By: Angus McMahan Darkness has long fallen. In a three-sided natural amphitheater, 60 drummers wait patiently. Laid out like a percussion orchestra along one edge of the large ritual circle we stand by our various drums, hands on, feeling the impending rhythms before they have begun. We are mostly strangers, in the civilized sense of the word, but wordlessly we will soon become closer than many families or lovers. The tall pine trees along the rim of the amphitheater seem to flicker and move in the light from the torches around the perimeter of the circle. The torches seem to sense their purpose. They are hungry for the tall, dry cone of branches and logs in the center of the circle. They eagerly lap up the air and their snap and crackle is the only sound in the night. Beneath the chatter of the torches there is another sound. Low, distant, but drawing nearer. The dancers are slowly approaching. In the preparatory stillness of the circle we can feel them coming as much as hear them. We drummers quickly find each other's eyes. Wicked smiles flash back and forth amongst us. Across the circle the long, chanting procession files through the smudge cloud at the entrance. There are 250 people here, in silence, at the witching hour, and nobody is sure what is going to happen between now and then, between the dark and the light. That is Adventure. And then four blazing torches are brought from the four cardinal directions and they are plunged deeply into the center. Gentle people, we have a fire! Start your engines, we have liftoff. In the now crackling silence a single voice begins a song. Other voices join in. The dancers pause, measuring the song, and then slowly begin clockwise rotations around the fire. Hair swinging, hips swaying, feet bathing themselves in the dust; shoulders twisting, faces meditative, hands and arms telling and re-telling the story of creation: The timeless joy of simply allowing your body to move as it will. Along the far edge of the dancers the many rattlers pick up the rhythm and begin their ceaseless motions. The jun-juns pick out the bottom rhythm and begin measuring it out. The djembes layer in a syncopated middle, and the congas and doumbeks flash around the top. The dancers respond to the drum, and the drums respond to the dancers. Chemistry and Physics take place, and Time goes away. It is replaced by a succession of moments, an endless series of nows. And our alchemical beaker pulls away from the shore of civilization and sets sail for the seas of loving chaos: that restless void from which transformation and innovation emerge. Fore and aft of our swirling craft there is only the enormous night. Tonight we will dance and chant and rattle and sing and drum around the fire until the morning sun touches the circle. And tomorrow evening we will do it again; the next night, and the next. The Firedance festival in Santa Cruz, California has many attractions - the pool, the workshops, the vendors - but the all night drum and dance is the core of the festival. I am amazed that so many people from so many walks of life have chosen to surrender themselves to the absolute unknown that will transform us all during this long, moonless, slate black night. Who would do such a thing? Who would want to? All sorts of people from what I saw: children, elderly folks, teenagers and whole families were there, moving and whapping for as long as they could. I saw several paths cross that don't normally do so: Wiccans, Rainbow Gatherers, Ceremonial Magicians, Burning Man Techno Primitives, Desk Jockeys, Drop Outs, Suits, Soccer Moms and all manner of miscellaneous Hippies and Pagans, were present. Grandma and the downtown panhandler side by side, banging on their drums, grinning like fools. To spend four nights in the forest as our primeval ancestors did is the reason why all of these different people are here. Now. For it is only when we step out of our comfort zones and push the envelope that we grow. The rhythms grow. The dancers whirl. The fire itself dances, fed by our energies as much as the wood brought by its attendants. The tempo swells. Between the circle of dancers and the 'V' of the drummers a triangular pocket emerges. It is the cross fade between the music and the movement, the everyone's-land where anyone can step up and testify for a time. Dancers step in to inspire the drummers. Drummers step in to the pocket to propel the dancers. The tempo |
retracts back to whatever it needs to be, and the churning syncopation continues on for however long it will. Then, silence. The fire takes the lead for a time. Then another song or chant from the circle, which the drums will then pick up and we're off again. Somewhere along in the night however, the party took a deeper turn. It's hard to say when; we were in radial time. In the still of the night perhaps, some transformations occurred. A dancer would suddenly careen off and collapse, crying into the dust, flinging away excess baggage, false assumptions, lingering guilt, a rattle, parental expectations, co-dependencies, and lousy boyfriends, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. Emotional molting. These people were cared for with a circle of shakers, a rattletrap, a human chrysalis as they underwent their transformations. After that though, the real work began for the rest of us. Our core tribe of 250 was down to about 100, as the sensible folks had long since gone off to bed, and the early risers had not yet shown. Dawn showed no signs of coming anytime soon, and perhaps not at all. The smell of sweat - new, cooled and then refreshed - settled around the circle. The drummers drummed and the dancers danced, and the drummers danced and the dancers drummed, but one could feel that our collective wheels were slowly coming off. Deprived of a watch, I got very into astronomy about then. (Not transformation, but regression: A hominid can always find a clock of some sort.) There was no moon that night, but I watched Venus come and go across the sky, I watched the Pleiades make their way over our circle, and I watched Orion's belt as it hunted across the sky. I started to lose it. I would be playing a particular pattern on my drum, gray out, and then snap back playing a completely different pattern, which nonetheless fit perfectly. Wild. My eyes got really tired from the brightness of the fire and the darkness of everything else, and so everything started to get bright or dim to shifting degrees. My hearing too started to fiddle with its own balance and volume as it slowly overloaded on the ceaseless loudness of it all. At one point I remember asking myself: "Am I really seeing a topless belly dancer with a snake wrapped around her? Yes. I guess I am. But am I seeing two belly dancers with snakes? Sure looks that way. Okay, but am I seeing three live snakes right now?" And I do believe I was. Sometime eons later, as I came back to awareness and found myself dancing in the circle with a rattle, I saw the outline of a tree at the Eastern end of the circle, on the small ridge above our natural amphitheater. It took me a few more revolutions until my freshly primitive brain registered that the only way I could be seeing the outline of a tree is if it had light coming from behind it. Light! From another source! We did it! But oh, there is such a stretch of time between false dawn and the actual sun entering the circle. No matter though; strictly a case of endgame. We were re-energized now, and the party began anew. Pre-dawn cast a strangely blue light on the world (or perhaps my poor rods and cones had run out of red), but I enjoyed the novelty of seeing the color spectrum from the side, as it reloaded for another Technicolor day. Less enjoyable was seeing my brothers and sisters in this most unforgiving of casts. Why we looked as bad as if we had stayed up all night drumming and dancing! But the wicked smiles of the drummers had returned. The sauciness of the dancers was back. Now the celebration could begin. I watched my friends the stars wink out one by one. I saw the trees turn green again. I watched the fire happily die down. I ignored the steady, throbbing ache in my hands. The circle again filled up with early risers. I saw the sky turn gray, then white, then blue. And I saw the blessed sunlight kiss the top of that Eastern tree, and slowly make its way down those 100 feet towards the ground. The dancers crowded the side of the circle, arms upraised, feet stomping. The drummers thundered out the final climax, and finally, finally were silent. And the first rays of morning crept into our silent circle, onto the dusty faces of the all-nighters, reflecting off our lunatic smiles. I kissed the head of my drum, covered it tenderly and we all staggered back to the camp, to civilization, to the modern age, to our tents to sleep exhausted, satisfied sleep. But tomorrow night we would be back.
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