Danny Lopez: An Introduction

by Louis Salazar

The children who danced for the AILDI participants on the videotape were of all ages, helping each other with daubs of clay, making faces at the camera, generally having fun with each other and the audience. As the time to dance grew close, they began to concentrate. Through the filter of the camera and videotape, I could see that the even the youngest children danced with a sense of real participation. One little girl, seven or eight years old, followed the larger group of older dancers, her long ponytails bouncing behind her as she skipped. Another girl, probably not much older, was similarly intent on her dancing, though she was not O'odham. Although some dancers smiled, and the younger ones sometimes giggled at each other, their high spirits did not distract them and they moved together easily, aware of their individual and group responsibilities. Mr. Lopez patiently directed the singers and dancers from the sidelines, through several songs, until at the end he encouraged the adult audience to participate in a dance. They wandered down from the seats, a little hesitant at first, and finally they danced with the children. Everyone was smiling a little, some self-consciously, but almost everybody danced, in front of the camera, behind the camera, and in wide circles around the auditorium. Eventually the cameraperson (who seemed to have abandoned the project of keeping the camera pointed at something) remembered to dance over and turn the video recorder off, but not before several more faces had been made and many dancers had inadvertently tripped over the tripod.

The generosity and inclusiveness of this videotaped dance foreshadowed Danny Lopez's visit with us. In our classroom, as in the auditorium, we felt momentarily included in his community, not only by Danny's song performances but by his humor and warmth. As he says in the transcript of his visit which follows, it is "group things, like group dancing, group singing" that are traditionally valued; in fact, he seems to view singing and song ceremonies not only as ends in themselves but as a means of building and maintaining healthy communities in the face of real problems. He speaks about the difficulty of organizing people to learn, perform, and in some cases, re-discover ceremonies and songs. in spite of these difficulties, he has clearly had many successes, with his own classroom and with ours.

When Mr. Lopez first spoke to us (in class), he spoke openly and joked with us at times. He answered many difficult, unusual and sometimes personal questions without pause and at length. He was always careful to qualify his statements; he felt that he spoke more for himself and his own small community than for the O'odham people as a group.

As we walked from class to the Graduate center for lunch, Mr. Lopez and I talked a little bit about the language of the songs, which varies somewhat from spoken O'odham. He listened patiently to my questions and answered in the manner of an experienced teacher, with several examples.

At the brown bag lunch which followed the classroom discussion, many of us asked Mr. Lopez about his work as a teacher. Sometimes he answered our questions with stories or by reading to us from his students' poetry, which he had brought with him, and which he clearly valued as much or more than his own. In fact, his students and their work were part of every presentation we saw, from our first classroom meeting, to the lunch, and finally at the reading in the evening. Later that afternoon, at the dinner, the conversation again turned to schools and education, both his own and that of his students.

As the lights in the Photography Center auditorium dimmed that evening and the hundreds of voices of the audience quieted, I, like many others in our class in and in the audience, felt expectant and curious. Mr Lopez was the first reader in the series of invited guests and the auditorium was more than full . . . people were seated in aisles and along the front of the stage on the floor. Preliminary announcements were made and Mr. Lopez took his place behind the podium. He began to read poetry he had written and the audience began an acquaintance with him.

As he read and spoke, Mr. Lopez moved away from the podium. The room was absolutely quiet as he sang; the final notes seemed to hang in the air for a few moments after a song had ended. I and the other listeners were impressed to hear a reading of poem by one of Mr Lopez's students about an eagle. As he began his final piece, a traditional story he told from memory, he left the podium entirely and walked freely about the stage, looking directly into the darkened rows of seated students and listeners, his voice changing in tone and depth to personify the characters in the story. It was a confident and masterful telling, mixing narration and explanation. When it was over and throughout the extended applause, I felt much the same way I had while watching the earlier videotaped dance performance... that I had been momentarily included in community of participating listeners, and that I had seen not just the performance of a story or a poem, but a performance with a purpose, in service to a home, its children and the larger community.