Harriet van Reek - Puppeteers - Rabbit music

Tomorrow I will leave Beijing for Dehong where I will meet up with Dutch artist Harriet van Reek, arriving there on the same day. Together we will do our last preparations for the ‘Puppeteers’ project in the Jingpo village of Yingpan.

I am very excited to be able to work with the very special artist Harriet van Reek. She is an illustrator and writer of children’s novels, two times rewarded with a Dutch ‘Silver Pencil’ (Zilveren Penseel) and she also is a theatre performing artist, and a teacher at the art academy of Zwolle, the Netherlands. I really like her work, which can be experienced at www.harrietvanreek.nl as well as in her blog http://harrietvanreek.blogspot.com/. I really like the pure, humane but also mysterious and strange atmospheres her works arouse.





On the left a construction for one of her performances in the Netherlands.
On the right some strange attribute of hers, apparently made of papier-mâché.
© Harriet van Reek





Harriet is making her first trip in China and after many adventures in remote mountainous areas of Sichuan and Yunnan, she will now finally reach Dehong for our long awaited joint project.

In Yingpan, the Prop Roots program’s pilot site, Harriet and I will include elements of the local folklore about ‘trickster rabbit’ in our own performances and are joined by adept Jingpo rabbit-storytellers. We will stimulate the kids to experiment with various new materials and techniques, such as papier-mâché, but also bamboo and other local plant materials, to make their own puppets and other gadgets and perform their stories on/in our special bamboo hut-like stage. All village people can experience our shows under the banyan tree. Dehong television will also be there.


So, I have to stop with other things and I even have to hurry up a bit: selecting music and prepare luggage and such. I made my last piece of “blog-music” before going: ‘One last rabbit’. I have become rather addicted to ‘rabittism’, my recent explorations into more ‘minimalist’ music. This is music for getting into the business of packing and traveling.

And, I finished a little piece of music named ‘Lots of rabbit stories’, specially intended for the puppetry event and also the first piece ever where I use Zaiwa voice recordings. The ‘lyrics’ are below. We could play it to the children before a show or during a break, or just anytime, as well as to visiting grownup Jingpo people. The piece ‘rabbit theme 01’ is also for the Puppeteers project. Besides these, I will make use of some musical themes from earlier works.

The three pieces mentioned are in the ‘My Band’ players of my facebooks, linked to my www.reverbnation.com/AntonLustig page (which works better).



Bangdvai maumi myo r.
‘There’s lots of rabbit stories’
A song for the Puppeteers project, Yingpan village, August 2010

containing the following Zaiwa phrases:


Bangdvai maumi
Rabbit stories

Maumi zyaq zyaq ge zyoq r.
There’s quite, quite a lot of them.

(Zyoq r.
There is.)

Lyem r lyem, gue r gue dai.
He’s just as sly as he’s an imposter!

Gue mvau lye mai!
He’s such a cheater!


By the way, this will be the last blog before the end of August. Blogspot/Blogger is blocked in China (just like facebook and youtube) so I won’t be able to post any new blogs, if I would have the time.

A bit of diary

I am not trying to show off. I just want to tell about how I am exploring what should be called ‘science’, reading ‘difficult books’.

First let me tell which book it is: ‘I am a Strange Loop’ by Douglas Hofstadter (mentioned in an earlier blog). In order to really appeal to a reader, great capacities are needed: to write in an interesting, catchy and very humane way, like Hofstadter does so well.

“Look! Anton is reading a BOOK!” Yes, I am reading a book again. Anyway, I am trying to explain how and why scientific matters have started to attract me so much in the last few years. I am very bad at numbers. At high school I was very bad at math, physics and chemistry. Any numbers seem to have an instant ability to make me feel lazy. Just now, I realized why: because basically I AM lazy; quite a discovery! (A great discovery indeed! I should remember to explore the workings of these matters!)

