Where is New Dithyrambia?
New Dithyrambia is everywhere and nowhere in particular. It is certainly no nation-state. It was born in New Hampshire, and there is dense growth in Southern California, but there are vines and tendrils worldwide.
What is New Dithyrambia?
It is an ekklēsia, a virtual committee, an invisible ark, known to those in the know. It is a condition of the heart. It’s a love boat passing in the grayest foggiest night. If you can see it, you can get on board. It is the germ of a new world, with neither thieves nor paupers. It is the republic of the ongoing perpetual street dance battle, from breaking to Kabuki, from capoeira to flamenco. Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” We beautify our time on earth, moving through space and time.
Why is New Dithyrambia?
Freedom for all in a healthy, material human community. Life organized around living and loving one another, and not accumulating value; certainly not for someone else’s so-called profit. Responsibility to and care for one another. Cleaning up after ourselves. Leaving no fields polluted.
The Vision
Fall 1996.
The dithyramb is the foundation of Greek poetry and drama, precursor to the chorus. It is the Dionysian mob, lifted; a rowdy crew of freestyling poets, Wu Tang hooligans invading Olympic stadia, only gravity pulling them down to the “stage”. There are no pre-writtens there, nor are they possible, nor would they be desirable, because the only goal of the words and music is to align living human beings with the rest of living existence, which is tumultuous and unpredictable. The rhythms must be multiple and layered, and parts must be syncopated in order to accommodate the surprising rhythms of actual life. As for the words? They must scream from deep down within the pain of mortality and the difficulty of care and the rejuvenating power of love.
I awoke in the dream to my bed in my dorm room in El Hajj Malik El Shabazz Hall, and my woman friend and classmate U was telling me that we had to make it to a certain event. I got up and descended the stairs, and U was already outside and I stepped out and the world was alive and dancing. I could not take a step without falling into one or another of the rhythms of the trees or the winds or U’s steps or—and this is why I am here today, and why this dream has not been lost—our speech. Our words were cymbals to the bass of our feet, and soloing reeds to the sway of our torsos as we lurched and swung our way down the footpath toward the computer center. Try to imagine the rhythm of all creation, one universal ensemble, every motion perfectly aligned and in tune, to establish just the right tension here, between this flagpole and that rock, and sufficient harmony between the breeze and the blacktop street to ensure we hear the car buzzing toward us. I wish I could convey how total and enveloping this harmonic rhythm order was. There was nothing outside it. No leaf, no raindrop, no bug, no mote of dust was outside the rhythmic harmony of our living, dancing world. Our words somehow always seemed to line up with the end of a measure nearby, and so did the response seem also to call forth its rhythms from the world around us, and keep singing in our ears to one another. When we move, the band moves, and we make new music from the new material, whatever it is. A group of our friends bopped on out into the street, heading in our same direction, but at an angle so that we would meet them down the way a bit, but also we could see one another and speak, and heads nodded and hands waved all still in a funky getdown rhythm of happenstance and suddenly they were not going to merge with our line up ahead, but cut across it, and they shifted into a different dance, a dance conveying the actual knowledge of ancestors, but somehow articulate enough to align the knowledge with the faculties of those who needed it when and how they did. The dance had multiple dimensions itself, because that’s what was required. I stopped, awestruck, looking, as they danced scholarship into the library. My friend U and I had different places to be, and we parted.
When I awoke I began looking for signs of this dance of creation. I found hippy psychedelic all-connected notions, of course, which I already knew about, but I could find no living acknowledgment of this dance except that which still lives in the practice of music and dance today. And those practices are art, which means business. They are not life, and they are not worship, and they are not participation in the dance of creation. Art is an inhibited two-step across a delicate field of contract law and electronic digital distribution platforms. We need the real thing again, now, today, so that we can love one another and grow our real community, to nurture and heal our real selves.
This is the vision upon which New Dithyrambia is found.
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