Photo: Dina Litovsky.
Román Baca leads rehearsal on the deck of the Intrepid, the aircraft carrier turned museum on the Hudson River.
The wars that have been fought in my lifetime sometimes seem to have been necessary and inevitable. Most often, not. As the young people head off, I always think about how their lives will have been warped if they get back. It seems so wrong. And right now the services we’ve promised them are being slashed.
Fortunately, there are efforts at healing that forge ahead. One such program involves ballet.
Brian Seibert writes at the New York Times, “When Román Baca was serving as a Marine in Iraq in 2005, he didn’t tell many people what kind of work he had done before the war. He had tried that in boot camp, and it hadn’t gone well. So when his best friend in the platoon asked him why he seemed so interested in local dance practices, he hesitated before admitting the truth: He was a ballet dancer.
“Baca’s friend wasn’t bothered by the revelation. So Baca told him his crazy idea: to translate their wartime experiences into dance.
“Eventually, that crazy idea became Baca’s life. With his wife, Lisa Fitzgerald, he founded Exit12 Dance Company, which makes and performs works about military experience. What started as a way for Baca to deal with his trauma has expanded into a mission to help other veterans deal with theirs — through dance.
“In recent weeks, a group of veterans and family members of veterans, ranging in age and physical ability, has been gathering in the belly of the U.S.S. Intrepid, an aircraft carrier turned museum on the Hudson River. Using various improvisational exercises, they have been creating a dance work [to] perform on May 30 on the ship (on the flight deck, weather permitting). More important than that performance, though, is the process.
“Baca sees the workshops as a corrective for military training. ‘To make a person respond immediately to orders and commit acts of violence, military training changes your identity,’ he said. ‘It removes everything that defines a person’ — your clothing, your haircut — ‘and then it changes you through physical exercises, repetitive motion and powerful brain-body connections.’
“Baca, who has been leading these workshops since 2011, recalled a moment from one: Everett Cox, a Vietnam War veteran who had kept away from everything military for decades, responded to a prompt of action verbs by expertly stabbing and slashing with an invisible bayonet. His long-unused training was intact in muscle memory.
“Another time, Baca was choreographing a military exercise sequence and directed his dancers to yell ‘kill’ with every motion. When Fitzgerald questioned if that creative decision might have been a bit much, Baca explained that he was only being accurate: Coupling all actions with the word ‘kill’ was part of boot camp.
” ‘That’s absolutely needed when you are in uniform,’ he said. ‘But what do you do with that after you get home?’
“The workshops use physical exercises to help restore what Baca, borrowing a term from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, called narrative identity. ‘You start to tell people who you are and parts of your story and then you listen to others do the same,’ he said.
“ ‘A lot of trauma survivors will say that you never fully heal,’ he added. But as evidence of how the process can work, he pointed to the experience of Cox, who returned from service in Vietnam feeling so guilty and ashamed that he did not consider himself a veteran. ‘I lost my mind in Vietnam’ is how Cox put it to me.
“For nearly 40 years, Cox, who took drugs and attempted suicide, tried to lock away what had happened. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic; one psychiatrist told him he was incurably insane. Then, in 2010, he attended a retreat for veterans at the Omega Institute, a holistic wellness center in the Hudson Valley. ‘It changed my life,’ he said. For the first time, he began to talk about his wartime experiences, and to write about them, and to cry. …
“ ‘If you’re holding a war in, it takes a lot of energy,’ he said. ‘And if you want to loosen that up, it also takes a lot of energy.’ ”
I so admire Baca, who against what seems to me like very long odds, keeps working hard to bring these damaged veterans back to life.
More at the Times, here.
Photo: Diana Markosian / Magnum Photos
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