Cristiani Videos to Whet Your Appetite for the Upcoming Philip Glass-Robert Lax Circus Opera

Poking around on YouTube today, I found these two old blurry videos of the Cristiani circus family, the second of which I’ve posted before.

The Cristianis, of course, are the stars of Robert Lax’s poetry cycles The Circus of the Sun and Mogador’s Book, the basis for the Philip Glass opera “Circus Days and Nights,” which will premiere in a live-streamed show from the Malmö Opera building on May 29.

I’ll be posting more about the opera in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, here’s a link to more information about it, including how to get tickets for one of the live-streamed shows. Stay tuned.

Robert Lax: The Artist as Collaborator

I spent several hours recently looking through my collection of Robert Lax books, booklets, pamphlets, recordings, letters, and drawings and thought I’d post images of a few of them. The ones I value most, of course, are those Lax gave me himself, inscribing them to me. But others have special meaning as well. Among them are:

The multi-language version of The Circus of the Sun I was amazed to find in a Seattle bookstore just months after I first met Lax (the first of his books I owned); the pristine copy of the original hardcover version or The Circus of the Sun its publisher, Emil Antonucci, sent me after I interviewed him; the copy of A Poem for Thomas Merton Lax’s cousin Soni gave me one of the last times I saw her (image below); and the four copies of the extremely fragile and rare Pax broadsheet Lax sent out to friends and a few paying customers in the 50s and 60s (which I was able to purchase online before prices for that kind of thing rose out of sight).

Signed pages from Lax’s “A Poem for Thomas Merton,” designed and illustrated by Emil Antonnuci.

What struck me most as I looked over all of these treasures was the sheer number and variety of people Lax collaborated with or simply allowed to use his poems in whatever way they chose. The two most consistent and therefore important publishers of his work were Emil Antonucci, who started Journeyman Press just to disseminate Lax’s poems, and Gladys Weigner und Bernhard Moosbrugger, who did something similar with Pendo-Verlag. But there were countless others: poets, painters, photographers, lithographers, musicians, radio personalities, magazine editors, and multimedia artists. All of them were touched by something in Lax’s writings but also by something in him: a spirit, a way of seeing, an ability to bring the world and ourselves into clearer focus. And all of them found Lax to be a willing and enjoyable partner.

While musicians are generally used to collaborating, most artists and writers create alone. And many of them—of us—are difficult to work with when a collaborative opportunity comes along. Even playwrights, who work in a collaborative medium, often have a tough time letting go of their work so directors and actors and stage designers can turn it into something alive on stage.

A few of the many stand-alone Lax poems printed and illustrated by Emil Antonucci

But although Lax lived alone and wrote his poetry alone, he was a natural and cheerful collaborator. His first collaborations were with his college friends—in creating issues of Jester at Columbia College and when they lived together during college summers at the Marcus cottage. Out of these times—and his later observations of jazz musicians jamming together and circus acrobats perfecting their timing with one another—came his view of the ideal life: not only living fully in the moment, under God, but also performing whatever art or practice you have worked to perfect—spontaneously, in a spirit of love, in community with others.

May we all learn from Lax to be better collaborators and enjoy the synergy that can be released only when we trust and say yes to one another.

Philip Glass Circus Opera Based on Robert Lax’s Poems Will Premiere as Scheduled on May 29, 2021

Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on the schedules of virtually all arts organizations. Malmö Opera, where composer Philip Glass’s circus opera based on Robert Lax’s poems is set to debut, is no exception. The opera house has been dark since December. Happily, though, the premiere of “Circus Days and Nights” will go on as scheduled on May 29, 2021.

Here’s what Henrik Sundin, marketing manager for co-producer Cirkus Cirkör, just wrote to me about the potential audience for the premiere: “At the moment, the restrictions in Sweden is 8 persons. But it’s reviewed every month so we don’t know. Maybe it will be a digital premiere. Maybe we will have 8, 50 or 300 in the audience.

Because of the uncertainty, ticket sales have been suspended and the dates for the opera’s world tour are yet to be set. I’ll pass on further information when I have it.

You’l find more information on the opera, including costume sketches and set models here.

The images above are of the cover and information page from the original hardcover edition of Lax’s The Circus of the Sun (only 500 copies printed).

IL CIRCO DEL SOLE: The First Italian Version of Robert Lax’s THE CIRCUS OF THE SUN

Lax’s majestic poetry cycle The Circus of the Sun is now available in Italian for the first time. This finely crafted and illustrated book is published by Il Ponte del Sale, a cultural association for both Italian and international poetry.