I was reading the part in ‘I am a Strange Loop’ about the connection between the primes and the squares, as an example of scientists’ search for the reasons behind regularities, just before introducing the mathematician Gödel’s work. It feels like such matters could ‘absorb’ me, which is very intriguing but also a bit dangerous. Psychologically, this is a matter to be careful with. But nevertheless, I want, and I will go deeper into the mysteries of numbers and their connections to nature and everything! So that I can ‘see’ how crystals grow, and connect what we call ‘small’ and ‘big’. This fits well with my ambitions to once leave all my/our habitual but very limited misconceptions of space and time behind and truly expand my vision.

For example, aren’t our concepts of space and dimensionality based on living in an animal body and our shared past of being hunter-gatherers and land tillers? (Not to be patronizing about the massive skills that such people have compared to us city people.) We still try to measure the vastness of space with the lengths of our arms and feet and we get bored thinking of anything that is too small for our eyes to see.

As I will try to explain later, I don’t believe so much in 'time'. As evidenced; the other day, I really was forgetting time, and not only that….



I have to leave these things for later. I will come back to them when I am up to it. If I would do them now, some things would get damaged in my head and in my life. And I have to do other things, much other things. I have to go on trying to make music for children.

Spontaneity and curiosity are the key ingredients of improvisation. Spontaneity much is about ‘to do what comes first’, mostly also in the most easy ways. Curiosity is something very natural and good to have. Children still have lots of it.


(a fragment of one of my paintings)

Today i finished a music piece named "summer". It is on www.reverbnation.com/antonlustig and www.myspace.com/anktonplankton.
I'm very happy with this piece. I think it is refreshing. It makes me think of cooling breezes during hot summer days.
These days, it's really very hot here in Beijing. Too hot for coffee, and everything has to be done at a slower pace. But then, the summer rewards us with different feelings and sensations.

Stange loops and plans

I started reading the book ‘I am a strange loop’, by Douglas Hofstadter. He is also the author of ‘Gödel, Esher, Bach’ (which i haven’t read). I already foresee this book ending up as one of my very favorites. Hofstadter is a great philosopher, scientist and also an excellent writer.

I will surely write more about how my reading of this book will proceed.

The topics discussed in Hofstadter’s books touch very well upon matters i often think about: ‘What is conciousness?’, ‘What is an ‘I’ or ‘self?’ It is already more than clear to me that a human being operates (or tries to do so) on what seem to be much different layers, neuro-physiologically, chemically and obiously in many more ways.

Could my music and paintings help people become more open and aware to the delicate complicatednesses of experience? At least this is what I most of all would like to achieve. I want to make pure-hearted, spontaneous explorations into as different sides of ‘self’ as possible. I make spontaneous immense cuts through cakes of a few meters high and then clearly expose the layers on the fresh cutting edges.

Imagine that for a few seconds or even longer you are totally seized by tone scales, as if what happens on the different tones, that seem to float almost in empty space, is a complete world of itself. Would such not help becoming more aware of different levels or functions of oneself? Imagine experiences like that, in the same way as standing with each of your feet on different chords or notes or color intervals, you could distinguish between much different ways of ‘hearing’ that you find yourself doing more or less simultaneously. The music/art could also help you to be able to distinguish more different kinds of ‘seeing’. Would all thus not stimulate curiousness about what really is your ‘self’?

I don't think any hurry should be involved in this, but really, i really like the process of slowly becoming aware and slowly becoming more able to put down the 'common facts' that blind you and me, our conditionings, our limited education and our superstitions, things that bore us but that we cause ourselves, etc. and understand that life is really amazing and that there are mysteries and matters worth researching in everything around and in us.

things to do (short term):
• finish the music for a friend’s short film
• finish an application for linguistic fieldwork with the Jingpo
• finish the latest pieces of music and post them on the internet as “BLOG MUSIC”

for the upcoming puppetry event (early August) with Jingpo children:
• get used to editing/composing music on my laptop instead of my big computer, find a reasonable set of themes
• get used to hand puppets (not necessarily as a ventriloquist)
• some networking and organizing





A Webpage for the Prop Roots Program
Around the day i published this blog i also started a webpage on facebook specially for our Prop Roots Program and my other public activities. (It is also accessible for people that don't have a facebook account.) This is the link:
www.facebook.com/PropRoots