Author: Danielle Schmidt

I was a baby and my mom was bouncing me on her knee to Billy Joel’s “The River of Dreams.” This is my first memory. Now, it may mean that I was conditioned to love the musician, but I don’t care. I just do. I love his voice and piano skills and brooding album cover gazes. After my first heartbreak, I listened to “And So It Goes” to complement the pain, and then, “Summer, Highland Falls” to get over it. As I was leaving home to enter my first year of college, I blasted “Movin’ Out” sporadically throughout the three-hour car ride. I have “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” on repeat whenever I cook spaghetti.  So many beautiful chords, so much lyric to life applicability. Needless to say, a motto of mine has always been: if you insult Billy Joel, I insult you . . . until a situation I found myself in this Tuesday.

Once a week, my French service group and I visit Freedom House in Detroit, which is a shelter for survivors of persecution who are seeking asylum in the United States and Canada. Many of the residents are from Francophone countries in Africa, so we help them improve their English. This is something I really enjoy doing. All of the people with whom I work are some of the kindest I’ve ever met in my life. They are so eager to learn that it is inspiring. One of the residents, though, I have always found to be a bit challenging to talk to. He was a pastor in Cameroon and if you even mention the words “Judaism” or “Islam,” he will immediately scoff and begin explaining why Christianity is better.

As part of my lesson this week, I had my group fill in the missing lyrics to “Piano Man” on a worksheet I created. He began giving me a sermon about how anti-God this song is. Essentially, he was saying that the characters shouldn’t be going to a bar to forget their problems, they should be going to church to have Jesus forgive their sins and aid in the soul-reparation process.

I couldn’t believe it and didn’t know how to respond. Of course, part of me instinctively wanted to resort to one of my go-to lines whenever I meet someone who doesn’t share my terrific taste in music: “You don’t like Billy Joel? Well, your sweater is ugly.” But, with him, I found that I could not physically force any insult or even subtle, passive aggressive statement from my mouth. When my volunteer group went to an orientation, we were told not to ask what the residents were there for, but the leader of the session made it very clear that they were all fleeing from some serious hell.

In the liberal paradise of Ann Arbor, I find that is easy to look down on people who are overtly religious. While this is certainly justified in cases where a group uses religion to oppress others, it is not when you are judging someone who uses it as a source of personal hope. This man at Freedom House isn’t privileged. He is trying to find security in a foreign country from the persecution he faces at home. Yes, his apparent dislike of other religions isn’t right, but me arguing with him about the legitimacy of his faith when it plays such an important role in his life would be mistaken as well. And you know what they say about two wrongs.

He finds comfort in Christianity. Good for him. I find comfort in spaghetti and Billy Joel music. Good for me. Whatever works for you, just do it. Become the practitioner of any religion you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, because the world is often a harsh, cold, terrifying, and unfair place in which to live. Help yourself find some sense of peace, “just the way you are.”

Growing up, I had always wanted to be one of those classy people who loved going to museums – someone who would look at a painting and say: “Oh my God, Monet is just speaking to me through these haystacks. They clearly represent the individual’s struggle against the socially constructed ordinary.” The reality though, was that my attention span was nowhere near great enough to appreciate looking at a static image on a wall for any extended period of time.

One summer, I worked as a camp counselor in Maine. I was born in a city just forty minutes away, and I hadn’t returned to the area since my family moved to Michigan when I was five; so, needless to say, I had grand expectations of being “at home” again and all of the Dorothy-Gale-complex-driven feeling-like-I-belonged-somewhere idealizations that came with that. To my shock, it was one of the worst experiences of my life for many reasons, a primary one being that it was so annoyingly, frustratingly, and sometimes horrifyingly loud. Children were screaming and chanting at the tops of their lungs wherever I went, which created a sense of falseness and confinement in the state I had always elevated as being the land of freedom and peace in my mind.

On a day off, I visited Old Port, a touristy (yet beautiful and culturally-diverse) area of Portland, ME. I recalled that my mother had recommended I go to the Portland Museum of Art while I was there; so partly in interest, but mostly to appease her, I went. And, as you can probably guess, it was one of those instances where mother knew best.

As I made my way through the building, I was surprised to find that I wasn’t having my usual, cynical, “Who the hell thinks stacked sardine cans constitute art?” thoughts. Instead, I felt my pulse lowering to tranquil levels again. The incredible sound of silence resonated in my ears, traveling through my brain and relieving my mind of anxiety.

That day, I finally understood the appeal of museums (or at least, how they appealed to me). I was alone most of the time and the people who occasionally passed by would speak in whispers as if there was some greater force among us which warranted respect. I was just there, and I was me, but that didn’t really matter, and it was blissfully quiet. The preserved characters in portraits and sculptures never ridiculed like the teenage girls I tried to teach every day. They didn’t follow young women alone into cabins at night and take pleasure in terrifying them like my supervisor did with me. They stared, and calmed, and aided in the process of remembrance. Portland was the Maine that had been beckoning in my dreams for fourteen years and I felt a connection to that museum. Its uprooted collections of painted and sculpted people were more real than the fake bullshit that was that camp. It was a vital and awakening experience. Now, I’m certainly not saying that I envisioned old-white-man God, sitting, perched upon a cloud above that city, looking down and twirling a beard as he magically induced a revelation within me, but this moment was the closest I had ever come to feeling completely enlightened, spiritually-aware, and secure in the world. I was at home there.

“I miss you,” says the woman. “I think we missed our floor,” the man responds. They both speak in frustrated tones. Blinking on the tops of their closed eyelids is a projected video recording of their open eyes. Although their audience comes and goes, they remain — standing in their restricted space, close enough to touch, yet as far apart as two people can be.

