Calypso´s World Travels!

Welcome to My Blog

2010-09-19T22:26:00.001-07:00

Hi there!!! You have successfully reached my blog about traveling in South America with The Dreamtime Circus in the Spring of 2010.
The stories tell about our tour teaching outreach circus workshops to children and performing free circus and fire shows for communities throughout Peru.
The chronology of the blog from here goes backwards, with the stories about the end of the tour first. Start at the beginning and read all the way through, or browse as you will through the tales of our times. Contact me if you have further questions at ContactCalypso@gmail.com. Thanks for coming and enjoy your read!

Dreamtime Circus Tour Itinerary

2010-08-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

This is the basic schedule of our tour. Some specific names of schools and organizations are missing, but this gives a basic outline of how we spent our three month tour doing outreach circus shows and workshops for children and communities of Peru.....

Whenever "Workshops" is listed, that means we organized and led Circus Workshops for groups of children, teaching skills such as acrobatics, juggling, hula hooping, clowning, face painting, music, contact juggling, etc.

Wherever it says "Bus" or "Fire Show," this means we performed Our Theatrical Circus Show (Bus) or Fire Show for an audience of children and communities.

DREAMTIME CIRCUS TOUR ITINERARY SPRING PERU 2010

March
2- Arrive in Lima, Peru!
3- Arrive in Chincha, a coastal town
4-15 Create and rehearse "The Bus Show"- a theatrical circus performance
16- Lead circus Skillshare at a shelter for female survivors of sexual assault and their children
18- Perform The Bus Show for the first time at the Mina de Oro neighborhood soccer stadium
20- Perform Bus and fire shows at another shelter for female survivors of sexual assault
22- Perfomr Bus and fire shows for the shelter with woman and children
25- Travel to Cusco
27-31 Fire and circus rehearsals, find housing in Cusco, curriculum building

April
1- Lead Circus Workshops in Huacarpay
2-Lead Circus Workshops in Huacarpay
4- Perform a Show in Huacarpay
6- Workshops, Bus and Fire Show in CaiCai
7- Workshops in Pisac at elementary school
8- Workshops and show in Cusco at elementary school in our neighborhood
9- Workshops, Variety and Fire Show at Amas (Cusco)
14- Workshops, Variety and Fire Show in Pisac
15- Workshops at Boys Orphanage in Cusco
16- Workshops, Bus and Fire show at Boys Orphanage in Cusco
17- Workshops and Bus Show at Orphanage with Little Babies in Cusco
18- Travel to Sacred Valley
19- Workshops, Bus and Fire show at Taray´s community center in Coya
20- Workshops, Bus and Fire show at Casa de Milagros Orphanage
21- Hike up a giant mountain
22- Workshops, Bus and Fire show in Harin at community center
23- Workshops, Bus and Fire show at Arco Iris in Urubamba
24- Week Off- Tour Break-

May
1- Second half of tour begins in Lima with new members joining from San Francisco
2- Fiteca Festival begins
3-6- Workshops for kids and Rehearsing show with new members
5- Parade with other festival performers through the town
7- Workshops, Bus and Fire show at Fiteca Festival
9-10- Workshops at Boys Orphanage in Lima, Rehearsals
11- Variety and Fire show for Orphanage kids in Lima
14- Travel to Cajamarca
18- Workshops, Parade, Bus and Fire Show in Cajamarca at Municipal Stadium
19- Bus Show (morn), Bus and Fire show (afteroon) at Municipal Stadium
20- Bus and Fire Show at a street festival in Cajamarca neighborhood
21- Bus and Fire Show at a school in Otuzco
23- Travel by bus back to Lima
24- Fly to Pucallpa
25- Arrive at Refuge of Hope- school for kids with special needs
26- Workshops, Workshops
27- Workshops, Workshops
28- Workshops, Bus and Fire show at Refuge of Hope
30- Bus and Fire show in pueblo San Francisco, indigenous jungle community
31- Travel to Pucallpa

June...
1- Workshops at a giant elementary school
2- Bus and Fire show at The University of Pucallpa
6-7- Rehearse Variety Acts
8- Workshops, Variety and Fire Show in village of Paris
9- Workshops, Variety and Fire Show in the village of Santa Lucia
10- Workshops at elementary schl and community plaza in San Francisco village
11- Workshops at elementary schl in San Francisco, Variety and Fire Show in Nuevo Luz
12- Tour Wrap up! Gift circus gear to local kids. Closing circle. Goodbyes.

Pueblo San Francisco and Jungle Tour

2010-08-12T11:59:00.001-07:00

We left the city of Pucallpa in two boats, heading down Lake Yarinacocha for over an hour to the pueblo of San Francisco. We had originally come to this village two weeks ago, scouting to see if it would be a good spot to do a show. On this scouting day, our 18-person crew arrived to shores of playful children and intrigued adults. We booked a show on the spot for the next week. When we came back a week later, we performed the bus show in a big grassy community space in the center of the village, where the artisan women sell their hand-embroidered tapestries and beaded necklaces during the day. Our dressing room was a large building adjacent to the grassy center, empty save the church-like pews. We sat on the long benches and transformed into our circus-persona selves. Oh, but we were not alone. Oh, no. The transformation process had attracted the spellbound children who hung from the wood slats that defined the glass-less rectangular openings in the walls. To keep the show G-Rated, we shuffled under sarongs to put on our costumes.
We performed for the delighted village, young and old alike. Most had never seen a circus show before, let alone fire dancing....

So when we arrived back in pueblo San Francisco after the university show and city workshops (see Pucallpa city blog post), the village knew us well. For the next two weeks we used this town as our home base and launching pad. Day in and day out, I could not walk down the street without an excited little voice yelling, "PAYASO!!!" (clown) from a porch stoop. We did workshops with these kids at the elementary school, and in the park. Rolling and tumbling, painting faces and juggling...

For the last two weeks, we were down six people who had to leave tour early, so we put together a variety show in place of the Bus Show. We traveled by boat to three other river villages to do shows and workshops. We created a surprising amount of new material as a group, considering the short time frame, including a partner acrobatic act by Angelina and I that was super fun.
We also made an all'women dance-battle act that only made it to the stage once, and then was cut from the show for critiques by some of our members that we may be influencing the children towards competition rather than collaboration... Rich and Vivian put together a clown-skit with incredible expressions of the body and face, dynamic and beautiful and funny to boot. We had some new fire acts come together. Angelina and I did the partner acro on fire. We integrated Enrique into the magic light toss act with Chris and I. Savannah tried out a solo disco poi spinning act. I busted out some magic tricks. Chris juggled knives. The Elements from the show did a giant flag spinning act, and more!!!
We rode in two little motor boats to visit each of the villages of Paris, Santa Lucia, and Nueva Luz. Paris was the first. Our workshops were a bit slapped together, the presence of some of the people who left early was notably missed, not only in performance and workshop material, but also in organizational flow of our group. But we pulled it off, and the cultural exchange of showing up to these remote jungle villages where they see very few white people, let alone circuses, has made an impact on me that will last forever. Paris was the village of mosquitoes. Just about dusk, which landed right in the middle of the fire show, the hordes of little biting pests swarmed in and took no mercy on neither us or the dancing and slapping audience. As soon as we took our last bow, we packed our stuff in an exquisite battle of blood, us against the fragile-bodied vampires. Twisting and turning, rubbing and itching, running! Our hands quickly darted between the exposed flesh of our costumed bodies and the props and materials we threw into bags. We jumped on the boat, and once we started cruising along the dark river, we had a moment to put on more clothing and let the breeze keep some of the pests always from our virgin city skins.
Santa Lucia was basically a banana patch. I learned later that this village used to actually have quite a community, and a hospital to boot, but it was all washed away in a flood.
The village that did remain was quite friendly and mystified by us. We showed up and crouched in the shade of the one simple building in site; they gathered around and brought us small wooden chairs to sit on while we put on makeup and painted their faces. I said hello to everyone and told them we were a circus and had come to share what we do. That we would teach workshops and then do a circus and fire show. Mumu, our token native-Spanish speaker, and also eloquent public speaker, was one of the members who had to leave the week before, to visit family in her birth-country, Puerto Rico. K-fire and I did our best to fill in, as we spoke some of the more fluent Spanish in our basically 'gringo' group. The town of Santa Lucia graciously provided us with a generator to run our sound system for the show; however, the generator turned out to lack enough power to run the tunes, and instead of booming the back up music for our acts, it blew out the circuits in our sound system. We discovered this as the first act was entering the stage. The show was put on hold while Chris trouble-shot in broken Spanish with a few local men. Enrique and I did our best to clown and play with the kids to keep them occupied. We ended up orchestrating a game of duck, duck, goose with all the kids. Except, I didn´t know how to say duck, or goose, in Spanish, so I called the game Gato, Gato, Raton. All and all, the show went on eventually with a dimly audible home stereo system the village brought out.
This village was one of the more impressionable shows for me. What was it???
The sparsity of the banana field? The way they looked at us with wonder, curiosity and also reserve? The depth of the difference of the life they lead and the life that we lead- that was it. That was what was so striking, how our two cultures could be meeting, like water and oil, and holding hands and playing together and doing whatever we could to relate to each other in translated tongues and gestures, through flying juggling pins, painted cheeks, and spinning hips to keep the hoola hoops afloat. This time we ended the show before the dreadful mosquito hour took full hold, and made it back on the boats just before dark. We crossed back across the mighty Ucayali under the red sun set sky, and navigated by flashlight down the channel that led back to Lago Yurinacocha and our base camp in pueblo San Francisco.
These night voyage boat trips were manned by two locals. Each boat had a driver, who steered the little motor in the back, and a navigator, who stood on the front holding a flashlight and gave hand signals to the driver as to which way to steer down the narrow, tree lined channel. At one point on the way home, we got stuck on a tree that was on one side of the narrow canal, half submerged in water. The navigator jumped up and down on the tree in the crocodile-filled waters, trying to free the little motor boat. Eventually, with the help of the driver and Enrique, the boat was pry ed free. So we carried on into the night... the dark waters and surrounding trees barely visible by the dim light of the flashlight, whose batteries seemed to be waning. I handed my bright shiny LED USA headlamp up to the navigator. It instantly lit up the waters and the shores. We cruised safely back to the docks of pueblo San Francisco.
The last show of our tour was in Nueva Luz, which compared to the previous two towns, was like a palace. We arrived to a muddy bank, much like the others. But once we got on shore, there were huge trees that actually gave some shady refuge from the beating sun. These were the golden doors of the palace. Rather than super structured workshops, on our last day of tour we played with the kids, painted their faces, and set up for the show. The village gathered around, and Enrique and I began with our opening clown skit. In the part near the beginning when I end up on the ground, pretend dead, I felt like I may really be dead. Was I dead, with maggots crawling all over me? No, I had laid down right on top of an ant hill. The biting red kind. Ahhhh! The dead moment didn´t last long, I was on my feet, desperately trying to wipe the little pinching creatures from my neck and hair and from out of my pants where they had burrowed. The audience quickly figured out what had happened, and gave out huge toothy grins, whoops and hollers in the face of my desperate pain. Tragedy, of course, is nothing but a gift to a clown. For the rest of the show anytime I entered, I could send snickers through the crowd with a mere twitch of my hand, which was not all an act, as I was picking ants off me well into the fire show.
The last show of the tour ended like the mellow come down after a roller coaster ride. Wow! What a spring to remember!

