Perhaps it was the combination of movement and green that attracted my attention; life hereabouts is quite often without either, and of course when I refer to movement I mean more than the minimal perambulations from one point to the next. Here, quite unannounced, was a small grassy lawn, set between an ultra-modern cinema and a building of unknown purpose bedecked with murals. And on the lawn: movement.

There were perhaps six dancers in all - all very silent and deliberate in their gesture, performing to an audience of none. I stood where I was and watched: their movements were slow, but so graceful and acrobatic that I was transfixed. They would break into pairs and interact with each other in small, intricately realized moments of supreme tenderness, and then break apart into what seemed to be random expanses of what finally revealed itself as highly choreographed group dynamics. And then again the pairs would reassert themselves - - sometimes the same couplings, sometimes different.

There were moments when a given individual dancer was not needed for a proscribed section, and would separate from the invisibly bounded arena and crouch by the side, catching his or her breath while the rest continued their balletic course. None of them ever looked at me as I stood by the edge of the lawn, observing their dance with mouth (I'm certain) slightly agape at the strange spectacle.

I find, in trying to set down this recollection, that my faculty of language is abhorrently inadequate for attempting to capture my response as I looked on. It was a combination of awe and wonder, and yet something else that made me shiver at the strangeness of it all. Here a young woman with short hair danced with a man of equal age, her face expressing a sympathy and sorrow and regret seeming much too profound for so youthful a face and frame. She touched his chin fleetingly with her hand in an arcing gesture that conveyed more than I could possibly comprehend - and he then lifted her aloft and her body seemed airborne in his grasp. As they spiraled away from my observation point, a man with a strangely patterned haircut hove into my direct line of sight: his hand twitching, his expression blank, yet his movement very affecting.

I don't know how long I stood thus, watching this silent display. I should clarify that the performance was not without its moments of harshness; for, on the contrary, the more I really looked closely at the bodies in motion, the more I could discern a certain hostility... or brutality... or perhaps frustration. Again, my limited vocabulary (or, rather, the limited language into which I was born) fails to convey what I saw. Perhaps (and I'll admit I could have been filtering this through the sieve of my earlier brooding) it was a lashing out at small-mindedness, at the self-aggrandizingly pathetic.

But it was all gorgeous: captivating and fluidly gorgeous. Until, at last, the dancers with an audience of one suddenly dispersed, as if into the early evening fog that was even now creeping in.

However it happened, I found myself all at once alone again at the edge of the lawn, staring across the empty, artificial-seeming grass at the buildings that bordered it... buildings which were distasteful to my eyes.

I was motionless myself for a time, and then continued on my way, taking away with me the small but vital consolation that not EVERY thing of beauty in this world has been crushed or smothered.

Soon, though, I was mired again in my own thoughts and moods.

Alas.
G6a(4)