An elevator may be the last place one would expect to find art, but this is the setting in which University of Michigan MFA student, Ann Bartges, has chosen to stage her piece, Remote Connection: Performance for Elevator. She and her husband, Jesse Potts, are the performers. They face each other, both wearing a projection instrument on their heads and repeating their script, which is composed of extracts from their long-distance relationship, for three hours as they are carried from floor to floor.

“Distance has invited technology into my closest relationships,” Bartges begins when explaining her inspiration in creating this piece. “From my home in Ann Arbor, I live my friendships and marriage from my computer, relying on video chat, email, and social media to keep these loved ones present in my life,” she says, “Through my artwork, I examine the human presence of mediated connection.”

This human presence may be difficult for a viewer to understand at first glance. After all, it is more than a little shocking when one’s expectations of an uneventful elevator ride are interrupted by two people with machines attached to their heads. But after some time observing the performance, it becomes clear that they are still people, no matter what projected masks haunt their faces. When one listens to their words and the often exasperated tones by which they are spoken and sees the revelatory pained muscle ticks which accompany them, s/he is able to understand the significance of this work.

“Because the piece takes place in an elevator, there are times when we have an audience and times when we do not,” she says. “We continue the performance regardless. I can’t see people when they enter or leave, but I can hear them and because the space of the elevator is so small, I can feel the body heat of a larger crowd. However, I cannot perceive their interest or response. Whether or not we have an audience, I try to maintain my focus on the potential for a connection with Jesse.” They are connecting through their shared frustration — both holding the desire to communicate intimately, regardless of the distance between them. It is a beautifully created, yet disturbing depiction of the trials that any relationship faces when challenged by distance and the inadequacy of technological communication.

“I am very interested in the significance of a fleeting moment,” Bartges says, “lasting perhaps seconds, but living on in memory for years. Live performance suits that fascination, itself an event that the viewer only has physical access to in the present moments of the piece.” She echos this idea in her work, because although three hours may seem like forever for the performers; for them and primarily for the viewers, the experience is very much temporary. It is a fleeting moment in life — it may reflect a reality, people my gawk, their projected masks may illuminate deeper truths, but after these hours, months, years, etc., it will come to an end. They will exit the elevator and reenter their lives. Eventually, instead of traveling up and down, trapped in the limbo of time and distance, they will power off their head apparatuses and travel forward.

Ann Bartges (right) and her husband, Jesse Potts, perform Remote Connection: Performance for Elevator. Photo credit: Juliet Hinely.

For about five years of my life, before coming to college, I was training to become a professional ballet dancer. I would take technique classes and rehearse for hours on end. I would take pride in my bloody toes and sore muscles, because that meant I was dedicated. Teachers told me that I had “such great potential” and “the perfect ballet body.” A fellow dancer once said she loved the flexibility of my feet so much, that she wanted to “chop them off.” I’m still not sure if that was a joke.

Today, I consider myself a retired dancer, and until a conversation I had this past summer, I had been avoiding coming to terms with why I left that world. My seventeen-year-old coworker was explaining to me his plan to “make it” on Broadway. He asked me why I had “given up” my dream of dancing for a ballet company. I was completely taken aback. No one had explicitly asked me this before. It was a question that had been gnawing at the back of my mind for the past two years, though — one that I had repressed from the fear that I might deeply regret the decision I made to give up my “great potential.” But I answered with the truth: I hated the ballet world with its constant pressure to be perfect and its uncertainty and its dancers that would give you condescending glances if you were eating anything but a fruit or a vegetable. His response: “Yeah, you have to be tough to make it.”

Of course I didn’t kill his huge dreams, because they were important to him, and they were to me at his age. In fact, I probably spewed the same line which alluded to the notion that I was a special breed of invincible. But as I’ve grown older, and (hopefully) wiser, I have revised my interpretation of “tough” in that you need to be tough to understand that you can no longer deal with a community you have grown up in. You need to be tough to get the hell out of it.

Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love ballet as an art form. The feeling I would get when I flew through the air in a grand jeté was incredible. Successfully balancing an arabesque until the music faded made me believe I could easily balance my life like that as well. It was the ballet world with which I quickly became frustrated. The competition that it bred was sickening to me both physically and mentally. When I moved from dancing with a small, local studio to training with a professional company, I immediately discerned that I was not welcome by many of my peers there. They would mock how I looked and danced in class and would send death glares my way whenever I completed multiple pirouettes. After four years there, I recognized that I felt like a stranger to myself and that I just didn’t want to feel miserable anymore.

I was reluctant to stop dancing, because I had the potential to succeed and a love of leaping. However, a daunting feeling developed within me during my senior year of high school, a feeling that I couldn’t return to that environment and the doubts that came with it. Looking back, I am able to see that along with this elegant ballerina dream and hidden within a teenage invincibility-complex, was the fear that I may not achieve my goals. I had dedicated my life to ballet; I thought that I had nothing else, that I would be no one if I didn’t “make it.” I had to leave, if not for the constant pain and eating disorders and mentally paralyzing envy of others, to learn that I was someone without my pointe shoes.

After this conversation I had with a seventeen-year-old who would have given John Lennon a run for his money in the dreamer department, I was able to analyze my own life and come to the understanding that I had not given up on my aspirations. I realized that artistic dreams do not have to be grandiose or full of hairspray, glittering eye makeup, and spotlights. They do not have to be absolute and unwavering — they can evolve and grow with you, never dying, but helping to shape the person you become. I do not regret my decision to enter the ballet world; it instilled a strong sense of discipline within me that I continue to apply to my everyday life. However, I also do not regret my decision to leave it, because I am so much happier now than I was five years ago.

My toes are happier too.