, it was slow, repetitive, and dull. They turned in a circle for a while, stood, paced back, bowed, turned for a while, over and over again. And it just went on and on. People started to leave, and poppy and I certainly would have been among them were it not for the fact that our seats were in pretty much the dead center of the row. When it finally did end, we booked out of there as quickly as we could.
Part of what made the performance uncomfortable was the fact that, as we realized rather early on, it wasn't really a performance so much as a religious ceremony taking place on stage in front of us. It seemed very odd to be just staring at somebody else solemnly enacting their religion. Do you clap? When do you clap? The guy had asked us not to applaud until the end, but the end of what? After the musicians stopped playing at one point, the crowd decided to put in a good round of applause, but even as I was clapping along I felt unsure whether I really should have been doing so. And then when the whole thing was obviously done, and everyone was leaving the stage, no one clapped, because there was still this slow procession involving lots of bowing going on, and it seemed wrong to applaud. It wasn't until everyone left the stage and the curtain started to go down that we felt okay to let out another round of applause - right before dashing for the exits.
Definitely a strange experience. If we'd known better what we were getting into, we probably would not have attended. We came out of the building thinking all kinds of really uncharitable things about Islam and Turkey, so if the intent was to foster better relations between our cultures, well, it didn't work out so well.
Still, it wasn't a completely terrible night - anyway, it all added up to a fascinating experience. Plus, now we know never to go near whirling dervishes ever again. |
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| Tagged (?): Dance (Not), Poetry (Not) | |
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