Murmuration in the Park

      A group of starlings is a murmuration. Murmurations flow and swoop in aerial dances, individual birds communicating by anticipation, like a line of chorus girls, each knowing when to lift her leg at the precise rhythmical moment. Dancers of all traditions communicate in the same way. Whales in pods communicate.

     With that inspiration, a performance troupe called Lelavision (my son and daughter-in-law, Ela and Leah) created Interspecies Communication, both a sculpture, conceived and built by Ela, of a starling with movable wings, flying over a truck-bed whale, and a community event, a gathering of dancers and musicians of many traditions, conceived and organized by Leah. This murmuration took place in Duwamish Waterway Park in Seattle last weekend, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

      I arrived the day before the event to help assemble the sculpture, which had been packed in pieces onto a Mitsubishi flatbed for travel. It was after dark when the forklift raised the bird, with its sixty-foot wingspan, into the air and lowered it carefully atop the thirty-foot poles bolted to the truck at the back of the cab.

It glowed and glittered in the floodlights, its two hundred smaller birds, lined up in the open-frame wings, twirling and twinkling in the wind.

       The next day the whale was assembled over the truck (head on the cab; tail drooped down the back end),

and at 3:00 two men from a yoga institute in Seattle, one dressed in white with a tall white turban, started the event with a gong and a drum.

Then the president of the Duwamish tribe, on whose land the park had been established, accepted tributes. After that the murmuration swirled and swooped: an Indian mudra dancer in bright fluttery scarves and skirt; dancers of the Japanese Butoh, in white-face make-up, black pants, and white tunics;

a gaggle of children dancing with miniature movable-wing bird sculptures they had made; a large black woman in a high black turban drumming and singing for the Interplay dancers (one of whom danced in bright yellow rubber boots). The dancers were on the grass, the musicians on the back of the whale, the audience facing the river and a swoop of crows over the Seattle city-scape beyond it. Above everything rose the sculpture with the bird's long beak pointing into the distance and the smaller birds in its wide-spread scalloped wings whirling and twinkling against the black clouds that threatened but never produced rain.

        Then Ela, on the stage, started playing his smaller sculpture-instruments, recording their music in a feed-back loop. Behind him Leah pulled a strap hanging from the body of the bird, down and up, making the bird’s wings wave. As the music swelled orchestrally and the bird flew gracefully thirty feet overhead, Leah, dancer and aerial artist, pulled herself into the strap, letting her acrobatics and rhythmical movements keep the bird flying, wingbeat by wingbeat.

Somersault by arabesque she hoisted herself higher and higher until she was just under the body of the bird. Ela left the music to loop along by itself and climbed onto the top of the whale’s head. Muscularly, he and Leah pulled themselves into the open framework of the bird.

They lay down in the body, their arms outstretched like wings. Because they were in the sky and the bird's wings were flowing, the impression, movement by movement, was that the dancers, too, were flying: dancers, bird, whale, and audience in an interspecies communication. Finally the dancers stood upright in the body of the bird,

their arms straight overhead, flying over the trees, through the sky, and on to unknown heavens, their silver-gray and sequined outfits sparkling like the inset twirling birds against the dramatically dark sky.

         Back on the ground, Leah led us all in a communal dance: “Walk. Come on. Everyone can walk. Run. Spin,” and so on, until most of the audience was running and spinning and dancing. Then she had us join hands and led us in a spiral, into the center and back out to a circle. 

        After more dances, and recitations by Seattle's poetry-slam winner, and fabulous nonsense-word singing by a Seattle artist, Ela invited the audience-participants – anyone who wanted to – to climb up the whale-tail ramp and pull the strap to send the bird a-flying. It was surprisingly easy to do. Little children, hardly tall enough to reach the strap, could pull it.

The trick was to listen to the bird's communication of movement, to find its graceful, meditative rhythm – the pull-and-let-go, the beat of the twinkling wings. 

       As twilight darkened into night, we ate grilled hot dogs and continued the murmuration in smaller groups. Green and purple lights came on the sculpture. The wings twinkled with subtle color, no less aerial than those of the planes flying over our heads to a landing at SeaTac airport.

       The next day we disassembled everything, loaded the bird and the whale onto the truck,

and Ela drove it all home to await the next murmuration in some other city at some other time. If it comers near you, don't miss it.