Pucallpa City

2010-07-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

In addition to the Refugio de Esperanza School, we worked with a connection from the University of Pucallpa to put on workshops at a local school and a free show at the University. They put us up in three houses near the center of Pucallpa. I was with four others in the mother´s house of one of the organizers from the university. She was a sweet grandmotherly woman who had simple but strikingly clean accommodations to offer us. We had two of our very own rooms to share between the five of us, which was spacious compared to some of our other organization-provided accommodations. There was a fan in the room, which was great for circulation in the warm jungley air, however, I was sleeping on the top bunk where the fan whizzed strikingly close to my head when I sat up in bed. I was actually a bit afraid of it, until the night it did hit my head. It hurt less than I thought. After that, I turned it off at night when we went to sleep....
Our host organization provided us with meals at the cheapest cafeteria style restaurant in the neighborhood where you could get a "menu." This is the set lunch-time meal here in Peru that can be found in every city, town, and village. Its usually begins with some kind of soup, followed by a plate of rice and chicken and some kind of juice. It sometime comes with salad or potatoes.
We went to a school to do workshops in the afternoon. It was a large school in the middle of the city, an expansive layout of two story buildings. As soon as we walked through the entrance into the large concrete courtyard, we were mobbed by hundreds of kids. Our host organizers shuffled us through the mob to a classroom off the courtyard where we closed the door, only to have the kids climbing the wooden bars that covered the glass-less windows.
We figured out how to arrange spaces at the school. We had a series of classrooms and an open outside space to work with. We divided the kids into five groups and did our workshop thang! I taught acrobatics this time, which was somewhat challenging in the medium sized classroom with cement floors. Two of us taught about 30 eight-year-olds. All was going well and fun, considering the circumstances, until one kid bumped his head on the floor. This was the only time the whole tour, surprisingly enough, that even a minor physical ouchy happened in a workshop I was teaching. Nothing much more serious than a bump and a handful of tears, but when we rotated groups we chose to move the acrobatics workshop outdoors onto the grass patch between the rows of classrooms. The space was uncontained to the surrounding chaos of the playground which hosted kids of all ages playing soccer and volleyball, but was a marked improvement. They warmed up with running and skipping, sideways and backwards, hopping and jumping, rolling and racing in pairs of wheel barrows. We spotted them in handstands and headstands. Then we did back bends, and some of the more advanced ones practiced walk overs... All and all another fun day at the office.

The next day we performed our show at the University of Pucallpa- our first, and only, mostly adult show, which was a fun change. Hundreds of students, community members, and some families with kids poured into the cuge covered basketball stadium. The university provided a sound system and tech staff to run it, which was also a nice change. We rocked out our last performance of the Bus Show to an enthralled audience. The fire show especially brought down the house. After the performance they had our whole cast line up on stage to ask us some questions, moderated by one of our local host-organizers on the microphone. They wanted to know who was dating each other amongst the group and cheered like nothing else when Alex and Mumu lovingly embraced. Encore!!! They wanted more! Oh, the romance. Adult shows are definitely a different bag of worms. It all ended in a super fly dance party. We packed up and dragged our gear out to load it into mototaxis.
Some of our crew members traveled on the next day, on to their next adventures. We had about two weeks left of tour. As we would be missing some of our main cast in the Bus Show, we set out to put together a show of variety acts for our last weeks of the jungle tour....

Jungle! Refugio De Esperanza

2010-07-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

Without stopping at ´Go´ in Lima, we went directly from the station where the all-night bus from Cajamarca dropped us to the Lima airport. Here caught a flight to Pucallpa, a gateway city to the Amazon in northeastern Peru. This was the last destination area on our tour. As we were way under budget on travel expenses, Chris, the financial coordinator and founder of Dreamtime Circus, decided that we would fly, rather than sucking it up on a 22 hour bus ride that has been reported to be somewhat dangerous for theft. We arrived to Lima from Cajamarca right on time, which was a first on the trip, and we made it to the airport in good time to check all the circus gear. The process took a while, but went seamlessly. We paid some extra baggage fees for being over the allotted luggage weight with our sound system and hoola hoops, etc., paid the airport tax and got on the plane!
We stepped out onto the early morning jungle-air runway in the small airport of Pucallpa. We gathered our gear, and headed into the city in a string of about ten mototaxis. These are common here, as they were in Chincha, our first destination. Its basically like a motorcycle tricycle- a motorcycle front where the driver sits, with a bench seat over two wheels in the back. We rode for about fifteen minutes with the wind blowing in our hair, turning heads on the sidewalks with our hoola hoops, stilts and sound system strapped on the backs of the mototaxis.
Our first destination in Pucallpa was a school called El Refugio de Esperanza, The Refuge of Hope. We pulled into the school, unloaded, and they showed us to our quarters in the school dorms where we would stay for the week. The men were in a couple of bunk rooms in the boys dorm, and the women in the girls dorm, with a few extra people staying in the house of the founders and directors of the school. There were about ten women that lived in the dorm on site, I think the boys was about the same, the rest of the hundreds of kids who attended the school lived off site and came each day from their homes to class. We did several days of workshops here. In the morning we would have a group of about 100 younger kids and in the afternoon about 80 high school students.
Alex and I taught clowning workshops for the high school students. It was all boys that came to the workshop, as it frequently had been on the rest of the tour. All but one workshop that I can remember actually was mostly boys. There was one workshop for a community outside of Cusco that had a bunch of elementary girls attend, which was a nice change. The girls tended to gravitate to face painting or hoola hoop. What is it about clowning that attracts the boys? The physicality? the risk? This workshop of men at Refugio de Esperanza was a change from our usual elementary crowd, and they were really focused on the material. The circle of gibberish conversation was a palpable challenge for them. Its so interesting to ask people who have spent all their years focusing on getting really good at speaking Spanish and mastering the art of being a person, to take everything they know and turn into a two year old. To forget the words, forget the grammar, and go to sounds and expression. Especially in those teenage years! It was fun to work with this group. I feel like they really learned! One man was the head of the local theater group of kids and told us he was going to teach the kids he works with some of the exercises. I love turning things upside down, playing with the unexpected. Turning into fully grown humans that are as empty minded as babies. Using our well developed faculties in new ways, close to the raw energy of creative possibility. Outside of the range of the expected and known!
That Friday night we turned the basketball court into a theater and performed the bus show and fire show for the kids, their families and other community members. We had a few guest performers come and perform their fire tricks as well, some guys we had met in town. It was a good ´ol time!

