Spoken Text from Another Evening

Another Evening, choreographed by Bill T. Jones, was first performed at the 2002 Evening Stars Music and Dance Festival at Historic Battery Park. It included original music by Daniel Bernard Roumain and vocals by Sasha Lazard. It was again performed in 2003, at Aaron Davis Hall, Harlem, New York City, with music by Cassandra Wilson, Daniel Roumain, and Curtis Lundy, and lighting by Gregory Bain.

In the 1970s Teresa said to me, "Solo work is a dead end. If you make a solo then you are condemned to make the same solo for the rest of your life!"

Maybe lovers have it right. While driving across the bridge, I saw two people holding hands while on the radio the president's man was trying to sell us the war. It was a very nice day.

In the West, a group of friends stand around, looking into the distance, watching the sunset. Someone has said:

"If you look closely enough, just at the moment when the sun goes below the horizon, the sky does a crazy dance and turns neon green." I tried this once, but was so involved in looking at my friends looking that the sun was down and all I caught was a familiar glow.

Small boys thinking:

Dariki was about seven years old and sitting on Estella's bed, very quietly, doing nothing—or so I thought. He felt me looking at him, turned and said:

"There must be about a million things."

I said "Where?"

He said, "You know, everywhere."

Growing up in the countryside gave one many opportunities to be alone. One afternoon when I was nine years old, I lay in a ditch along the back of the house and tried to scroll through my future life in 10-year increments.

From nine to nineteen,

from nineteen to twenty-nine,

from twenty-nine to thirty-nine,

thirty-nine to forty-nine and then it became really hard.

Gretchen once said to me that some of us have nostalgia for the future.

Estella had always instructed—as she herself had been taught—that whenever you travel with a newborn baby across a body of water, the mother should call its name constantly lest its soul gets left on the other side.

I remember hearing this as a child, in the wee hours of the night, as we traveled by caravan from one state to another. I thought of course, that she only called the boys.

Recently over Estella's hospital bed, Johari said that it had never been the case; one should call them all, boys and girls!

Recently we boarded a plane and flew to a European city to participate in the festivities around the opening of a brand new concert house. The first evening, a black-tie affair, representatives from the federal government, the governor, the mayor, and various other dignitaries were in attendance. It was an all Beethoven program, complete with symphony orchestra and chorus suspended above the stage.

At one point the music stopped. An elderly man with spectacles and tousled hair proceeded to speak for a long time in this language I could not understand. I did what we always do when an important person speaks and we can't understand what they are saying: I began to look at the members of the orchestra and chorus as they sat perfectly still until everyone in the room realized that he was going to speak for a very long time and then, the flutist began to tap his fingers on his knee; someone else gently vibrated a heel against the floor; at least two people, way up high in the orchestra fell asleep. But the gentleman appears to have been a good speaker as people around me chuckled sometimes at what he said, wiggled uncomfortably at others, and for the most part gave him their undivided attention. Later, my friend who speaks the language tried to reconstruct highlights of the speech. It seems the speech had been about values and the loss of them: honor, language, culture, tolerance.

There was one thing he said that sticks with...