Firedance [2001]
by Angus McMahan
"How to prepare, how to prepare?" I stand by my drum and
wonder. Darkness has long fallen. The perimeter torches eagerly lap
up the air, hungry for the tall, dry cone of branches and logs in the
center. Across from me, at the entrance to the circle, the sage smudge
floats thickly, tendrils reaching out, looking for the dancers, the
rattlers, the chanters.
They all have been hidden, ensconced somewhere for some time, but now
they are coming: Oh yes; they are surely coming. In the preparatory
stillness of the circle we can feel them approaching. I stand by my
drum and wonder: how to prepare for this unknown. I am not alone with
this thought, however.
Opposite the entrance 'neck', across the several radii of the circles,
is the large and broad 'V' of the drummers, forming the bass of this
alchemical beaker. We are no mere drum-circle though, nay, we are a
percussion orchestra, 60 hands strong! And carefully placed like to
like....to like: Large and deep drums at the well of the 'V', medium
tones along each wing, staccato snappers at the tips. We radiate out
so: Bass - Tone - Slap. 30 odd drummers from several countries, with
several more countries of instruments between us all. Five continents
of percussion, two hemispheres of rhythm, all the one tribe of propulsion:
the universal heart - beat.
I stand, touching my drum in silence, feeling my fellow drummers around
me in the flickering blackness of the moonless night. And then from
somewhere, from everywhere, from over there we hear all 200 of them
through the darkness: the villagers approacheth. We drummers, each touching
their drum, quickly find each other’s eyes. A wave of wicked smiles
washes over us.
We are mostly strangers, in the civilized sense of the word, but wordlessly
we will soon become closer than many families or lovers. And yet I wonder
if I am the only one who feels unprepared for the absolute unknown that
will soon transpire, the loving chaos that will transform us all during
this long blank slate black night.
Firedance is a mixture of several known things that combine to create
something unknown, indeed something different on each night it is enacted.
At its base is the idea of gathering together 250 or so folks, and camping
for three or four nights up at the Cutter Boy Scout camp above Big Basin.
Workshops, meal plan, swimming pool, vendors, the usual suspects of
these things are all well supplied.
The main attraction here though is an outlandish proposition: Create
a large and elaborate fire circle, supply a carefully placed drum troupe
along one edge, fill in the rest with people, gather at oh, say, 11pm,
and drum and dance and do-what-thou-wilt till we raise the sun the next
morning. Then get up the next night and do it again. Then get up for
the third night and do it some more.
And then just see what happens, individually and collectively.
Who would do such a thing? Who could? 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, and all manner of miscellaneous Hippies and Pagans
were present. The Magician, the Magickian, and the Magus all playing
nice. Grandma and the downtown panhandler side by side, banging on their
drums, grinning like fools. I had a blast, and by next year I will have
forgotten the heat, the dust, the dryness, and the bugs.
I stand behind my drum, hands on. Across the circle the long, chanting
procession files through the smudge cloud at the entrance neck. And
I suddenly have my answer: there is no preparation for the unknown.
There is only glorious surrender. (If you could predict the unknown,
it wouldn't be unknown.) Am I fed? Watered? In tune?
Relatively free from emotional or physical discomfort? Yes? Then Celebrate!
Push off from this solid foundation and lets go exploring. It is only
when we step out of our comfort zones and push the envelope that we
grow. 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. There is no electricity here,
at least in the regulated sense of the word. No beepers, no pagers,
no cell phones, no watches; how will we survive till the morn?
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. A song starts in the now
crackling silence, and the dancers slowly begin their clockwise rotations.
Along the far edge of the dancers the rattlers pick up the rhythm and
begin their ceaseless motion. At the center of the 'V' 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 beaker
pulls away from the shore of civilization and sets sail for the seas
of Chaos: that restless void from which transformation and innovation
emerge. Fore and aft of our swirling craft there is only the enormous
night.
Who brought such a wild idea to Santa Cruz, the home of wild ideas?
The Firedance emerged from the desert, shepherded by a restless Master.
He is Magnus, He is a Magus, but you can call him a Magi. He is also
Jeff McBride, based out of Las Vegas. By day a well known stage magician,
a purveyor of tricks and illusions, by night a mover of ancient energies
within secretive sects. But he seems to have gotten it all mixed up
somehow. Now his stage magic is full of wisdom and truths that connect
with each audience member separately, and his Hermetic studies are now
full of flash and fire and swarms of people being delighted. Most contradictory
of all from a background of stage illusion and Ceremonial Magic is the
startling fact that Jeff/Magnus is not in control here. He sets it up,
we do it together, and neither of us knows what'll happen next. And
what transpired at last nights Firedance is no indication of what will
happen at this one. Each night’s blueprint is reduced to ashes
by the cold dawn. Magnus is not in charge, but he does provide a gregarious
and loving re-assurance that we'll all be sound when we emerge from
this musical movement maelstrom. Magnus as in Magus as in Magi, but
also Magnus as in Magnanimous.
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 lizard shedding its skin.
Emotional molting. These people were cared for with a circle of shakers,
a rattletrap, a human chrysalis as they underwent their transformation.
Hallelujah.
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 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 EQ 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. (Hmmm. Topless belly dancers
with snakes in the middle of the night: Not the normal fare for a Boy
Scout Camp!)
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. 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 that 100 feet towards the ground. Waiting there
for the sun was Magnus omnipresent as he had been for this entire enormous
night, smiling and joking, looking fresh as a daisy. Now that's Magic.
He carried a beautiful, large mirror, shaped like a fiery sun. 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 landed on the mirror and were reflected
straight into our cold and silent circle, onto the dusty faces of the
all-nighters, reflecting off our lunatic smiles.
Yesssss...I kissed the head of my drum, covered it tenderly and staggered
back to my tent to sleep the Sleep of the Just.
Originally Printed in Community Seed Magazine,
Fall 2002.
www.communityseed.org
Copyright 2002. Reproduced here by permission.
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