Cajamarca

2010-07-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

After the 18 hour bus ride from Lima, we pulled into Cajamarca, an intellectual city built of stone. We arrived at the place we would be staying for the two weeks while we were in town- a would-be hostel that was not permitted to be open to the public. Our local contact hooked us up with this place, a Peruvian lady who worked for the municipality of the city of Cajamarca. It was a stone building with a big door that opened onto a covered courtyard with a red-painted cement floor, which would become the rehearsal, meeting space, and living room of our circus for the next two weeks. There were again three bedrooms for us to share between the 18 of us. Well, one was actually more like a converted living room. We created our makeshift kitchen on the second story balcony that overlooked the covered courtyard. I slept on the bottom bunk of a room with eight beds, and a tiny balcony that overlooked the street.
In Cajamarca our local connection was the Municipality. They set up shows for us at the Municipal Stadium. We would arrive early in the morning for three days to the giant soccer field with stadium bleachers to meet hundreds of elementary kids who were bused in from schools all over the area. The first day we did a giant workshop series, split the kids into about 6 groups of about 50 each and cycled them through the various workshops- acrobatics, juggling, games and obstacles courses, face painting, hoola hooping... For three hours we were there, in what quickly became a blazing bright sun. We ended by putting on a spontaneous variety show of circus skills for the audience of kids who had mostly retreated to the bleachers in the shade for snack time by the time the workshops wound down.
The municipality took us out for lunch, the basic Peruvian menu at one of the nearby cafes. The vegetarians went hungry splitting the few plates of plain pasta the cooks
came up with when they realized that about seven people in our group don't eat meat, though we had told the municipality connections several times. What? It´s been known to many down here what vegetarianism is, but its still foreign to some!
After lunch, a local twelve piece marching band showed up to our joyful surprise to join us for a parade to the center town plaza,
commonly know here from city to city as Plaza de Armas. I love marching bands! And I love parading down the streets with marching bands, dressed to the nines in our circus gear, promoting our circus show, free to all, that would follow the parade in the Municipal Stadium. It was surprisingly easy with this 12 piece marching band to take over the street! The crowding cars had little chance to pass, and the police gave us no notice.
Back at the stadium we performed the bus show for an audience of hundreds, and did the fire show to follow.
We repeated the same schedule in the stadium the next day, but rather than doing the morning workshops, we opted to simplify and perform the bus show instead, leaving the kids to watch from the shade. That afternoon we did the bus show again, with the fire show to follow.
The next day we went to a neighborhood on the other side of town, where our local contacts said the kids don´t have much access to the arts. We were greeted by a roped-off street full of expectant kids, mothers holding babies, curious teenagers, and smiling fathers. We set up our back drop in front of an empty lot and played with the kids, showing off tricks and killing time so that the bus show could start at the perfect time to lead right into the fire show once darkness was coming.
We were at last ready to start the bus show, just as we gave our two minute call, the rain was also ready to start. And start it did! It came down, light at first, and then poured pretty good as the people stepped under the cover of the houses and stores around, threw their sweaters over the heads of the babies and we all waited and played. In about twenty minutes the rain let up a bit and we decided to start the show. They brought out a few pieces of carpet we could lay on the wet asphalt for the partner acro bits that require laying on the ground, and the show went on! It was actually quite fun in the drizzling rain. The crowd had such great energy, they really launched the whole show to a stellar level. Rain could not get these people down. They were so excited to have a circus show in their neighborhood! Heads poked out of windows and off balconies all down the street, and hundreds were gathered around stretching their necks to get a glimpse. The community energy of this place was so beautiful. This really was their neighborhood.
After the show, the lady who had set up the show, invited us into her house right across the way. We laid our wet things in the entry way and all sat down for hot tea and bread and jam. The circus was rather starving and scarfed down the fluffy white rolls so quick our hosts ran to the corner store and got some more...
This was one of the only times we were given any kind of food or drink after a show by the people, which somewhat surprised me. Peruvians are into food, but not so much like my Lebanese family or other cultures I have come across where you can´t say hello to someone without them insisting that you eat something. There were two other occasions I can think of- the Coca Cola and Finger sandwiches at the girls shelter in Chincha and the bright yellow-glowing cola at the kids shelter outside of Cusco.
The next day we went to Otuzco, a smaller town outside of Cajamarca, and performed the bus and fire show at a local school there. The people flooded in from all over, and so did the rain. So we all crammed into the biggest indoor space they had, an oversized classroom on the second story. It was tight, which meant our choreography had to be tight too. Quite the opposite of the Fiteca Festival with its huge stage and stadium. It´s been so interesting to do the same show in different sized spaces for different crowds and adjusting the theater of it. Subtleties in small spaces, facial expressions, breathing, looks. Expansiveness in big spaces, large body movements, more movement across stage, playing to different sides of the audience.
When the tour was booked, they didn´t realize there was no through road from Cajamarca in the northwest of Peru to Pucallpa in the northeast, and that it would be necessary to go back to Lima to make the connection. Oh my!

We jumped back on the bus for another 18 hour bus ride right back to Lima!

Lima- The Orphanage

2010-07-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

After leaving Fiteca we pulled up in taxis´ to an orphanage in the center of Lima. We got out and met the next group we would work with- a boys orphanage that had a sister girls orphanage. They had told us they would provide housing, the men in our group would stay with the boys, and the women would stay with the girls. That sounds like a great idea, but then we found out that the girls orphanage was a twenty minute taxi ride away. Still having acts to rehearse with our newly arrived comrades from the US, it was decided by some of the logistics coordinators to be an impractical choice, and better that we all stay at the boys shelter. This turned out to be an interesting squeeze, and after a crowded week with 17 of us crammed onto the concrete floors of three bedrooms at Fiteca, ended up with almost half of the group sick, including myself. After one night there, hanging out with the super sweet boys, most people found hostels to bunk up in Miraflores. The entrance to the boys shelter had a somewhat disconcerting lifesize cardboard cut out of a motherly looking figure at the entrance. I never quite figured out exactly what this was supposed to accomplish. Fill in for the mother they never had? It seemed like more of a sad reminder to me.
One boy reminded us of some of our faerie friends back home. He wanted to play in our makeup and was super smart and really a charm to hang out with. He will love San Francisco, California if he ever makes it there. We did circus workshops with all the kids, and also rehearsed new scenes for the bus show and fire show with our new comrades.
I ended up in the sick boat the next day, puking my guts out for two days. Luckily I had made it to the hostel by the time it started, and the motherly women who ran the place made me chicken soup and brought me water, while I lay like a corpse, my insides flooding at both ends at every opportunity. I was matched by Jypsy who had a similar fate in the bunk next to me. Meanwhile, those that could in the group did more workshops with the kids and put on a variety and fire show at the local school the kids attended.
People were up to their ears in the smoggy air of Lima and the logistics crew decided to bump our departure date a few days earlier to head out by bus to Cajamarca, an 18 hour ride to the north.
It took everything I had to drag my various parts together and make it out of town. Nora was not coming with us, but rather heading to the nearby coast to work with Burners Without Borders building houses for a few days, and then back to the states to organize a bike ride to/from the US Social Forum. She also lugged my big red suitcase with souvenirs and unneeded extra circus gear back to the states for me. As I would be traveling for the summer after tour, I wanted to get as much to the states as possible in any opportunity.

Second Half of Tour! ! Fiteca Festival

2010-07-06T17:24:00.000-07:00

We were picked up at the airport in Lima by two young Peruvian guys holding a yellow Fiteca poster. Fiteca is an annual music and arts festival that offers free community shows for a neighborhood with lots of character, but not much dough, in the hills overlooking Lima. Nora and I and the two Peruvian guys headed over to international to round up Vivian and Rachel who were just arriving from the US. Nora and I greeted then with cartwheels as they came down the run way so they would be sure to know where the circus was. We all piled into a brightly painted van in the parking lot and drove across town to the site of the festival.
The festival is put on by a community group in the neighborhood of Colmas. All the shows and workshops are free and open to the public. They put us up in the house of a family in the neighborhood. It was a Spanish style house with a courtyard, simple but sufficient. We had the whole roof floor which had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and lots of outside space for hanging out and rehearsing. We set up our traveling makeshift kitchen by the utility sink and went to work plugging the newbies into our shows and curriculum. The first day we did getting to know you, group building, exercises, mostly led by Nora who donned her years of experience working as an organizer to create connection and shared goals among the group. We also had some fun and played some improv games, getting into the theater of what we were up to. Tuesday through Friday we offered circus workshops in the festival programing to kids in the neighborhood. There was a different circus skill offered each day, and well as a core class taught to the same group of kids each day who ended up performing what they learned on Friday night in the big stadium.
There were performers from all over the world at the festival. It was the first time in our tour that we performed with other groups, and had a whole structure of workshops and the schedule of shows set up for us. The other group that was from the US were some Native Americans who did some awesome music and dance. One of them also did an act spinning and fitting through two mini hoops that was very circus. There was a circus from Lima there who is quite renown and has been around for some time. There were performers from all over south America. Singing, dance, theater, puppetry, clowning. The stage was like an amphitheater and it was packed every night. We performed on Friday night, in the headliner spot, the last night of the festival. It was super packed, thousands of people were there I would guess. I thought back to Clown Conservatory when we went one morning to Keezar Stadium in our costumes and makeup to practice projecting to a huge audience. I kept that in mind, and played to the back row, as well as all in between, as much as possible. Performing in that space was such a contrast to some of the smaller shows we did for a hundred, fifty, or ever a few hundred. Thousands! I found myself making large movements. I couldn't´t rely on facial expressions as much. The space was also mostly in the round, save the entrance where we came in and out to the backstage, so really like a circus tent. The slapstick scene where we toss around a water bottle was challenging spatially, as we were all more spread out than we usually are. Nonetheless, after our bus show, the kids that had been in our intensive workshop all week went on and did their show, while most of us were backstage getting ready for the fire show. Chris, Rico and I did our magic light toss act which led right into the fire show. Alex and I did the partner acro fire piece. The whole show went well and we closed out the festival to a standing ovation from the audience..... Awards and thank you´s came after the show and the whole evening came together in a giant dance party on the stage, with DJs rotating with live musicians to bring the house down. Wow! Some of these Latin men really know how to shake their hips! Many of the performers from the week were there and we had a good ól time shaking down on the dance floor.