Il Circo del Sole, with text in both English and Italian, was edited by Giampaolo De Pietro and Graziano Krätli (with translations by Krätli himself and Renata Morresi, an afterword by Andrea Raos, and drawings by Francesco Balsamo. You can see one of Balsamo’s illustrations here.) The book is 126 pp. and costs 20 euros + shipping.

For ordering information, write to: ilpontedelsale@libero.it.

For a sample of the book’s text in both English and Italian, click here.

Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan Poet and Translator of Lax’s THE CIRCUS OF THE SUN, has died at 95

(Photograph from ndbook.com)

Robert Lax became acquainted with Ernesto Cardenal through Thomas Merton, who served as Cardenal’s novice master when he was studying to be a monk at Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Cardenal eventually left the Trappists and returned to his native country, where he served as Minister of Culture from 1979 to 1988, a tumultuous time in Nicaragua’s history. A celebrated poet, he did the Spanish translation for the multilingual version of Lax’s The Circus of the Sun, published by Pendo in 1981.

You can read more about Cardenal’s extraordinary life on his Poetry Foundation webpage.

And in his obituary from the The Guardian.

You’ll find many of Cardenal’s books in English and Spanish at Amazon, including a collection of his correspondence with Merton.

The Presentness and Mindfulness of Robert Lax’s Pure Act (part one)

When Robert Lax was a student at Columbia University in the late ‘30s, he and Thomas Merton liked to go to jazz clubs late at night to watch jazz musicians jam. These jam sessions were more spontaneous than a regular performance, but they weren’t entirely freewheeling and they certainly weren’t chaotic. What gave them form and flow was a combination of the musicians’ training, whatever tune they were using as a base, and their presentness and mindfulness. The musicians were fully in the moment, listening and responding to each other.

When the time came for one of them to solo, he knew it, not because a leader gave a nod but because the music shifted his direction, an opening invited him to shine. In that moment, as he blew his horn or strummed his bass, he did it more intensely and more soulfully than he had before, playing, as George Clinton once said, like his mamma just died. He didn’t do it to outplay the others but because playing his best, expressing what he could best express, was the best way of both respecting and encouraging his fellow musicians. Each one playing his best brought out the best in the others.

A worrier by nature, Lax longed to be as present and as mindful, as disciplined and yet insouciant and spontaneous as those musicians were. His relationship with Merton and their other college friends gave him a taste of how a constant jam might feel: the free exchange of new ideas and views, the playing off of one another, the applauding of creative accomplishments. But college ended and his friends scattered. Merton entered a monastery. Jazz musicians were still playing, of course, but the world offered few other models of the concept Lax would come to call pure act, and his understanding of it remained more theoretical than actual.

Until, that is, he met the Crisitani family. Performers since they were young, the family’s eleven brothers and sisters were the world’s leading equestrian acrobats. Catholics all, they shared a faith and an understanding of each other built from countless hours of practicing and performing together. Each had his individual talents and personality but all were serious and sober, happy and playful, graceful and skillful, as Lax would describe them in his poem cycle Mogador’s Book.

About the skill of Mogador, the brother Lax felt closest to, he wrote:

Like the highest art,
it is a kind of play
which involves
responsibility
and control;
An activity which involves
awareness and appreciation;
Its own symbolic value.
Like the prayers
of the old in wisdom,
it has the joy
and the solemnity of love.

Lax’s first book, The Circus of the Sun, was an attempt to show the relationship in spirit between the performers in the Cristianis circus and the Creation story:

“We have seen all the days of creation in one day: this is
the day of the waking dawn and all over the field the
people are moving, they are coming to praise the Lord:
and it is now the first day of creation…

He succeeded wonderfully in portraying the grace and beauty of both circus and creation, but the writing of the book did not come easily. And after writing it, he still felt far more anxious than he wanted to. To live and make his art as freely as the Cristianis did, he’d need a deeper understanding of himself and what he meant by pure act, a phrase he’d borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas. He’d need to make a move, too: from overly commercial and distracted America to a tiny room beside the waterfront in dangerous Marseilles, and then an island far from anyone or anything he knew, in the middle of the vast Aegean.

(part two to come…)

A Gyroscope on the Island of Love

by Michael N. McGregor—originally published in Image, no. 70, Summer 2011

I’d been meaning to call him for days and hadn’t, but that afternoon something made me search for a phone. The same something, maybe, that had led me to Robert Lax in the first place fifteen years before. My wife and I were walking through a small Turkish town where all I could find was a cheap payphone halfway up a dirt alley. Connections between Turkey and Greece were bad in those days and this phone looked especially dubious, but I pushed my coins into the slot and dialed his number. The usual clicks and beeps filled my ear, then the low, drawn-out brrrrrs as his line rang. Continue reading A Gyroscope on the Island of Love