Dance Wright Night Delights II

Having enjoyed last year's DanceWright Project show so much, I looked foward to this year's performances in Sept. and I was not disappointed !
Thinking back now, a few weeks later, a couple of things have stuck in my mind about the evening:

The excellence of the DanceWright dancers was impressive !
One of my former Jazz Dance teachers, Zafra Miriam, had remarked that Jazz was hard because one moment you can be doing the most contorted off-balance thing and then suddenly in the next moment you have to be as centered and balanced as a Ballet dancer. Well, the DanceWright crew had THAT for sure. Not only going from a 'crazy posture' to suddenly being centered and balanced, but all the way up onto full pointe (tips of toes) to boot. All of that while actually 'dancing' as in 'art vs. a gymnastic-like-technical display'.. wow..

Kat Worthington's piece 'Portals of Grace' with her group 'Copius Dance Theater' was lush/flowing and expressive. I don't know how else to put it. It really has to be seen as words can't convey it (or rather, I can't convey the feeling). The SFgate reviewer described the piece (later performed at the WestWave performance) as 'curious'.. hmmm.. I and the many sitting near me on the night that I say it thought that it was enthralling !

Lastly, the 'Adhesive Dance Theater' of Dexandro "D" Montalvo did some contemporary dance theater pieces (and they did adhere !). One of them 'Ride the Muni' was the comical transition of a very uptight (as in ska-way-yer conservative) MUNI rider letting it all go after being trapped in a MUNI trolley during a 'service outage'.. The confined MUNI car became the 'Club MUNI' disco hall with our hero loosening his tie and shakin' it (madly)... 'Club MUNI' became my personal theme of the week that followed :-)

I'm looking foward to DanceWright Night #3 next year !

Part of me wished that this recent Night #2 could have been experienced by a larger crowd. I ran into someone later who had also been at Night #2 and we agreed that if the show moves to a larger venue, that venue might be the kind of place where the audience would not be allowed to hoot n' holler (and we were hootin n' hollerin' mightly during night #2) and that that might be a loss... life's trade-offs...

The Doggie Diner

Doggie Diners used to be a familiar sight around the SF Bay Area. The big smiling dachsund promised kids a nice meal from the home of the friendly doggie. Alas, the worldwide golden arches and their ilk have done in the favorite local dog. But the heads still live and I was pleasantly surprised to happen upon this trio smiling in the sunset.

Full Circle

A few decades ago a journalist whose name I've forgotten, wrote an article for a magazine whose name I've also forgotten, in which he observed an interesting fashion trend amongst urban Japanese citizens while on a visit to Tokyo.

He described seeing many people wearing clothing that had 'nonsense' english sayings on them. Something along the lines of:

Mighty Vacation Fury

or

Salute to Stigma

or some such. Of course, it did not matter to the garment wearers what the words on their clothes actually meant, all that mattered was that the idea of having English language words or pronouncements on your clothes was a cool fashion statement.

We (in the English speaking world) laughed.

OK, so flash forward to last week during which I noticed this peculiar hand bag being worn by the pedestrian in front of me.

Well, this handbag has nice Chinese characters printed on it.

Almost.

You see, words are not quite right. As any person who can read the most elementary Chinese can see, the characters don't look right until you hold the bag up to a mirror and read them from there. Yes, the characters are completely mirror image 'backwards'

Of course, this condition likely didn't matter one bit to the person 'holding the bag', all that mattered was that the characters, readable or not, were making a cool fashion statement.

East and West have come full circle around each other !

When the going gets weird...

The weird turn pro...

I forget from where I first heard that phrase, but how appropriate it is...

My knee is recovering steadily and I am able to bicycle for ever so slightly longer commute distances. I'm really looking forward to when I can do some basic recreational riding (starting off at about 30 miles / 3 hours of easy riding). My touring road bike had minimalist 'clip' only pedals on it and I wanted to change them out for some dual-use 'clip' and 'no-clip' pedals as my right knee is still a bit sensitive to twisting..