-Last Day of Break- May Day

2010-07-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

We woke up on May Day, May 1st in Oyantantambo. Crystal and I lemented not being gathered with our radical faeries back in the states for spring festivities. However we didn´t wallow in our sorrows long, as we were invited by some locals over to their pachamanca cook out. This is a traditional way of cooking where they fill a fire pit with rocks and build a huge fire on top to heat the rocks up. When the fire burns down to coals, they threw a layer of potatos on, covered by banana leaves, then another layer of corn, more leaves, then chickens, ribs, fish.... Wow! While the food cooked for two hours Crystal and I hiked up the mountain side that over looked us, through the old Incan ruins. They say they were military outlook sites, stone encampments in the mountain-side walls. We talked about life and the nature of the universe while peering down on the valley below, the town of Oyantantambo, which itself is ancient stone, still fitted together as the Incans left them, buildings and water ways, in full use by the residents.
We climbed down, back to the Pachamanca, which was on a terrace used as a community garden, a terrace built by the Incans as they all were in this town.
We ended up having a grand old time and rather than going back to Cusco later that day as we had planned on, we stayed in town for the night. It turned out that the people throwing the party were celebrating, in addition to the International Worker´s Holiday, the opening of their brand new hostel!
After we all gorged ourselves on the best fish, chicken, ribs, potatoes and corn I have ever eaten in my life (this day marks the official end of my proud vegetarianism, which has been waning ever since I began to do circus training), we set up the may pole that Nora constructed with a giant wood tree and yarn. We told them about our tradition of dancing around the may pole, fabric in hand, to weave a community fabric for the coming spring. The whole group enthusiastically took to it and we all danced round and round in circles, weaving the yarn in patterns down the pole, while someone beat melodically on a drum. Doing this dance with people from a culture of master weavers added another element of excitement to what we were creating together.
The next morning we went back to Cusco and after one last breakfast at Jack´s, the delicious California style touristy restaurant, Nora and I jumped on a plane and flew to Lima to meet back up with the rest of the circus for the second half of the tour.

Tour Break- Machu Picchu

2010-06-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

For our break from tour, Nora and I spent the rest of the day and the night in Cusco, preparing to trek five days through the mountains, past Salkantay Mountain which has a glacier, to arrive at Machu Pichu. We got snacks at the market, Nora rented hiking shoes. We stayed in the Artesano Hostel in San Blas that night and made raw energy nuggets for the hike and a fabulous dinner of fresh veggies to charge up for the trek. We woke up at 3¨45am, got dressed and went out the door to meet the tour guide. We walked with our backpacks through the dark streets of Cusco, collecting various travelers at different hostels, and eventually made our way to the plaza San Francisco where we got on a private bus and drove into the dawn to Mollepata. In Mollepata we ate the hard boiled eggs and bread we brought, packed our day packs, and gave the rest of our overnight things to the tour company who loaded them on donkeys. We walked with a group of about 12 people. The donkeys also carried the company provided tents and cookware. We had a guide, a cook, and an assistant cook.
We walked through the mountains all day, arriving at sunset near the foot of Salkantay. We filled our water bottles from the dripping glacier run off that trickled down the mountain. At the base of the glaciers, it was very cold. We exhaled billows of fog as we watched the full moon rise over the mountain. In the morning we woke in the darkness, had breakfast and set out down the trail just as the sun lit the day. We hiked up the last part of the valley, took some fun pictures with the others members of the group and climbed the trail up the mountain Salkantay. We hiked the morning away and arrived at the highest point we would reach near the base of the glacier with a great view, just before the fog rolled in.
We gathered as a group and left the offerings our guide had told us to bring from the bottom of the mountain- a rock and some coca leaves. The rest of the day we hiked slowly downwards through valleys. A trickle of glacier melt followed us, and all day as we hiked it was joined by other springs and rivulets and before long it was a creek. As the creek continued to play at our feet, back and forth across the valley floor, it turned before long into a stream. Further we floated down the grassy cow filled valley. We picked up some vertebrae bones and the stream turned into a river. That was a truly special vista, to track the birth of the river. By the time we had hiked two days the tiny rivulet of glacier runoff had been joined by many streams, springs, and other rivers and was a giant rushing torrent that filled the narrowing valley floor. As we got closer to Aguas Calientes and Machu Pichu, we reached a place where it was necessary to cross the rushing river, but there was no bridge. Rather, there was a cable car that two to three people could ride in, and whiz over the river to the other side. Gravity and human force was the fuel for the process, only simple machines, and no official operator. The burly men from our group and the tour guides hand pulled the bassinet by cable to our side of the river, we jumped in, and gravity took us across. It was quite a community event to make all this happen, and it was interesting that it was a public utility, with no individual profiting off the process. It was also interesting to note that never did we sign any sort of waiver of liability to go on this trek, that was treacherous at times. Nor was there any sort of physical examination or requirements stated of physical ability, although the trek was moderately challenging for even Nora and I, who are good physical condition. Small differences from the USA!
After our fourth full day of hiking we arrived, wet, into Aguas Calientes in the late afternoon rain, excited to see the small glimpses of Machu Pichu at the top of the mountain. Of all people, we ran into Crystal and Bree from our circus tour just as we approached town. Hooray!
We dropped our stuff at the hostel the tour company provided us, and after a fresh fruit juice at the Mercado, headed directly to the hot springs about a ten minute walk through town, up a small side canyon. Ah.... the place was developed around the springs and had an enchanting entrance way with magic alters, a bar, and bathrooms. We jumped into the hottest pool and relaxed!
The next day we woke up in the dark, convened with our tour group outside the hostel at 4am, and started walking through the misty morning rain down the road to Machu Pichu. We climbed the side of the mountain via a staircase for an hour straight without stopping. It was easy to keep walking because in the dark, there were no views to look at, save the flashlight spot that follow the feet in front of me. We walked in a line, like ants, up The Incan StairMaster!
Arriving at the entrance gate, we were amongst the first there in the predawn morning. We shook the water off our rain jackets, and had some snacks. Then the gate operators arrived and we formed a line to wait to get into the great ancient temple, just as the first light of day began to outline the arriving people. We watched the line get longer and longer, and at 6am, the gates opened, and we entered a rainy, misty Machu Pichu. We got there so early in order to line up for tickets to hike up the peak Winu Pichu, which over looks Machu Pichu, and itself is a revered Temple of the past. The tickets are free and are given to the first 300 people of the day.
After a short misty and rainy tour by our tour guide, he said goodbye, and we headed back to the cafe of Machu Pichu to dry out a bit and get expensive tourist hot tea to warm up (worth every penny!). Before long, the rain let up, and the sun shone brightly.

We hiked around the various portals, took pictures with Llamas and headed up to Winu Pichu. We hiked to the top and lay out on the rocks at the very top, with a 360 degree view of the mountains all around. It was like being in a bowl of mountains, and the river wrapped around us at the base, encircling us. From there we saw signs that led onwards, to the Gran Caverna, which means Great Cave. I love caves, and we had the whole day to spend, so amazingly we hiked our tired legs onwards, another hour down the trail. We saw only one person the whole time. It was a nice break from the crowds of the more populated temples. We hiked down and down and around, sometimes the mountain was so steep there were ladders to climb, or railings to hang onto. We speculated about how burly the Incans were to not only traverse these mountains with no hand railings, but to actually traverse them with no trails, and create the trials themselves. Not only did they create trails, they created plateaus out of the steep slopes for growing food. And turned the rocky faces into intricately fit together blocks for houses that have now stood 500 years with little shifting. Wow! I am forever entranced by the capability of this culture to craft the landscape. It brings a whole new dimension to the possibilities of ¨landscape architecture,¨ and demonstrates an architectural awareness that far exceeds in majesty and magic anything I see on a day to day basis.
Eventually at the end of this trail we reached what a sign called ¨The Moon Temple,¨ which was a giant carved out space in the mountain, like an expanded cave. There were precisely carved rectangle spaces in one side of the cave, which I believe may have been alters or tombs of some kind. The cave went way back, and
I forged my way through the darkness exploring the intentionally shaped recesses and wondering what kind of magic they did there. We ate the snacks we had brought for lunch, and explored on, coming to the Gran Caverna itself. It was like a house carved out of a cave, with a perfectly rectangle doorway entrance, and more of these rectangular niches inside. I left some coca leaves in each of the niches, as our guide had taught us to do, as an offering to the space, as well as a spell to leave negative energy behind. While we were in the Gran Cavera, it started to rain, as we had imagined it may just in the moment we were safely dry inside. We watched the rain from the doorway, fall gently on the perfectly shaped stones. After a while it stopped, and we emerged to explore the roof of the Cave, which itself was a perfectly shaped stone building with windows and walls.
It was afternoon, and approaching the hours that the park would close for the night. While we considered bush whacking our way down to the river, and walking back along the river to Aguas Calientes, rather than hiking all the way back up the mountain to Machu Pichu and down again, we decided to go with the more known path, and savor the last minutes of hanging out in the Temple of the Condor in Machu Pichu. We returned via a loop trail, all the while I scanned the landscape sensing where the ruins may be that have yet to be excavated and opened to the public. Its a fun game in this area, as there really is much deep history and magical, buried places along the way.
We were the last ones to leave the Winu Pichu area for the day, and we spent our last moments running through the Machu Pichu temples, looking at the revolutionary stone carver secret hidden pictures in the rock formations, and watching the llamas hump to the surprise and delight of a hillside of tourists.
The park closed, we walked outside, a bit more hungry for our hour long hike down the mountain to Aguas Calientes than we would like to be. The cafe had closed, but the nice men who worked there gifted us one of the over-priced leftover sandwiches from the day, which was delicious and the perfect fuel to send us home. We skipped back to Aguas Calientes, got dinner, and went back to the hot springs. We grabbed our bags and met our tour group at the train station, where we all caught the 9-45pm train out of town. Nora and I de-trained in Oyantaytambo and stayed there in a hostel for the night where we reconvened with Crystal Cobra and Bree.

