weekend: art partay!
Oct. 10th, 2005 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxSomehow even cleaning my house this weekend was actually about art.
I'm turning my spare room into a combination library slash (visual) art workcenter. Shelves of books. Cozy sofa. One whole bookshelf of art supplies, actually organized. Mats to work on large paintings on the floor. Heaven, basically.
And pretty much all I accomplished on Saturday, other than talking to friends and getting really nauseated.
Friday night I went to see Starr Foster Dance on my own. Sometimes the modern dance vocabulary seems so repetitive - like, could we possibly have run out of new things to do with the body? Not that this is bad, but I feel so jaded thinking about a vocabulary-less dance form like it's ballet or something. There was a piece of dance [Heroin(e)] with film and dancers talking at the end, that (barring the dancers talking, which was just that without acting or anything) was really intriguing. The movement was intriguing, and the drastic shifts, and the use of all these extra bodies (like 20 people on stage). Compelling.
The Richmond dance scene seems to be getting really into this multimedia thing - the Heroin(e) piece was one of the better uses of this. There was a lot of repetition and revision on screen, and some nice moments of synchronicity with the stage.
Something I really liked about our old place was the sense of living in this diverse family community. Seeing families of color walking around (when they came out of their houses) was comforting. Now I live around the block, but on a row of college kids and single women. One kid. A whole lotta white people.
There's an advantage to this, which is that my neighbors come outside a lot more, so I know them - I mean, one of the guys two doors down stopped by to ask for a cigarette during practice last week - and that they really don't care if I have 5 drummers going at it for a couple of hours once a week. In fact, they like it. I would have felt like an ass practicing around families with small kids. It comes with a disadvantage, though, which is that I can hardly complain about their annoying loud music late in the night. It's not so much the loud or the timing, though, as their sheer bad taste. Like that song about "doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel"? Sucked five years ago! They don't even play current crappy music at all hours. Ah! My ears!
They're good kids, though they will no doubt leave UofR to grow up into Future Yuppies of America, who will probably continue to think that the music on the radio when they were 13 is the be-all and end-all of rock and roll.
Yesterday I spent at the National Folk Festival, which is in Richmond each fall for the next two years. It rocked the socks. I saw beautiful Cambodian dance (of the Ramayana, which means of course - Dancing Monkeys! [I should explain that I have a boundless love for portrayals of Hanumon, and these folk were absolutely delightful - I wonder how much the variance in monkey-portrayal from country to country has to do with the native monkey species? Someone do a doctoral thesis on that for me, please.]), a little bit of Ralph Stanley (I really want to like bluegrass), a Puerto Rican/Nuyorican band with dancers, a Cajun band, some zydeco, some klezmer, and some truly delightful Yu'pik Eskimo chanting & dancing. The latter reminded me of the Samoan dude at the Polynesian Cultural Center - witty, cheeky, and totally educational. Plus, a really hot woman in lots of clothes.
The real socks-rocking, though, was just in walking through the place. People doing cool things everywhere, beautiful people, weather, art, environment. And hoopers! Next year I obviously need to just hang out there all weekend.
And then we closed out the weekend with a bunch of our friends at our tribe "dress rehearsal". Whew. I actually had a good time, good enough that I feel stressless and care not one bit whether other people think we're boring or sucky. I felt connected to the other dancers and our drum corps, more so than I have since like the first night of practice.
There's still an element of awe in me when I look at them. Like, how did this idea turn into these 11 gorgeous and overwhelming people? Why am I so... well, blessed, I guess? And I was feeling that dancing last night, finally.
I'm turning my spare room into a combination library slash (visual) art workcenter. Shelves of books. Cozy sofa. One whole bookshelf of art supplies, actually organized. Mats to work on large paintings on the floor. Heaven, basically.
And pretty much all I accomplished on Saturday, other than talking to friends and getting really nauseated.
Friday night I went to see Starr Foster Dance on my own. Sometimes the modern dance vocabulary seems so repetitive - like, could we possibly have run out of new things to do with the body? Not that this is bad, but I feel so jaded thinking about a vocabulary-less dance form like it's ballet or something. There was a piece of dance [Heroin(e)] with film and dancers talking at the end, that (barring the dancers talking, which was just that without acting or anything) was really intriguing. The movement was intriguing, and the drastic shifts, and the use of all these extra bodies (like 20 people on stage). Compelling.
The Richmond dance scene seems to be getting really into this multimedia thing - the Heroin(e) piece was one of the better uses of this. There was a lot of repetition and revision on screen, and some nice moments of synchronicity with the stage.
Something I really liked about our old place was the sense of living in this diverse family community. Seeing families of color walking around (when they came out of their houses) was comforting. Now I live around the block, but on a row of college kids and single women. One kid. A whole lotta white people.
There's an advantage to this, which is that my neighbors come outside a lot more, so I know them - I mean, one of the guys two doors down stopped by to ask for a cigarette during practice last week - and that they really don't care if I have 5 drummers going at it for a couple of hours once a week. In fact, they like it. I would have felt like an ass practicing around families with small kids. It comes with a disadvantage, though, which is that I can hardly complain about their annoying loud music late in the night. It's not so much the loud or the timing, though, as their sheer bad taste. Like that song about "doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel"? Sucked five years ago! They don't even play current crappy music at all hours. Ah! My ears!
They're good kids, though they will no doubt leave UofR to grow up into Future Yuppies of America, who will probably continue to think that the music on the radio when they were 13 is the be-all and end-all of rock and roll.
Yesterday I spent at the National Folk Festival, which is in Richmond each fall for the next two years. It rocked the socks. I saw beautiful Cambodian dance (of the Ramayana, which means of course - Dancing Monkeys! [I should explain that I have a boundless love for portrayals of Hanumon, and these folk were absolutely delightful - I wonder how much the variance in monkey-portrayal from country to country has to do with the native monkey species? Someone do a doctoral thesis on that for me, please.]), a little bit of Ralph Stanley (I really want to like bluegrass), a Puerto Rican/Nuyorican band with dancers, a Cajun band, some zydeco, some klezmer, and some truly delightful Yu'pik Eskimo chanting & dancing. The latter reminded me of the Samoan dude at the Polynesian Cultural Center - witty, cheeky, and totally educational. Plus, a really hot woman in lots of clothes.
The real socks-rocking, though, was just in walking through the place. People doing cool things everywhere, beautiful people, weather, art, environment. And hoopers! Next year I obviously need to just hang out there all weekend.
And then we closed out the weekend with a bunch of our friends at our tribe "dress rehearsal". Whew. I actually had a good time, good enough that I feel stressless and care not one bit whether other people think we're boring or sucky. I felt connected to the other dancers and our drum corps, more so than I have since like the first night of practice.
There's still an element of awe in me when I look at them. Like, how did this idea turn into these 11 gorgeous and overwhelming people? Why am I so... well, blessed, I guess? And I was feeling that dancing last night, finally.