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

Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.

Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was a professor of physics, Nobel Prize-winner, or any other baloney. I didn’t want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it’s not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all. I didn’t want to do it if I was a physics professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had composed.

So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out. She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up in her mind and said, “OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that …”

We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph’s house. We played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She 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.