Urubamba

2010-05-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

From Coya we toured on to Mama Kia's, a beautiful orphanage built at the base of a mountain. We did workshops and our show. Some of the boys had some acrobatic inclination. One could walk across the grass area on his hands. They made this human pyramid.

Then we toured onto Urubamba. Here we worked with an organizaiton called Arco Iris, which means rainbow. We did workshops with the special needs kids there. Then in late afternoon, we performed The Bus Show. Many kids came to Acro Iris for the show. A group of kids from an orphanage in the surrounding mountains came. The audience had amazing energy, and their space was beautiful, with bright murals painted on the walls. As the dusk came, we performed our fire show for the delighted audience. At the end of the show we celebrated the completion of the first half of tour. We went out to dinner that night, had a dance party at our hospedaje to celebrate Chris and Mumu´s birthdays. The next day we packed up our circus gear to ship it back to Lima on a bus line called Molina, and we all went our seperate ways for the mid'tour week off.
Nora, Karen, Sarah and I ventured off to see the salt flats outside of town. The incans created this salt farm, where the salty streams from the mountains lead into flats where the salt collects. They really let you walk all around the salt flats, and they taste very salty. We brought some salt with us and took a taxi to Moray where the Incans had done farming experiments. They made a giant perfect circle of terraces that go down in an amphetheater shape. There was some quinoa growning there at the bottom of the giant circle, the first time I myslef have ever picked a piece of this fine crop I´ve often enjoyed in my bowl.
From there Nora and I headed off together to begin our adventure of the week, a 5-day trek through the mountains to Machu Pichu. We went to Chinchero, a small quiet town in the middle of grassy rolling hills and spent the night. In the morning we visited their reputed town market where I got some gifts for people back home. Then we returned to Cusco for the night.

The Sacred Valley

2010-05-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

We did in fact go on to Coya or Quoya, after I wrote that last blog post. We arrived to a well spread out house made of adobe, shaped in an L with grass all around. We did workshops and our show for the gathered community of kids, and danced our fire show to the setting sun.
We stayed at this house for a few nights, spread amongst three rooms on the second story. We climbed up to our rooms on ladders, and laid out our sleeping mats and sleeping bags on the empty wooden floors. We lit candles and told stories. The next day our whole group went on a long walk up into the mountains with Loco Taray, the host of our Coya experience, as our guide. The day began with a traditional ceremony led by Taray´s wife, Damiana. This ceremony had many coca tea leaves spread across a woven tapestry, surrounded by our whole group sitting in a circle. Damiana had about 15 little packages wrapped in newspaper piled up in the center. She asked Bree to choose a packaged, and opened it up. There was sparkly golden shimmery blingy pieces inside. She was reading our destiny, and said that drawing this package was good luck, and good fortune for our group. That we would have abundance on our journey. She went on to draw the rest of the packages and speak in Quechua as to the divinatory meaning of each little package she opened. Taray would translate into Spanish. Lots of good fortune was reported. She said more people would join our group (as we already expected, our amigos who would meet us in Lima in two weeks for the second half of the tour). She said the journey would end in an unexpected way, that some of us may carry on together. Good fortune all along. I didn{t understand all that was said, but she said it bode very well for our journey together. she read the coca leaves for each one of us and cast spells of good fortune. It was an interesting blend of traditional magic with Catholic overtones, that seems to be a pretty standard way of practicing religion here. I am constantly amazed how dramatically one culture can shift another and how prevelant the Catholic church has been over the last 500 years with their missionary journies.
After the magical ceremony,we walked out of the gate of the house, and down the road, to go on a day{s long journey up the mountain to an ancient forest. We walked as a group of 15, fourteen of us Dreamtimers and Taray as our guide, down the cobblestone road, up the valley outside of town, and along the path once it turned dirt. We followed the dirt road along a creek, well out of town into the farm lands. We walked by cows and pigs, sheep and dogs.
We walked and walked, up the valley. We found a place to sit under a tree and drank some Wachuma Cactus juice that Taray had prepared for hours over the wood stove the night before. This cactus is revered as a medicine and guide here. It tastes thick and mucus'like. Like aloe vera juice, not sweet at all. We walked up the dirt road as it climbed the side of the ancient mountain, up and up, passing a few trees and rocks along the way. We walked up and up, sometimes in clumps, sometimes single file, foot after foot. After we had walked for hours, we reached a grassy plateau in the late afernoon. We sat there and met a local man who walked up with a bundle on his back. He lived near by and had just made the walk back home from town with some supplies. No vehicles came this far up the mountain, but there were a few houses just beyond us, whose inhabitants walked to town for supplies. Once the whole group had arrived, we drank some more of the Wachuma cactus juice. The taste was repugnant. Once our whole group had arrived, we walked on a bit further, to greet Tio Tom, Damiana{s uncle who lived up on the mountain. We entered his area through a wooden fence. There were cows and pigs and goats, and a tiny house. Tio Tomas had no front teeth, he was a short man, maybe 5 ft. 3 inches. A crazy widow'd man who lived alone up on the mountain. He had quite a spark in his eye, and brought out a drum. He played some music, and when we took up playing the music, he was dancing! He offered us some of the homemade moonshine that he was drinking. Taray said is was impolite to refuse what the host has to offer, so I took a small sip. It tasted like rubbing alcohol....
The sun got to be lower in the sky, and some people wanted to start the long walk back to the house in town. Several of us wanted to keep going up the hill to the magical ancient forrest that we had been promised was the destination of this walk. Crystal, Nora, Sarah, Taray and I continued to walk up the mountain to the patch of trees Taray pointed out as the ancient forrest, while the rest of the group made their way back down the dirt road, down the mountain. Now we walked up the mountain on a trail, part human, part goat. We were walking high on a sacred ancient mountain, like the ones I had been spying at with curiosity from the Sacred Valley below for the past several weeks. Wow! I was so happy to be walking on this mini terraces that I had been so mistified by from below. Were all this mountains really carved out by human hands to cultivate food as they appeared from below? In my up close vantage point, I confirmed that phenomenon must be true! I felt like I was walking through time. We climbed and climbed up the trail as the light of day faded, resting at one small spring and a clump of eucalyptus trees along the way. At last, we reached the ancient forrest. We stopped before entering, and Taray sprayed us with Rose water in the setting sun. We entered the forest, which had small old trees with peeling bark. We climbed through the maze of branches until we reached a giant rock wall, like a *tabla* that had a flat face, and an indentation like a piece had fallen out of it. We were actually at the top of a giant mountain, the part you see from below where the vegetation gives way to sharp rises of rock! Wow! We sat against the side of the rock and watched the sky turn pink. I felt like I was sitting at the top of the earth, and uderstood for the first time in my life why people quest to climb the tallest peaks of the globe. The energy up there was super clear! As the dusk takes over, Taray pulled some dead branches out of the trees and we started a fire and warmed our hands. I pulled out of my bag the magical bundle that Damiana had put together in our morning ceremony, and placed it in the fire as she had said to do, as an offering for the mountain. We watched the package turn bright yellow and hot, and eventually to ash.
The fire died down, and we put it all the way out with some water. I thanked all the gods that had ever been and ever will be. We gazed up to the sky, which from this elevation was closer than I had ever been to it before! Sharing three flashlights between the five of us, we began the long descent down the mountain back to the town, and to the adobe walls of our home for the night in Coya. We held hands to make a train of support for each other as we traversed down the steep hillside guided by the light of the stars. A ways down the mountain, we sat to rest for a moment in an open grassy patch. We laid on our backs and starred up at the sky. Wow! I{ve never seen so many stars ever in my life. I couldn{t believe how clear the night was and how close the stars were! I could hear them talking to me. We kept up our train hand in hand whenever the trail got exceptionally steep going down the mountain. We made our way over land down the steep slopes of goat trails, into the night. At last we reached the road again, and the river, and followed it back to the cobblestone streets of town. Just when we were passing some of the first houses in town, we heard some music blarring out of a house. About ten people were gathered around, children and adult, some dancing. As we passed a middle aged Peruvian women, with drink in hand, insisted that we come in and join them at the birthday party of her mother. We went inside, the four gringa women and Taray, our local Peruvian guide who knew these women. They were having a grand ol time! The place was decorated with painting and sculptures in an eclectic fashion and bright colors. It reminded me vaguely of San Francisco art, burning man style, but super funky small town Peru style. Feet danced on the dirt floor. Their sat the birthday lady of the evening, it turns out she was turning 70! I hope I have a party so full of fun when-if- I turn 70! They insisted that we drink large glasses of Chicha, the corn beer. I told the lady we had just been drinking cactus juice and I didn{t quite have the stomach for it. She said, knowingly, the chicha is good for you, drink up, sip by sip. Ok. I didn{t want to be impolite, nor ignore the well'meaning advice of the locals, so I choked down about three quarters of the glass of chicha....We left the party and made it home. Found our comrades talkin story by the fire. We joined them, had some hot soup, and eventually drifted off to sleep. Ah, so gifted I am to have journeyed so far up one of the mountains of the Sacred Valley. I am so happy to have a guide who took me much further than I could have ever ventured alone. I will remember that mountian forever- the fire by the large rock face at the top, the divination of charms and burning the magical package, the way we walked, five souls bared, hand in hand, in a train of survival and support down the dark and ancient paths of the mountain of The Sacred Valley.
The next day we caught the combi bus to Pisac for an amazing breakfast at a touristsy cafe. Crystal and I bought a hand'weaved bag for Taray and a blanket for Damiana. I checked my email and got some timely news. I instantly thought of the ritual from the day before and the forecast of abundance when I read the email from a friend who said some work in the bay had been completed and he was depositing a bunch of unexpected money into my bank account. Wow! Magic is real. Thank you ancestors!

