December 2010: AN EVENING WITH RUMI

America’s best-loved poet inspires North Coast actors and musicians to create the soulful An Evening With Rumi directed by John Heckel, presented in Gist Hall Theatre at HSU, Thursdays through Saturdays December 2-4, 9-11 at 7:30 pm, and December 5 at 2 pm. $10/$8, with limited number of free seats to HSU students at each performance, from the HSU Box Office (826-3928) or at the door. An HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance production.

AN EVENING WITH RUMI: Media Previews

Media previews appear here (hotlinks in red): Humboldt State Now, TriCity Weekly, North Coast Journal (Calendar, Stage Matters, the Hum), Arcata Eye, Humboldt Beacon.

AN EVENING WITH RUMI

“Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?

Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.”

He is described as America’s best-loved, most popular and best-selling poet. Born 800 years ago in Persia (specifically in today’s Afghanistan), he was a prominent Sufi and an original Whirling Dervish. Today the poet and mystic called Rumi is a contemporary global phenomenon.

Now his work has inspired North Coast actors and musicians to create An Evening with Rumi, presented by the HSU Department of Theatre, Film and Dance for two weekends, beginning December 2.

Members of the cast: Jonathan Barrett, Jessica Charles, Sarah McKinney, Nicole Umayam.

“Go to Borders, Barnes & Noble or any neighborhood bookstore, and you're likely to find many more Rumi titles than books by Robert Frost or Walt Whitman,” writes Jonathan Curiel in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Besides poetry shelves, Rumi is prominent in bookstores' calendar, religious and music sections.”

“Rumi's words -- lyrical and resonant,” Curiel adds, “lend themselves perfectly to musical expression,” and there have been many Rumi readings with musical accompaniment. But the HSU production is different in several notable ways: it combines words and music with movement and theatrical storytelling, and it is the specific expression of this group of creators from the North Coast community.

Although director John Heckel brought his 16 pages of selected Rumi poems when the cast first met some eight weeks ago, everyone was asked to contribute their own favorite verses. “They shared with the group why this particular piece moved them, and what it touches in their experience of the world right now,” Heckel said. “We made collective decisions on what to include, and my task was to find a form to make this an evening of theatre.”

Nicole Umayam

“There is a community of the spirit...
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.”

“We have a diverse cast, in terms of ethnicity, age and gender, both students and members of the community. So one of our first discoveries was a way to use this,” Heckel said. “At times during the production the men will do several poems by themselves, being witnessed by the women, and the women will do several poems witnessed by the men.”

The cast also divides at times into Elders, the Present Tense group (mid to late 20s) and the Future group of younger participants. “We’ll explore relationships between the groups, and what they have to say to each other,” Heckel said. “At first you have to recognize and pay tribute to the differences, and hopefully by the end of the evening the differences will collapse in on themselves, the way they do in Rumi’s poetry.”

director John Heckel

“We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity.”

There are several longer stories that Rumi tells that will be dramatized and spread throughout the evening. But what theatregoers will see is a direct result of the poems that the group chose, the discoveries they made in finding ways to best express them, and finally in how director Heckel organized the presentation.

“It’s a question of how to weave all this together, so that the evening makes sense, and the individual poems make sense,” Heckel said, in the midst of the process. “There’s a sense of continuity but also the appropriate breaks in continuity to allow things to stand on their own. That’s part of the trick of putting it all together.”

“We have fallen into the place
Where everything is music.”

Music is a theme in Rumi’s poetry, and a very important element in An Evening With Rumi. Though music director Seabury Gould has been wedding his music to Rumi’s words for more than a decade (and recently released his own CD of this work), he has approached this production as something new, and as a group process.

“I gathered ideas from John and cast members, finding out what people want to do and can do—for example, Amanda [Sharp] plays sitar, so she brought her sitar in today. Then I develop music to accompany the poems, and interweave the musical accompaniment with the poetry.”

Gould will himself play several instruments during the evening. The possibilities include several kinds of flute (especially an Indian bamboo flute called the bansuri), several stringed instruments (including the bouzouki from Greece) and percussion (such as the Middle Eastern dumbek.)

“ I try to hear what is the essence or theme of a poem, and try to have the music convey that. For example, if there’s bewilderment or playfulness or some kind of humor—even self-deprecating humor or irony, I try to have the music convey that. Or passion, or pathos, or—there’s a word the Sufis use, annihilation—that one is blown away by ineffable majesty.”

"Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.
Now in this ocean of pearling currents,
I’ve lost track of what was mine."

The HSU production began with a wealth of material to choose from, thanks to the blanket permission granted by Coleman Barks, the foremost English translator of Rumi’s verses in a series of books widely credited for the Rumi boom. All it took was an email from director Heckel, and Barks immediately agreed. His 500 page compendium called Rumi: The Big Red Book was published earlier this fall.

"Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see. "

For beyond the methods and modes of presentation, the essence for performers and audience alike is the direct impact of Rumi’s words. “Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person,” said Robert Bly, the American poet who first suggested that Barks translate Rumi. “When I started reading Rumi, all at once I felt at home. I think many readers of his work have that feeling.”

According to Coleman Barks himself, Rumi “is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity...the joy of being human is uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin.”

