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Post Ballet Performance — Z Space

November 22, 2014

This was not to my taste.  It was five short dance performances to mostly live musical accompaniments by The Living Earth Show.  The dancing for the most part lacked emotional content, did not sync with the sound tracks, and had a sameness to it that seemed to lack imagination.

The first one, Flutter, was three dancers: two males and one female, in two skits.  The first was to hand clapping accompaniment provided by The Living Earth Show.  The second was to a solo violin performance of the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita in D minor played live on stage by Kevin Rogers.  Rogers did a nice job on the Sarabande.   He didn’t really need the dancers and they did not add much to his performance.  I could see immediately that these dancers were not at the highest level of technical proficiency, and this dance they were asked to perform was not of great interest.

Sixes and Sevens was a solo performance by Tetyana Martyanova, accompanied by a chaotic, confusing, mishmash of noisy, monotonous soundtracks that do not fit together at all.  Tetyana is a tall, beautiful girl, who is a very fine dancer — probably the best dancer on the stage tonight.  It would have been much more effective if she had danced to silence instead of that awful soundtrack.

Yours is Mine showed some promise.  It was three males in various antagonistic, somewhat homoerotic configurations.  This one had the most discernible emotional content of all of the vignettes, and the most meaningful interactions between the dancers.  If it had continued developing the male-male themes it might have been good, but about midway through a female dancer enters.  Her entry destroys the momentum of the male-male interactions, but she does not provide a new focus for the skit.  Instead the dance becomes diffuse and sort of melts into a bland mass.  The woman, qua woman, is ignored and she almost becomes one of the guys.  Except she is not one of the guys.  In fact, there are no guys any more.  They are just dancers cavorting around without any real purpose.

North Pacific Garbage Patch is a musical interlude performed by The Living Earth Show.   This band consists of two guys, the one artist bashes rambunctiously on a set of drums while the other artist blasts an electric guitar tuned to sound like a cross between a snow blower, a table saw, and sometimes a freight train.  I couldn’t have chosen a better title for this myself.  I think it perfectly captures the flavor of this performance.

Tassel, the final vignette, comes the closest to being interesting.  Five dancers plus The Living Earth Show in an energetic romp that uses the entire stage.  One begins to notice as the dancers blitz back and forth that they are each taking off their clothes a piece at a time.  It becomes an incipient group strip tease that draws one subtly in.  But they don’t have the nerve to carry it to its ultimate conclusion, and instead change direction bringing out suitcases full of clothes that are throw wildly into the air and about the stage while the dancers impetuously change into new garb.   The dance ends as it began with the dancers placidly seated at tables, but dressed in a different wardrobe.

The performance lasted just over an hour without an intermission.  I like performances like this that are not real long and omit the intermission.  It makes for a pleasant experience that is not too taxing.  They are a young, energetic group that needs a sense of purpose beyond dancing for the sake of dance.  I might be tempted to go see them again, but I would like to see something with more substance and definitely better taste in the soundtrack.

OH MY GOD!!!!

Only when we are no longer afraid
Do we begin to live.
Dorothy Thompson

It is always something…and that something terrorizes us.  In Britain, we are all petrified of spiders and the strongest among us get queasy when we look down from a high place. If we are planning suicide, we much prefer to hang ourselves or swallow poison.  It isn’t as scary.

All of us can feel our blood pressure rise when we hear what is happening to the ozone layer even though not one of us have ever seen it or really know what it is.

We were warned that greater exposure to ultra violet rays has caused a rise in melanomas to eat away our skin even as it blinds innocent fish and little bunnies.  Every educated person worries that our deserts are expanding and we are going to dry out if we are not completely cooked by global warming or drowned by the melting glaciers first.  Worse, the air has become so polluted that if anyone dares to take a deep breath these days, he will die. Now it is the Ebola Virus that is seeping in from Africa and will kill every one of us within moments.

What next?

I have lived through it all and I can testify that all of it is smoke and mirrors.  My mother believed that the Russians created the Asian Flu epidemic and I believed she was the cause of all my cavities.  My sister blamed my mother for making her so fat and my mother blamed my father when the car stalled.

All of us are afraid that we won’t have enough money to take care of ourselves until we die and now that we all live longer, we are stashing funds into retirement accounts, under mattresses and behind the furnace just in case we have the bad luck to live to be 110.

The truth is that all the fuss about organic foods is spoiling dinner. I am sorry if the beef I eat was taken from viciously murdered cows and I feel terrible for the spinach soaked in nasty insecticides so it wouldn’t look like green Swiss cheese when it arrived at the table. If am going to worry that the vegetables in my salad had an unhappy childhood or the cream I rub on my face is nothing but wax, I am not going to have time to go dancing.

Hooray for caring about our environment.  Hooray for doing our best to clean up the air and return to real food instead of the genetically modified, tasteless fakes the supermarkets give us.  Hooray, too,  for medical advances that protect us from epidemics.  I believe in doing our best to do our best for ourselves now….and deal with disaster when it happens. If the coward dies 1000 deaths and the hero dies but one, I want to be a hero.

NO, THANK YOU

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life
Is “No thank you,” it will be enough.
Lynn Ruth and Meister Eckhart

No one likes to take responsibility for their own destiny and the American people are a prime example.  They have blamed the car manufacturers for our automobile fatalities, the cigarette manufacturers for lung cancer and now they are blaming dessert creators for our obesity.  It turns out that unsuspecting consumers are not at fault for increasing their circumference faster than the speed of light.  Nor is it their doing that they no longer fit in a revolving door.  The blame is now on those profit-mongering villains who make delectable biscuits, marvelous confections and delicious drinks to quench our thirst. Indeed, these greedy monsters are deliberately adding a ton of sugar to all the goods we adore for the sole purpose of making diabetes our national disease.