An Orphanage, Kids in the Hills

2010-04-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

We are about to leave Cusco tomorrow, to head into the Sacred Valley to go from small village to town doing shows and workshops with the children.
We went to two orphanages this week and performed a show in Pisac. For the show in Pisac there was bouts of rain and one of our cast members was sick throwing up, so instead of doing our regular theatrical ´¨Bus Show¨¨ we did a variety show. It was quite fun actually. In the chaos of the bouts of rain, while we prepared the stage, Crystal and I ended up doing a music jam with the kids that was such fun. They have excellent rhythm on the whole, even the three year olds! I brought along on this tour quite a few sound effects and toy instruments, and Crystal has a cohone drum that she bought here along the coast in Chincha and shakers and a tambourine. We had bells and horns, drums and shakers going. I was playing the washboard with spoon. The kids have this fascinated stare they do, such focused attention. It was quite a rocking lil drummin circle, with Crystal and I and about twenty kids circled around. We were making improv vocal sounds too, and I think the kids got quite a kick out of the whole scene, I know I did! This has inspired Crystal and I to offer a music making workshop as part of our curriculum. We are going to get some more instruments today before leaving the big city of Cusco. And also some supplies for them to make shakers and such. Bells and whistles! Tomorrow when we leave Cusco, and leave Leslie{s house where we{ve gotten quite comfortable in over the last three weeks, we will travel about an hour into the Sacred Valley to the town of Quoya, and to the large casa of a drum maker, of all people. Sounds like quite a lovely place. We will stay there for three days as we outreach into the area with workshops and shows each day. Then we will stay in a further town at a local community circus center!
An old friend of mine, Nora Dye, has arrived to join our tour for the next month. She arrived the day of this variety show in Pisac. As the sound system was getting set up, the two of us jumped right on stage to entertain the crowd of about a hundred waiting kids and community members, with some improv clowning. We actually did the Dead or Alive clown skit on stage, with Nora never having done it before, and me whispering to her each sequential move before the eyes of the audience. She picked up on it without missing a beat and we were rewarded with loud hollers of laughter from the audience. Wow!
This week we also went to two orphanages. The first one, on Thursday, was an institution of about forty school'aged boys. We did the usual workshops and for the first time ever, I did facepainting. I painted scorpions and dragons, spiders were also very popular. When one little boy came up and asked to be a payasito, little clown, I couldn{t be happier to paint! They were amazing creatures, all of the children. We did our show in the chilly afternoon, with fire show to follow. Mumu had a little heart flurry in the middle of the show, so she rested back stage and the show went on with a bit of improv for the final scene. It{s amazing the resilancey this trip brings forward. No matter the obstacles, large or small, the show will go on. I appreciate the commitment of the people in this group and I am constantly amazed that we show up and do what we do, day after day, joining with one child{s face and heart to another.
Another new person has also joined forces with us, Sarah, who Savannah brought on board, and who I happen to know from going to UC Berkeley together, years ago.... She filmed the past two shows, and with any luck, I can post some video before this whole she'bang is done to show you all more of what we are up to.
Yesterday we went to another orhpanage in Cusco, this one was run by women and has younger kids and babies. While the workshops were going on, Nora and one of our favorite taxi drivers went to the nearby industrial area to look for a new tube, as the one I{ve been using in the rolla bolla act had cracked the day before in the show at the boys orphanage. It was pretty interesting traversing the shops of the industrial area with Nora and said Taxi driver, asking for a small chunk of a large PVC pipe, and showing them the cracked one as an example. After no luck finding a place that had the correct size and thickness in a chunk less than 20 meters, we found a metal shop that cut us a piece of thin but strong metal in the appropiate length. Next door to the metal shop I got some metal sand paper to take off the rough edges, and also some metal sand paper to glue on as grip tape. On our way back to the orphanage we got a large board that we can bring with us to set between two chairs so the rolla bolla can happen up in the air!
We returned to the orphanage to perform the show. As soon as we walked into the space I had a great feeling. We set up our newly designed, by Sophia and Savannah, {Dreamtime Circus!] backdrop in a grassy corner of the backyard, with papaya trees and passion fruit vines framing our back stage. We performed the bus show, to a great audience of laughing children. It was surely a feel-good space, which makes me happy to see, orphan children with no parents being so well taken care of! They said that there are about forty children who live there, and about 25 staff who rotate, shifts go around the clock, of course, 24 hours a day.
After the show, one of the woman who works there took us up stairs to see the babies. Wow!!!! Babies they were! There was room was about fifteen basients, each one with a cute little babe, swaddled up in blankets, bottle of milk propped up by the blankets, faces calm and suckling. The women who worked there were very sweet. I washed my hands and held one of the cutiest little creatures ever! He may have been about six months old, with the sweetest bright eyes and wise grin. When I told him we were going to take him home, and he could be our circus baby, and walk on his hands, he smiled super big. We asked about the stories of the kids. Some are abandoned at hospitals just after being born. In some cases, they said, women would ask someone on the street to just hold her babe for a moment while she used the bathroom, and she would never come back. Babies abandoned. Also, 30 percent of the boys in the all-boys orphanage had been sexually abused and removed from their homes. Despite their histories, these kids are amazingly resilaint and so willing to love, trust and open up to us. Wow! Talk about learning about strength, wisdom and courage from children.

