Rethinking the Garden of Eden as a Dance Video: The Conversation between Eve and Lilith

As far back as we can trace our cultural memory, there has always been a question and a story. How did we get here? Why? A question and a story about the creation of man and woman. 

I was intrigued by this question and decided to reinvent the version played out, somewhat ambiguously, in Genesis. At first, I wrote a 5 minute play for a competition for short-, short plays. But, as a visual artist, I wanted to tell the story in video form and not my usual flat, 2D image that would be hung on the wall or seen at some internet site. 

Inspirational Points of Departure - The Dance and the Video
I was inspired by Jean Isaacs' Trolley Dances (onsite dances in and around the San Diego trolley stations) as well as dances at the White Box and UCSD Mandell Weiss Theater. I have multiple digital files on my computer that attest to my photographic fascination with these events. But photography is not quite videography.

Trolley Dances 2014 / City College / Ariana Siegel and Jedi Taylor

I had to acquire new capture, editing and presentation methodologies. Seeing movies is not the same as making a movie; making a home movie on a smartphone is not the same as organizing, filming and editing a movie for prime time. Some YouTube videos reach this point of perfection, most do not. Several of the Gotan Project videos reaffirmed my decision  to take this adventure:  La Gloria;  Epoca - Un Tango Sensual; Epoca - Igor Stravinsky;  Diferente; and many others.

And, of course, there is Grace Jones' Corporate Cannibal.

The challenge was how to wed video and dance to the Garden of Eden - as an objet d'art, rather than a commercial song promo. While I enjoy watching song/dance videos like The Pussycat Dolls (with Timbaland) Wait a Minute, my mindset seeks a deeper engagement with the eternal love song.

Male/Female Creation Stories

The most familiar male/female creation story is likely the Garden of Eden. But, even here, there is a question of who the first woman was.

Genesis 27 reads as follows:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. There is no name for this first woman. An interpretation, or midrash, suggests that this woman was Lilith.

Only later, after God fashions woman from Adam's rib, and after eating the apple and falling from a protected status in Eden, do we have a name - Eve. (Genesis 3:20 - Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.) 

This dual story line of two different women being created in the Garden of Eden raises a question about why Lilith, the first wife of Adam, would leave. Why was she discontented with Adam and left of her own accord, and in subsequent rabbinic literature, becoming something of a succubus demon?

Other male/female creation stories abound. One of my favorites is the Blackfoot tale of Old Coyote Man Meets Coyote Woman, each separately existing in the other half of the world until they encountered each other by accident.

Eve Meets Lilith in the Garden of Eden (video link)

you can also cut and paste this URL to your browser to stream the video:
http://online2.sdccd.edu/faculty/jnalven/nalven_compressed/nalven_compressed_player.html

A What-If Scenario
Instead of the common interpretations of Adam/Eve, Eve/Snake, God/Adam/Eve, God/Serpent, gods (among themselves), what if we focused on the conversation of Eve and Lilith? What if these two women overlapped each other in time? 

Here, two women in the Garden of Eden might be compared to Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Two vibrant women at the beginning of humanity rather than two older men bored with their absurd existence.

In the short play that I wrote, I presented the Eve and Lilith conversation; but, as a video of a dance, the text could be constraining. That would depend on the choreographer's approach to translating a text narrative into a choreographed narrative, or words versus movement; semantics versus kinesics.

Also, I was about to enter a learning curve - about dance, about wedding dance to a piece of music, about videography, about editing and the like - and all at one time. 

The Evolution of Humanity - Language, Communication, Meaniing and Even Bodily Form and Function

When we look through the prism of archaeology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary genetics and like-minded sciences, the search is for actual connections and processes that tie modern man to ancient forbears. Those points in time are measured in the millions of years, although more recent benchmarks are appealing for homo sapiens sapiens, especially with respect to human language, advanced toolmaking and the beginnings of agriculture. 

But when was the Garden of Eden? As a metaphor for human evolution, the actual years are unimportant. Instead, we think about those human benchmarks - like sin - that resulted from being sent out of the Garden.

Then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A Paradise within thee, happier far ...They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way.
John Milton, Paradise Lost

So, how would one construct a conversation between Eve and Lilith - part metaphor and part evolutionary growth in human communication? 

For this video dramatization, I imagined a non-verbal conversation - a conversation that existed before language triumphed over the physicality of relationship.  Dance and music are especially good to imagine such a conversation between the first women. Harkening to a Schopenhauerian perspective, it is music - music without words, perhaps with barks and howls - that reaches deep into our connecting to the force of nature, before with idealize our representations in words. 

That became the framework of instructions to the dancers. Now you meet; now you hear Adam somewhere about in the Garden; now recognizing the fecundity of womanhood; now recognizing the taking leave (by Lilith).  Cues that called out non-verbal interaction.

So, part of the solution to my learning curve in making a dance video was to create a conceptual framework for the dancers to structure their movement, filming the same sequence in different ways - and once with painted faces akin to the way in which the Omo tribes of Ethiopia decorate themselves. 

Editing Towards Perfection
One quickly appreciates that having the elements of a video (or any object composed of pieces) requires imaginative editing. Cutting and pasting is much more than simply cutting and pasting. Aristotle was acutely aware that the difference between a bunch of bricks and a house (with the same size and number of bricks) was form. That is what an architect brings to the realization of plain versus beautiful buildings. The same with building a dance video. 

With the assistance of David Giberson at Miramar Community College, I worked towards learning the elements of a video editing program and while concurrently building the video. With my long-term working with Photoshop, I looked for ways to make a compelling visual flow that synced to a musical sentiment. Since there was little opportunity to delve into special effects, I opted for montaging the several filmed sequences together, slightly offset in timing to create a multiple and asymmetrical communication between Eve and Lilith.

What does that mean? That means watch the video and test its coherence and persuasiveness as a video objet d'art.

For the future:  Watch for a quite different approach to the conversation between Eve and Lilith, with a dash of Adam.  To be performed in Balboa Park as part of its centennial celebration and choreographed by Jean Isaacs.