The latest scientific studies confirm their corruption.  Sugar is toxic and unscrupulous manufacturers like Sara Lee (yummy cheesecake) or Krispy Kreme Doughnuts have deliberately stuffed their products with this poisonous substance that has been proven to kill us even faster than fatty beef will clog our arteries.

In less informed times, these bakers were our heroes.  We longed for their recipes, gobbled up their products and reveled in the sugar high we got to finish our meal.  We reached blindly for them in the mid-afternoon to pep us up when the “threesies” hit.  Now, thanks to those experts who conduct scientific studies that destroy our confidence in our own preferences, we all know better.  We have been the innocent pushovers of a diabolical plot to put money in the pockets of the obscenely rich manufacturers of cookies, cakes and pies even as we collapse in droves from insulin failure.

The baking industry and the soft drink tycoons are scandalized at the accusations the scientific community has made to smudge their good name and destroy their public image. After all, they say, all they did was create a product that people enjoyed eating. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” one reportedly said. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”

I cannot help but remember my sister who turned to hypnotism to help her when she topped 400 pounds.  “My right hand was hypnotized so it would not touch the refrigerator,” she said.  “So I learned to open it with my left.”

Now, I know perfectly well that it has become politically incorrect to blame the consumer for what he consumes but I cannot help but remember my dear old mother (who wasn’t dear ALL the time but sadly almost always right) when she said.  “If you don’t want it, just say, ‘no thank you.’”

I would love to see a scientific study that figures out why the obese among us are incapable of pushing away that second piece of pie, or turning their noses up and their fifth glass of soda pop.  I suspect that if we could create a no thank you serum to inject into ourselves before dinner, we would save a fortune in diabetic remedies, fat farms and gastric by-passes.  Isn’t funny, how simple solutions seem to escape us?

In the dark ages when I was a child, Gwendolyn Turner and I took my chubby sister to an ice cream parlor and, because we only had thirty-five cents between us, we ordered a chocolate soda with three straws.  My sister, who was the shortest, grabbed her straw and began drinking.  Gwendolyn and I kept bumping heads trying to get to our straws and before we managed to solve this spatial challenge my sister had finished the soda.  Moral: If you want something bad enough, there is always a way to avoid sharing it.

My mother’s family was very poor and ate potatoes almost every night.  Every once in a while, my grandma managed to bake a cake for her 4 daughters and her son, Charlie.  She would cut it into portions, put it on the table and as soon as all four little girls look rapturously at their dessert, my Uncle Charlie would point to the ceiling and shout “LOOK!!!”  When his sisters looked down again at their plates, their cake had disappeared.  Moral: Brothers cannot be trusted any more that the manufacturers of sugar-filled products; scheming monsters every one of them.

NAKED IS AS NAKED DOES

The male body is hairy and lumpy
And should not be seen by the light of day
Richard Roeper

Americans do not mind seeing people murdered on their television screen and they love watching heads flying and limbs severed at the movies.  They like the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, bodies strewn across the pavement and little children crying for their lost mummies and daddies.   The more violence the better.  That is the American way.

The truth is that violence and tragedy make great entertainment.  So does pornography.  Americans actually prefer to watch lust happening even more than they like doing it. What a thrill to see a man and women tearing each other’s genitals to pieces or whipping and chaining each other for the sheer pleasure of hearing them scream.  Porn is almost as popular in America as violence.  We watch both every day and love it all.

But let some poor schnook walk outside to get the newspaper in the altogether and he ignites public outrage. “It offends me to see anyone that way,” said one insulted observer. “It is disgusting.”

That is why San Francisco decided to compromise its image of freedom of expression and tolerance of the odd-ball and ban public nudity from its streets.  No more can raunchy old men spread a towel on a stone bench and sun themselves in the Castro district.  No more, can its citizens strip to the flesh to bathe in the afternoon sun.  San Francisco now supports the theory that our bodies are so hideous they must be concealed in public.  No matter, that liberated women, forward thinking men and eating disorder specialists are trying to make us comfy with our diverse shapes and sizes.  In San Francisco, it is pc to be ashamed.

Now, it seems that the Japanese, too are offended by nudity, but they have taken it one step further.  They do not want to see representations of the human body, much less the real thing. Michelangelo’s David  was presented to the town of Okuizumo and the inhabitants ran for cover.  “It’s frightening the children and worrying the adults with its nakedness,” said one of the town’s bigwigs.

I can only assume that they have also stripped their museums of reproductions of Van Gogh’s NUDE WOMAN ON A BED or Renoir’s AFER BATHING not to mention Whistler’s shocking NUDE GIRL WITH A BOWL.

Obviously, the very sight of a naked body horrifies the more sensitive among us.   It is difficult to understand why we think the sight of a penis or a breast will frighten our children more than the sight of shattered limbs and battered heads. Will our innocent youth smash the bathroom mirror when one day they see those very banned organs protruding from their own bodies?

The truth is that in America our bodies are considered repulsive and offensive unless we film them and flaunt them on a screen.  The only answer to this dilemma is to cover every baby at birth with ornamental tattoos so that as they mature, no one will recognize the new growth.  And everyone will be amazed when it rises to an occasion.

I don’t even like to be naked
In front of myself!
Camryn Manheim