On our four day break last weekend I went to the hot springs of Lares, a several hour trip up into the mountains of the Sacred Valley from Cusco. We drove by taxi, winding through the mountains into the sunset of Sunday, a week ago. We arrived at the gate of the hot springs in the dark, walked down the path and entered between two small circular houses with living roofs on top. The hot springs were fairly developed, all created with stone. We camped out in a palapa, a structure with thatched roof, and half stone walls, for two nights. I spent much time to relaxing and meditating in the quite peace of these mountains. It was nice to wake up on Monday and have no where to go, nothing to think about, no sounds of roads, nothing but the large rushing river between the palapa, folded into the expansive and steep hillside, and the hotsprings. I dreamed for much of the morning. When I rose and ate some granola, locally made, on the steps of the palapa, the sun blocked out for a moment. I looked up to see a giant condor, with wings fully oustretched, floating by the side of the mountain. Wow! It disappeared over the top of the palapa, and I felt blessed.
Afer soaking in the springs with buddies, Crystal and Bree- from our tour- and Brittany and Noah- Americans who live nearby the hotsprings who Bree was friends with before- we hopped over the rock wall of the hotspring area and hiked along the trail that went up the canyon. We passed a few adobe houses and many plots of corn and beans. It was a like a valley, or a large canyon. After awhile Bree and Crystal stopped to bask in the last rays of the sun, and I hiked on to explore a bit more and get some excersize. And some excersize did I ever get!
I walked up the trail some more and it dumped into a dirt road that went further up the canyon. I followed the road which slowly climbed the hill away from the roaring river at the base of the canyon-valley. I passed a few more houses and after a while, the road split directions, ending in trails. Downwards, one path crossed a stream, straight ahead it poured into what looked like someone{s yard, with kids playing soccer, and off the left, one trail climbed along the stream, towards the late afternoon sun{s rays which were still shinning higher up on the canyon{s plateaus. Though interested in the kids soccer game, I climbed the hillside into the sun{s rays. Up and up I walked, along a rocky path along the stream, then up over grassy plateaus towards the tops of the mountains. I was attracted to a large rock further up and headed towards that. After a while, I sat on a grassy knoll in the sun and looked out at the valley. After about fifteen minutes, two of the girls who had been playing soccer down below began to climb up the hillside. Eventually, I realized they were coming towards me. I watched them grow in size as they got closer and closer. When they came near, I could see they wanted to say something to me. Hola, I said. Que tal? We started to talk, they came and sat near me. I told them I had come on a walk from the hotsprings. They said they were cousins and lived in the two houses below. I was presumably sitting on their land, but they said nothing to the effect. They asked me if I spoke Quechua, I said no. They said their parents all speak only Quechua, not Castenano, as they called Spanish. Ah.... How long has your family lived here, I asked, in Castenano. A long time, they said. Hundreds of years? I asked. No, thousands of years, they said. Wow! What it must be like to grow with with an indentity so immeshed with a certain culture and landscape! Foreign this experience is to me, from the melting pot of the world, ancestors from the corners of the earth.
All of a sudden, up the hill started to trek the other three boys they had been playing with, who were much younger, probably two were about 8 and the other about 4. These boys were their brothers, and cousins, respectively. The girls, I found out later when we were playing jump rope, in a song where you have to jump your age, were actually 18 and 22 rescpectively, so I{d be more appropriate to call them women actually. They both had very playful spirits about them. As the boys got nearer, they said, come on, let{s play! We walked down the hill a bit to join them, and they ambushed the two women with chunks of dried animal poop from the ground. It was a mix of poop, must have been sheep, llama, donkey, maybe horse, maybe cow. They ended up getting into a battle of poop throwing. At first I felt a bit like the akward foreigner lady, standing there on a hillside in the middle of a poop war. It didn{t take me long though, to pick up a piece of dried cake myself, and chuck it with fury and might at the eight year old boy. It turned into an all out good natured war of poop throwing, boys against girls, so to speak. The boys had quite a tactic, they would retreat, gather ammunition and then charge, with hollering noises and intent faces. The four year old was especially quite fierce. They would duck and dodge the oncoming pellets and chunks with dexterity, and had quite good aim at throwing. We made our way back up the hill, gathering more ammunition all along the way. It was quite fun and I was amazed at how fierce and yet good natured the way this family played together.
Eventually, we retreated to a high up spot and one of the women called truce. She said sit and rest awhile. We sat for about two minutes, they boys joined us, and then they decided we would next play a game of tag, running down the hillside to the flat grass outside their house. They did a thing like einee'minee miney mo, all in spanish, of course, eliminating one person each time, until at last one was left. This person was {it} and we all ran down the hillside. I got tagged a few times, and tagged others. I{ve never ran so fast down a hillside. At one point I looked in front of me and saw that I was mid air jumping off a small cliff. Wow! I landed just fine and kept running.
When we got to the bottom, I was the one it. The game was called off, and they said sit and rest. About two seconds later, they said, let{s play soccer! That sounded like a great idea! One of them went to look for a soccer ball, not finding it after asking the neighbor, she asked me, do you know how to play {asldkfj- a word I didn{t recognize}}??? I{m not sure, I said. Ah, then we will teach you, she said. They pullled out a long rope and one held each end. We play jump rope games for about an hour, I loved to hear the songs they sang. If you were jumping and got the rope stuck, you would switch to swinging one of the sides. These kids were all quite fantastic and smart and athletic, and I felt very connected to them, despite our language, cultural and age differences.
Eventually, we started doing limbo with the jump rope and dive rolls over it. One of the boys was especially acrobatic. Then they said, okay, teach us your games. We did headstands and handstands. I showed them some slap stick and partner acrobatics. They were all very athletic and loved the partner acrobatics. By this point the sun had set and we played on in the darkness. I asked them where their parents were. One of their fathers had died, I couldn{t quite understand how, and the rest of their parents were inside drinking chincha, they said. It{s an alcholic drink here made with fermented corn.
Ah, we continued on with the parnter acrobatics, shoulder stands, partner flips, flying in bird and such. Then the women suggested we sing songs, each one singing a song, going around in a circle. The two women sang beautiful love songs for the most part, I sung the gypsy traveler tunes of the Hobo Gobblins and those my traveling friends have taught me. We went around in the circle, each singing a song for about five rounds. The boys sang little pieces of songs when their turns came. It was all very heart warming. Then it was time to part, and I said goodbye to Frida, Rosemary, Julio, Walter, and the littlest one, whose Quechua name elludes me. They said I was welcome to come back with my friends to sleep on their ground there. I said I would love to bring the whole circus to Lares to do a show. I told them I would return when I could, even if it was in five years....
I walked back through the night with my flashlight. Once I was in sight of the hot springs, I sat in a meadow and looked at the stars for awhile, glowing in the warmth of this unique encounter. It was so easy to love with so little to go on. These kids inspired me to play, and reminded me how much I love to play, and how fun life is when lived from one game to another, excersizing the body and team spirit with every step. Ah... I experienced a truly magical encounter. I hopped back over the rock wall and joined my comrades in the hot water. That night we had a fire in our palapa, and the next day we went back to Lares, buying honey wine from a local merchant who said his was the only of such a kind in the whole area. We took the long bus ride, squished between Peruvians, through the gorgeous unfolding valleys and hills to Calca. We caught the Combi -bus- back to Pisac, had dinner, and caught a taxi all the way back to our abode by the temple of the moon, in the hills above Cusco.
Tomorrow we embark into the Sacred Valley. Tomorrow afternoon we will do workshops and shows for the kids and surrounding community of Quoya, where our host-collaborator works on the radio- and will announce our arrival far and wide. After traveling the week through the Sacred Valley, we will have an official week off tour before uniting in Lima with six more buddies from SF who will join us for the second half of the tour. On the break, I will visit Machu Pichu, probably arriving by foot, walking for a few days on the jungle trail. We are avoiding taking the train, as the floods have put the tourist train out of commission, and the subsequent flood of tourist on the local train has the locals out of their needed transportation. We{d rather walk than contribute to taking over the locals needed transport with our powerful dollars. Aye! Till next write! Love to you all.