I replaced the right pedal without any problems, but the left pedal just wasn't going to budge with the cheap soft-steel short wrench that I was using (see top picture. I've left out from the photo the hammer that I was using to bang on the wrench lest I cause heart-attacks within the chests of any professional bike mechanics as a result displaying such abuse of equipment).

Time for some real equipment !

I bit the bullet and ante-d up for a professional grade purpose made 15mm pedal wrench. A thick piece of hardened steel that's long enough to provide plenty of leverage. I hook the wrench up to the pedal and apply torque via the nicely cushioned handle...

viola.. With the greatest of ease the pedal is loosened and I complete the pedal change.

Right tool for the job !

Trained Technique vs Spontaneity

I checked out the 'KeKe Palmer Super Jerkin Contest Winners' video.

A pair had won a choreography contest posed by KeKe Palmer to submit a 'Jerkin' dance routine.

The 2 winners joined KeKe and another dancer to rehearse the routine. What I saw re-raises a quandry that's lurked in my mind for quite a while: Technical Training vs 'Spontaneity'. KeKe and Co look like 'trained dancers'. They're tight in timing and movement. The 2 contest winners are great but one can notice that in many places their hands and arms are not in sync, especially with regards to placement. The video was edited with many short quick cuts, I suspect that this was purposefully done so that the difference in the quality of the dancers would be less noticeable.

But, which of the pairs is 'better' ? I'm not sure that I have an opinion. What one group impresses with as far as precision, the other group impresses with being able to convey a different kind of feeling.

Try to compare trumpeters Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis. Wynton Marsalis wins hands down for versatility and technical ability. Miles would never have made it as a symphonic trumpeter, whereas Wynton Marsalis had remarkably won both the classical and jazz Grammy Awards one year. But Miles had a voice all his own and sometimes I wonder if a perfect 'classically trained' tone would have helped or hurt his art.

That's the dilemma with dance, how to train precision but also not come across as a robot (unless you're doing the robot style, of course !).

My Chromatic Polar Invert

Last night I was on my way to HipHop Dance class and noticed that the fellow sitting near me happened to be wearing colors similar to those draped upon myself only 'turned upside down'. How likely is that given this subdued shade of red ?

He graciously agreed to be photographed :-)

Romeo and Juliet

I went to see SF Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet on Friday night. This was a 'complete' experience with a fantastic score, expressive choreography and an elaborate set and costumes. The score, by Prokofiev, is rich enough to just listen to alone. I recall vividly the first time I heard a section of it. In a crackling super-low fidelity ShortWave radio broadcast from 'Radio Moscow'. It was rich and dramatic sounding, I had to learn more about this music which was bouncing off the ionosphere traversing continents to reach me. Michael Tilson Thomas arranged a suite and recorded it with the SF Symphony, highly recommended.

The choreography struck me as classical ballet with modern touches (usually in the form of allowing some torso bending here and there). At one point, to demonstrate shared excitement through gesture, 2 of the dancers jumped up in the air to give each other the 'high five' (very contemporary !).

The performance looked sold out. The only floor level seat that I could get was off on the side (see photo). I prefer floor level seating because it allows me the best view of the dancers use of elevation. The seats at higher levels give a better view of the choreography and better acoustics from the orchestra, but for me it's mostly about the individual dancers so floor level it is.

I wish I could have taken (non-flash) pictures of the actual performance. Which leads me back to my main peeve about the 'old arts establishment'. In my humble opinion, they ought to get with modern times or continue to die a self-strangled death as their patrons slowly fade away. So.... I cannot point you to any exciting and interesting pictures of the performance on a photo sharing site because it's not allowed.

Earlier in the day I heard a podcast interview with Principal Dancer Maria Kochetkova. At one point the interviewer brought up the fact that she is on Twitter. Every time he asked a question about her 'tweeting' habits he and the audience could not suppress laughter because it sounded so funny (i.e. foreign and unknown). I'll grant SFBallet that they now have stuff up on YouTube and that there's a company Blog and an official Twitter account. But I think the next step is to relax the tight control and to allow patrons themselves to capture and relate their excitement about the SFBallet scene with their own media taken from their own point of view.

Socially evolved or not, I'm really looking forward to their next season !