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?

Handjobs and child abuse

Dancing is a bit like barehand fishing: you flail around like a lunatic and when the day's done you're left wet, hungry and tired. It tends to get to you after a while. So when a friend of mine asked me last week to lay some laminate flooring in her new flat I was more than happy to help. There I was with a pile of laminates, a jigsaw, a ruler, a tapemeasure, a pencil and a thumb in my mouth standing in the middle of the lounge. After a few minutes of tumbleweed rolling through my otherwise blank mind I headed for the nearest corner and started making mistakes. Six hours later I was standing on the same spot with a beer in my hand and a satisfied grin on my face, the lounge and the hall boasting a bright new floor! Another friend, with equal lack of knowledge on the subject at hand, had joined me about an hour or so into the job and with a little experimentation and a general gung ho-attitude we eventually succeeded with flying colours. It's very satisfying to be able to say: "I made this", to have some concrete evidence of the work you've done. Returning to the original topic of dance: after the buzz and back slapping of a show well done wanes what do you have left? Abstract, intangible feelings that fade away. Sometimes it's just not enough... Or maybe I'm just not a 'True Artiste'.

Maybe I should have stayed in the army as a Drill Seargeant. I spent the best part of today in London giving workshops to boys aged 12 to 14 the majority of whom had no dance background and even less interest. About a hundred kids divided into four groups with a generous time allocation of, oh, thirty minutes per group. A lot of loud music, a bit of shouting, running, push ups and sit ups, very basic plies and tendus followed by a spot of weird contemporary movement courtesy of Mr Petronio's MiddleSexGorge and they were ripe to crawl back to their respective mummies. I hope I was able to shed a few stereotypes and if even one out of that hundred headed horde found the work interesting and pursues his interests further it was all worth it.

The more possibilities we're given from an early age the better. The more stimulating the environment the broader and brighter the mind? You can't really be interested in something you don't know exists? Then again there are people who go looking for something without even the slightest idea of what that might be only realising it when they find it or when they have already passed it and lost it. You can look for something so hard that when it slaps you in the face you'll throw it away in annoyance and continue looking for it. Such is the nature of man to throw his life away chasing mirages.

How did I end up here? I'm not drunk, for once, nor under the influence of any other poisons. Sleep deprivation it must be then...

Tactical strikes of the marketing kind.

Looking at the times of the past entries I can see a pattern emerging: small hours of the night, mostly drunk. Does that say something about me? No real social life to speak of since I'm cruising in the net in the middle of the night all by myself? A zimmer frame, honorary AA membership (no relation to the automotive assistance service) and a liver failure by the age of 30? Who cares?

Another first night is history, the champagne is on ice and I'm drinking whisky. The few reviews I've stumbled across have all been five- or four-star affairs mostly due to the brilliant 4Temps and the general genius of the programming, all credit to Mr Page.

I've seen the show myself and it's rocking. The posters and billboards are all over the town and still there's hardly any audience! What is it with anything with even a slight whiff of something modern? The Nutcracker proved that we can pull the crowd in, we have an existing audience, but trying to get some new faces in just isn't working and the lovely old ladies are in too much of a shock to dust up their primal urges and admit they actually quite fancy the new stuff. I dragged all of my obscure friends from their respective drinking holes to watch the show and they loved it! There's a huge potential audience in the 20- and 30-something population but the message isn't going through. For the price of a couple of pints you'd get a full nights entertainment and for a price of a half decent lap dance you'd get to oggle a load of beautiful bodies with a bunch of your mates as well! "Challenge that for marketing is... hmmm..." would a little green guy with pointy ears say.

'The Herald readers offer' and stuff like that is all well and good but building a new clientele while retaining, and encouraging, the existing one is the name of the game. Expand and prosper with focus and initiative or shrivel in the shadows of perceived elitism for ever. The future audience is studying in the universities, sweating in the health clubs and letting their hair down in the clubs and bars. Get in there and drag them kicking and screaming to enjoy themselves in the theatre with eye catching flyers, leaflets, postcards and ticket offers. As any self respecting drug dealer knows the first time's always free and when the silly buggers are hooked you crank up the price.

At the moment we seem to be in a limbo of sorts between the classical ballet loving traditionalists and the rock 'n roll youth. The feedback I've got from the few representatives of both sides has been overwhelmingly positive so I hope it's just a question of giving the grapevine enough time to work it's magic... In the meantime I'll be employing all methods of emotional blackmailing and general bullying to get some bums on the seats. I don't care if they hate me as long as they fear me enough to pay the price of the first ticket!

A bit of determination, a beer gut and
the butt end of a snooker cue is all it takes.
Photo by Lexie©