The Dreamer's Life

A stool, a clothesline, a hanging sheet. But for these three things, the stage set for “Woolgathering” was largely empty. “Woolgathering” is a ‘spoken word opera’ directed and composed by Oliver Tompkins Ray with choreography by John Heginbotham, inspired by the poetic memoir by Patti Smith.

Performance

“Woolgathering” directed and composed by Oliver Tompkins Ray with choreography by John Heginbotham

Place

Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY, October 23, 2024

Words

Cecilia Whalen

Mykel Marai Nairne, Gerald Casel, and Patti Smith in “Woolgathering.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

Smith is the star: the piece's guiding light. In darkness, two dancers (Mykel Marai Nairne and Gerald Casel) lead her towards the lonely seat. The dancers sit before her as lights go up. Smith begins to read excerpts of her 1992 book, describing moments of insight and intrigue from her childhood and young adulthood.

Luminous in a long white shirt which drapes past her knees, Smith speaks first of her grandmothers, whom she never met. “I only knew my great-grandmother, who shunned me,” Smith reads. Smith's great-grandmother was a strict woman whom Smith says never liked her or her mother.

Nevertheless, Smith found herself connected to her great-grandmother, partly because they looked alike, but importantly because of their shared connection to “the dreamer's life:” “[My great-grandmother] descended from a long line of Norfolk farmers and solitary shepherds…through her I possessed the soul of the shepherdess. I imagined tending a flock, gathering wool in a leather pouch, and contemplating the color of the clouds.”

Mykel Marai Nairne, Gerald Casel, and Patti Smith in “Woolgathering.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

In “Woolgathering,” the performance, Smith's words alone enliven the sparse stage with flashbacks, images of childhood fantasy and amazement.

Nairne and Casel's duet further evokes Smith's almost mystic stories through mime and gentle partnering. They lean their heads together when seated, rise, clasp hands, and waltz through each other's arms. They pull extended fingers out of their mouths as if to test the wind, then shake, morphing cries into laughter.

Soon, Smith tells of the “woolgatherers,” the people who worked in the neighboring fields of Smith's childhood home and whom she came to view as kinds of spirits. As a child, she would picture them as she fell asleep: “I wandered among them, through thistle and thorn, with no task more exceptional than to rescue a fleeting thought, as a tuft of wool, from the comb of the wind.”

Heginbotham's dancers make use of Smith's movement direction, “wandering” and “gliding” around the centered Smith. Sometimes, the dancers take on non-human imagery: In one striking moment, Casel is seated downstage and Nairne is extended perpendicular to him on his lap. Casel rolls Nairne to him vigorously as she tumbles atop him like spinning wool.

Most of the time, however, the dancing attends to Smith's more sensitive personal experiences, with the dancers' portraying a childlike relationship. The very last lines Smith speaks from her book refer to her own siblings and reveal the relationship created by Casel and Nairne: “It was a communion bred of love and innocence.”

Mykel Marai Nairne, Gerald Casel, and Patti Smith in “Woolgathering.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

Tompkins Ray's music, which is mostly atmospheric with sounds of wind and crickets echoing among synthesizer chords and the occasional folk fiddling, provides numerous pauses, which are mirrored by Smith and the dancers. These moments allow the audience opportunities for the mind to wander, to woolgather (a real word!) alongside Smith.

In a program note, the word “woolgathering” is defined as “indulgence in aimless thought or dreamy imagining; absentmindedness.” But Smith's woolgathering is not absent-minded in the way one might interpret the word. Absentmindedness often implies carelessness which can be destructive. For Smith, woolgathering is productive. It results in moments of reverie, insight, and encounters with the sacred.

In a few different passages, Smith refers to a man who lived near her family. The man sold minnows for bait and was “the oldest man in the oldest house.” Though other children were afraid of him, Smith developed a friendship with him. In fact, it is he who first told her of the woolgatherers.

On different occasions, Smith refers to the old man as “holy.” She says that there was something “blessed” about him. “Here he sat, in all weather, in his overalls, long white hair and beard, keeping watch over the world.” Like the woolgatherers, the minnow man evokes in Smith something spiritual, and he maintains a sacred mystery which Smith describes as “eternal.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Patti Smith in “Woolgathering.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

How perfect that the minnow man was played onstage by a dancer who himself we might call anointed: Mikhail Baryshnikov. For most of the show, Baryshnikov hides behind his floppy hat, coat, and glasses, skimming the backdrop surreptitiously like a cool breeze.

It is only at the very end that he approaches Smith, and that the audience, to our overwhelming delight and surprise, discovers who he really is.

Cecilia Whalen

Cecilia Whalen is a writer and dancer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and holds a bachelor's degree in French. Currently, Cecilia is studying composition at the Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn.

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