“To be working with these words written almost 800 years ago that will be read and listened to 800 years from now,” noted John Heckel, “that alone is a profound experience.”

"Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

For Heckel there is another reason to focus on Rumi at this historical moment. “In a contemporary world where we’re overwhelmed with a vision that all Islamic people are suicide bombers, I want to create a different connection with that civilization during this evening,” he said. “Rumi is a particularly interesting and unique way to increase our cultural understanding.”

“Rumi was surrounded by news of terrorism, just as we are eight centuries later,” noted Jonathan Curiel. “So where’s the bloodshed in Rumi’s writing? Like Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Rumi insisted violence was an unsatisfying way of resolving issues...Sentiments like that have turned Rumi into one of America’s best-selling poets—someone whose thoughts on love and other matters are revered by hundreds of thousands of readers.”

AN EVENING WITH RUMI: Our Cast

sketch of a proposed pose for An Evening with Rumi

Jonathan Barrett
Jessica Charles
Bernadette Cheyne
Erin Harris
Jeanne Kirke
Sarah McKinney
Amanda Sharp
John Trautwein
Colin Trevino-Odell
Anthony Trombetti
Nicole Umayam
Arnold Waddell

AN EVENING WITH RUMI: Our Production

Sketch of floor plan for the set of An Evening With Rumi

Producer: Margaret T. Kelso
Director: John Heckel
Set Designer: Ivan Hess
Musical Director: Seabury Gould
Costume Designer: Jody Sekas
Technical Director: Jayson Mohatt
Lighting Designer: David Kenworthy
Lighting Advisor: James P. McHugh
Prop Designer: Liz Uhazy
Sound Consultants: Katie Dawson & Lynnie Horrigan
Sound Advisor: Glen Nagy
Assistant Director: Colin Trevino-Odell
Stage Manager: Genevieve Angle
Assistant Stage Manager: Coleen Fischer-Lacy
Costume Shop Manager: Catherine Brown
Light Board Operator: Telfer Reynolds
Sound Board Operator: Sam Weingast
Runnig Crew: Lynn Huynm
Administrative Support: Suzan Logwood, Debra Ryerson
Photography: Kellie Brown
Publicity/blog copy & design: Bill Kowinski

AN EVENING WITH RUMI: Some Links

These links are all to YouTube videos.

Brief readings, often with music:
By Coleman Barks and Robert Bly
Robert Bly (the Scolding Rumi)
Robert Bly (with commentary on the 60s and deconstruction)
Naomi Shihab Nye

some on YouTube add their own visual creativity:
Coleman Barks reading
Soul of the World read by Coleman Barks

commentary by an Islamic scholar on Rumi--contains Rumi verses read in the original Persian

a short excerpt, mostly biographical, from a documentary on Rumi

Rumi CD Release Concert

Seabury Gould is the music director for the upcoming HSU production of An Evening with Rumi, but this is not his first experience with the 13th century Sufi poet, or with integrating his music with Rumi’s verse. In fact he’s been working on doing that for at least a dozen years, and by some cosmic coincidence, these efforts come to fruition in a new CD, to be released just a few weeks before the completely different HSU show opens.

So it’s appropriate that the release concert for this CD titled Rumi: Let that musician finish this poem, will be in the Gist Hall Theatre (where the HSU production will be presented.)

Seabury Gould is a Humboldt County musician and storyteller. His CD combines readings of Rumi’s poetry (translations by Coleman Barks) with his music, and includes guest musicians Eddie Guthman and Jolie Einem.

The release concert for Rumi: Let that musician finish this poem is Saturday November 13 at 8 pm in the Gist Hall Theatre. Donation: sliding scale $3-5. For more information: Seabury Gould.com.

Permission Granted: HSU Theatre Project Gets Rumi Poems

Virtually unknown in the West until recent years, the 13th century Sufi mystic known as Rumi is now one of the most popular and best-selling poets in America. Some say a principal reason is The Essential Rumi, a collection of verses translated by Coleman Barks.

HSU Theatre, Film & Dance emeritus professor John Heckel wanted to gather interested students and community members to create a theatre piece based on Rumi’s poems. But they would first need legal access to the poetry in order to explore, select and dramatize appropriate verses. “The whole project was dependent on getting the rights to these translations,” Heckel said.

But what could have been a complicated negotiation turned out not to be. Coleman Barks promptly responded to Heckel’s email inquiry with permission to use his translations from The Essential Rumi, as well as his many other volumes of Rumi’s work.

So now the Rumi project is on the HSU Theatre, Film & Dance performance schedule for December.

“The plan is to get a group of about eight students and some community members, read these translations and put together an evening of theatre, based on the life and works of Rumi,” Heckel said.

Coleman Barks was educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley, and taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for 30 years. At the suggestion of poet Robert Bly, he began translating Rumi’s verses each day after teaching his classes, at first with no thought of publication.

Coleman Barks’ new compendium of translations from the past 34 years, Rumi: The Big Red Book, will be published in the fall.

There is keen interest in Rumi’s visionary poetry of peace and ecstasy on the North Coast, including among HSU students and alumni, John Heckel believes. “We’re inviting the community to participate in this project,” he said, “and we invite their help in bringing Coleman Barks to campus as part of it.”

Media: Humboldt State Now