Workshops and Shows, Incan Ruins

2010-04-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

We have been staying in this guest house in a beautiful garden of an adobe home in the hills above Cusco for a few weeks now. It´s really quite nice. I have had time to explore the ruins in these hills around our house. We live at the end of the road, the second to last house before the Temple of the Moon. Walking through the hills is incredible! There are Incan ruins at every step! This is an exceptionally hot spot for beauty and history. I have had some time to do one of my favorite things ever- explore! On one walk I found a giant mountain of a rock that had tunnels carved out through it, caves carved out and expanded by the Incans, with little altars deep in the earth.
Crystal and I crawled into one tunnel into the earth one day and sat there and listened and sang. It seems like this land must have been volcanic, because there are these crevicies in so many places. It feels great to sit inside of the earth. The elements are powerful here as well, the clouds team up in great puffs like a dragon´s breath on a cold day. The temperature is crisp at night, during the day it can be very sunny and hot.
Our workshop and show offerings are really starting to get on a roll now. Today we went to the local school in this neighborhood. We had the whole school in the courtyard- we started with a whole group warm up of exercizes and then broke into smaller groups for workshops. Each workshop leader does a demonstration and out of this, the kids get to choose one workshop to attend. Alex and I taught clowning, which we´ve done for several other workshops now. We had about twenty kids for about an hour- we warmed up faces first, doing a follow the leader type of thing with different expressions matched with sounds. Then we did funny walks and practiced walking with a different body part leading each time. We warmed up our hands and had the kids practice the range of expression possible with the hands. We taught them a couple of clown skits- I called them ´obritas de payaso¨ which means little clown skits in spanish. Oh yeah, that´s another thing, we teach the workshops in all spanish, as none of these kids speak english. Spanish, and.... we also taught them gibberish conversations which they get a big kick out of. The clown skits we have them do are... meet and greet< the handshake miss, where two walk back and forth attempting to greet each other and miss each time. on the third time the hands meet, and then get stuck until there is a creative way to get unglued. The other skit, I also learned at The Clown Conservatory at Circus Center, where it was dubbed ´¨grapefruit¨- one person comes on stage to announce something, or do an act, the second person interupts, the first person guides them off stage, uplifting their shoulder. this happens twice, then on the third time the first person points offstage, the second person raises there shoulder and walks off stage to the side as if they were being led.
We do these two skits with them. They all understand, and some of them are really quite good at it....
What is a clown, aferall? There´s nothing like traveling around Peru teaching clowning to children to understand deeper levels of what it is to create laughter.
All along on this trip I am learning about my path with circus, performance, clowning and acrobatics, and finding inspiration for where I will grow into my future.
This evening we rehearsed our new group fire show. Alex and I put together a fire partner acrobatic piece that I am very happy about. That´s my latest fire love- partner acrobatics. This is the fourth run of a show of fire partner acrobatics I´ve done. After having the dream for several years, the first show was the bicylce tour down the Mississippi River, about four years ago now. Since then I have created a third generation design of the fire toy. I make them myself- they are leather arm bands with wire that comes off the side that has a line of wick at the end of the wire. My lastest design seals quickly with a thick band of industrial strenth velcro. My first design was an elastic cinch tie, the second model closed with snaps, which both took too long to get on and off.
I´ve also returned to my original fire tool to join a group act- poi swinging! It´s fun to get old skills out of the closet. I´m interested to see if the love will spark again with poi.
As part of our Dreamtime Circus cast training I have introduced the group to the game of ´¨sticks¨which I originally learned from Jeff Raz at Circus Center, and I believe it was also Ronlan Foreman who came as a guest teacher and played the game with us. The circus had fallen in love with this game, and we have taken it the a new level by playing fire sticks, which we amy incorporate in our show for the second half of our tour. We played fire sticks under the last full moon, in the meadow by the temple of the moon, and by the creek that runs near our house.
The game of sticks consists of the group being in a circle, with several sticks held by different people. Without exchanging words, the sticks are thrown in a random order around the circle, caught and thrown again. If a stick hits the ground, the whole group stops, touches the ground with a hand, and begins the tossing again. The number of sticks can be increased. Playing the game on fire definitely added a heightened focus and group connection to the already intense focus this game requires to not get bonked in the head!!!
I am so happy to be around such amazing nature here! Everyday I go on a walk in the hills, by the river, over the rocks and study the designs that the Incans have left in the rocks. It´s unbelievable the lasting way they carved into the earth. I went to Saxywayman, a great ruin that overlooks Cusco. I arrived at sunset and one of the docents who worked there took me to a great circle on top of the hill on the west side of the ruins where there was a large circle made with stones that radiated out into a matrix, like a labirynth. He left me there to meditate to the setting sun. He said, ¨meditarse¨, when i asked for further information to be sure I understood him correctly, he said, ¨taking in energy from all that is around.¨¨
Magic and spirituality is built into the culture here. Things like exploring awareness and tuning into the earth, which have always seemed like fringe culture in the U.S., are a way of life here, grounded deeply in the history of the people.
We have a favorite taxi driver who takes us to many of our gigs. We usually travel in three taxis for the 11 of us and all our gear. Two people of our original 13 have headed off to there next adventure, Mimi and Tom.
We have this weekend off. I plan to go to Pisac, where there is a great market of artists on the weekend, and then to a town called Lares to go to a hotsprings.
We went to Pisac a few days ago and worked with a group of school kids there, teaching workshops. Alex and I taught acrobatics and juggling, and a bit of clowning to the younger ones. We will go back to Pisac next Wednesday to put on our circus show and fire show for the whole community.
Tomorrow we do our thing- workshops and both circus and fire show with another group of kids- I think an organization for street kids somewhere outside of Cusco. Things are on a role with our program.
We´ve done our circus show around seven times now, and have the next couple of weeks generally booked on a tour of the Sacred Valley. We end up near Machu Pichu, which I plan to visit. Then we head to Lima to meet up with more of our circus crew who will be joining us for the second half of the tour, into the jungles of the north.
It´s really fun to be connecting with the children of these communities. It´s nice to travel and have a deeper connection with these areas than the average tourist would. The kids get really excited for what we have to offer. They are exceptionally loving and will often individually come up to us after shows to give us hugs and kisses on the cheek- a common practice here, like Italy... Also, I find the kids very enthusiastic and eager to learn. They listen amazingly well and follow directions better than the average U.S. kids I´ve worked with, despite our directions in broken Spanish. Their focus is amazing. They will sit and watch us rehearse for hours in the feilds, their gaze intently focused.
The people on the whole are calm and loving.
One man who I met walking down the dirt road of our neighborhood said in Spanish, ¨where are you from?¨ I said, ¨los estados unidos,¨ he said, ¨ah, los estados corridos,¨ the running states. Yes, indeed, its nice to have a bit of a break from the running pace from task to task my life in SAn Francisco has been for the past few years. I am rich for all that I´ve learned and all the ways I grew in San Francisco over the past few years, and my spirit is really happy to be here in the mountains, where the hills seem to be infinite for exploring and I have time to meditate and look deeper into the nature of my spirit and this earth- which is something I love to do.

Cusco

2010-03-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

We have officially arrived in Cusco, Peru after an 18 hour bus ride from Chincha. We have workshops set up this week with a small village, Huacarpay, about an hour ouside of Cusco. This town was hit especially hard by the recent floods. The directions we have to the community center is to look for the blue tarps once we enter the village. Their structures were destroyed in the floods. We will travel there each day for the next three days to bring workshops and our theatrical circus show and fire show to the children and community. We´ve set up workshops to teach the 120 kids of the town acrobatics, juggling, poi spinning, clowning and theater, arts and crafts, face painting, and hoola hooping. We will bring our whole crew of 13 people each day. We were due to go today and start the workshops, but due to heavy rains, we stayed in Cusco. We looked at the irony of the situation= that we canceled due to rain, but we are going there due to the floods, and for all the community has been through due to rain. We decided we will do tomorrow, rain or shine, and if it is pouring we will do the best we can gathered under the blue tarps to be with those kids and bring them joy, inspiration and the possibility of new opprotunities and expanded horizons.

I didn´t write too much in Chincha, the first stop on our destination, mostly because I was pretty sick most of the time, between an upset stomach and a bronchitis cough that I developed just before leaving the States. My health has taken great leaps of strenth over the last few days and I´m excited to feel like myself again.

In Chincha, we stayed at La Casa de Mayten, while we created and rehearsed our show and worked with the communities of children that Mayten works with. She ran a community center for children out of her house, we taught and performed for these children. We also went to two shelters for sexually abused women and did circus workshops and performed our shows, circus and fire.
One of the shelters was for women and the children they gave birth to as the result of sexual violence. There were about twenty women at this shelter. We went first one day and met them and did workshops. We went then another day and with the twenty women and the thirteen of us from our circus, we sat around a giant table and had a discussion, well-facilitated by Mayten about our experiences of being alive, what we love, the tragic things we have experienced and what are dreams are for the future. After the talk, we performed our circus and then fire show. It all ended with a huge dance party that was one of the best dance parties I´ve been to in a while. I appreciated so much the depth of sharing and then going into a creative space of sharing and circus. Wow! From that experience I learned about myself that I love the moments when people share their deep feeling and experiences, when everyone listens to each other with respect, support and attention, and then when there is a shared creative experience to follow. Those girls were so strong and full of joy, despite their past experiences. They truly opened and shared their spirits and were so receptive to hearing, seeing and apppreciating us.
Wow!

See more about Mayten and the community projects she has created here in Peru, as well as some photos from our time spent with her here- maytenandtheimpossibleproject.blogspot.com

Here in Cusco we have rented a house for the 13 of us to stay in for our three weeks here in town. It´s an amazing place- a cottage house in a beautiful garden up on the hill that overlooks Cusco, surrounded by ancient ruins. The Temple de la Luna is just outside our front door. Yesterday evening the thirteen of us sat upon it and watched the sunset while the full moon rose, while we talked about the workshops we will offer the children in this area. I´m so excited to be here, and for the opprotunity to connect intimately with the communities around here. This town is a gateway to the ancient temples of Machu Pichu and the Sacred Valley, and has much magic in the air.

Our first Show in Peru!

2010-03-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

We performed our first show this evening here in Chincha Peru. We did a theatrical circus show, with a fire show afterwards. The local kids also showcased the skills we've been teaching them- hoola hoop and juggling mostly. Some of these kids are excellent hoola-hoopers, like Manuel who did four today around his waist with ease and style. He's probably 8 years old or so, but he's more like the size of a 5 year old American kid. The people here are shorter all and all. The ceilings are lower, the beds shorter.
Our show, which we have been informally calling "The Bus Show," is about fourty minutes of theater and circus.
A short synopsis: I am one of the four main characters who ride a bus that breaks down. We try to fix the bus which turns into a juggling act. Alex and I do a club-stealing routine, the "Hat and Cigar" routine without the cigar. Then Alex and Chris pass juggle, I walk through the formation and juggle a plunger, knife and spatula. The bus falls apart, and then we become at the mercy of "The Elements." The sun comes out who is Erinina doing trapeze on a bar held by Riko and Savannah. We are so hot from the sun; I have one bottle of water left; I go to drink it, but it gets stolen from me, and the scene turns into a slapstick routine with the water bottle between Mumu, Alex, Chris and I. Then the rain comes, who is Mimi, and cools us off with bubbles, small bubbles and giant bubbles. But it thunders and pours and we all stack on top of one another under an umbrella with acrobatic style.
The wind comes, who is Karen, and sweeps away Alex and Chris. I meet a Magic Frog who is Rico, contact juggling. He hypnotizes me and entices me to climb onto a bench. I end up doing rolla bolla on the bench while juggling his contact balls.
Bree, the jungle cat comes and shows Mumu, whose hat juggling, a path.
We all end uniting in the final scene, enlivened by our journies with the elements and animals. We do a three person pyramid, then a line dance, a whole group dance, and end with a giant pyramid.
We will perform this show all over Peru for the next three months. We made the show for general audience, and it plays to kids mostly.
Here we have been staying at an amazing house and community project for youth and community empowerment led by a magnanimous woman named Mayten, and her partner Andy.
This place has been the home of our circus for over the past two weeks while we have been building this show. She has been an incredible host and leasion for our circus to the Peruvian people and to the children. There are a handful of kids who come here regularly, and are her students and friends. We have gotten to know these kids- from the first day go around they have had all of our names memorized.

Now I'm off for the night.
More to come.....