“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

took a copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers with it in San Francisco.

Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two cycles of this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own damn tape!

The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that because he’s a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The “playing department” in our minds was also the “talking department” for counting—we couldn’t play and count at the same time!

When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that by watching the dancers we didn’t have to count because the dancers went through certain motions.

There were a number of things that happened to us because we were supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn’t. For example, one of the scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other on chairs and put this “crazy drum” between us on our knees, with one guy beating bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda rapidly with his two fingers, constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with his two hands and change the pitch. Now it would go booda— booda— booda— bidda— beeda— beeda— beeda— bidda— booda-booda- booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda, creating a lot of interesting sounds.

Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: “First, I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way.” I knew damn well I couldn’t keep track of this, so I interrupted her:

“Just go ahead and do the dance, and I’ll play along.”

“But don’t you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I’ve finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way.” It was no use; I couldn’t remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real musician!

Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, “Mr. Feynman has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let’s try it once that way, and if you’re not satisfied, we can correct it.”

Well, she was a first-rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.

The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren’t many people in the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very much.

Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the performances, we weren’t sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second, that we’re good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was surely crazy! For me, who had never had any “culture,” to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.

We didn’t think that she’d be able to find ballet dancers who would be willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.

The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.

Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn’t figure out how to make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mache were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.

We didn’t offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, “Tusks!” Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!

He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.

The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet—that’s how she entered the contest.

She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left—a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.

She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn’t a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.

“Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing.”

And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.

Altered States

I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in—a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, “Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?”

“This is the place,” the receptionist replied.

The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.

“I don’t think you’d like ’em much,” I say. “They’re kind of technical.”

Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: “I bet you’re Professor Feynman!”

It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense deprivation, and had built some tanks.