Jarkko Lehmus Diary

Time is on our side, baby!

Rather than being up to my usual antics of pouring most of my paycheck down my throat in the nearest watering hole I'm sitting at home sporting Finnish army standard issue boxer shorts (Oops! I forgot to give them back...) and polishing off some half decent Aussie whites.

I saw somebody in the rambling ballet.co conversations being concerned about my alcohol consumption. Not to worry: I'm a highly trained professional!

Tonight I wanted to write about growing old gracefully. That obviously being something I have no idea about yet, nor probably will ever have so it seems I'm the perfect person to talk irrelevant nonsense about it from my distorted point of view.

What brings me to this topic is a rather marvelous martial arts seminar I attended during the past weekend. It just so happened that a man called Dan Inosanto popped into town for a couple of days. He used to train with a guy called Bruce Lee way back before I was born and is the main torch holder for his concepts of Jeet Kune Do. I say concepts rather than art because the teaching is not bound by any strict rules of form or style. It's a combination of ideas of space, distance and angles, and timing. The techniques taught come from a wide base of martial arts varying from the French kick boxing style of Savate to Silat, Indonesian form of armed combat. Different techniques suit different practitioners and situations the aim being to give everyone as wide a "menu" as possible to dip into. With such abundance of combinations and variations on offer, it's up to the individual to hone each solitary technique and to find the most suitable and efficient way of executing it and then to be able to flow from one style to another seamlessly applying the principles of time and space in the core of the concept. The whole thing's very much related to the way I think about dance: just a funky way of walking. A stroll on the open countryside on a sunny Sunday is a very different animal compared to a shopping frenzy on Oxford Street.

Let's reel the wandering mind back in and get to the point: Mr Inosanto. The man is a short american Philippino at the respectable age of 60. He's been training in various disciplines for the best part of his life. For the sake of clarity just think of it as movement. He wasn't ever a great physical talent but the sheer amount of wisdom he's accumulated through his life is instantly recognisably in the way he carries himself. I might sound awestruck but believe you me you have to see him to understand it fully. In his own field he's a superstar still managing to be down to earth and laid back. Every single move he made was executed with such sensitivity, ease, sense of purpose, substance and clarity that any dancer would seem a meaningless puppet next to him.

At the age of sixty what are most dancers doing? Are they still involved in dance? Can they still cut the mustard and open a big can of whoop-ass on us young bucks? If you look at some of the earlier entries you'll find another rare example... Another such person I've had the pleasure of working with is Mr Matt Mattox. It was back in Helsinki in 1997, me thinks. Again the description goes along the lines of intelligence, dedication, clarity, humour and a hefty dose of good old rock 'n roll.

All of the people mentioned above are very much alive and kicking. Much more so than I can say about the vast majority of the people I know... They might be alive but not kicking much. We're all young one time in our life and then we grow old and settle down and say: "I'm too old for this tomfoolery." It's a choice we make because it's the way life's generally perceived to be lived.

How old do you want to be when you die?

Posted by Jarkko at April 27, 2004 11:31 PM