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Alvin Ailey

Pepper Greene and I went to see the Alvin Ailey Dance at the Opera House in Boston.  The Introduction was a film with Judith Jemison the present director of the Alvin Ailey. She introduced and explained the classic piece, Revelations, that was the evenings performance, and told interesting background biographical tales about Alvin Ailey.    

The music of the evening was the famous Gospel Music of our nation, Wade in the Water, Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?, Rock-a-my-soul in the Bosom of Abraham,     Oh Sinner Man...and others..     

What was unique?  The dancers appeared in Turkish Costumes, the gold pleated   whirling dervish for part of the performance.  And what else? Not all the choreography was a religious fervor nor celebration of the book of revelations as we think of it and as it was usually performed...added gestures:  The woman almost punches her partner in the face a dozen times but never quite, The two partners, woman and man intersaw wood or so it seems with each other gesticulating their arms back and forth between each others arms.....as if they are at the filing cabinet fighting over files...who has the authority to put that issue in that folder?  

Fight...Fight...Fight...

It was Fierce!

Salem Dance at MassArt Dance Project

A sneak preview of the grace of The Dance Project brought to us by Colleges at the Fenway
Directed by Kristen Young and Sandra Parks
April 18 at Tower Auditorium
What was so enticing.... it is so young and fresh!!
What is so beautiful and unusual, ...some of the dancers are not so skinny but pleasantly robust... plump.
What is so worth bringing home and writing about? "Amazing Grace"  the war in Iraq, in which the dancers wore fatigues and blessed the photos of their soldiers now serving overseas...
Hard to be graceful about.

Senagalese Dance

Held at the Dance Complex, Fatou D'jai performed with her troop...
Senegalese dance and song are always energizing..
What was unique? The black female dancers and white female dancers were in perfect synchronicity side by side.
My role: I did not dance, I videoed.  For a change.

Last Week I went to African Dance and stayed for a very refreshing and enriching dance recital at The Dance Complex. The recital was a review of several choreographers. The style of dance was modern dance and I had not seen a dance performance in quite some time although I still like to attend the AFrican Dance at that school.

It was a surprise to see the dancers articulating in the modern dance form the same anxiety that I feel about the ritual of school. The stage was set with a rack of clothing in the background. Many suits and dresses were hanging from them.  The front of the stage was a school desk...the old fashioned kind with a ink and quil pen place and a chair that lifts up...Several female dancers celebrated that anxiety...looking and being well .... and receiving passing grades in school. They galloped over to the desk in the front and knelt on the chair as if in earnest prayer....seeking some higher powers guidance....their was a frantic pace to the dance...galloping, racing...being in the throng..the maine...part of it...looking well groomed...a dance of anxiousness.

The dances that were the usual with live chamber music did not impress me that much but the last dance was a dance of this age of technocracy...a dance of a robot. Looking as if it were a part of Mummenshanz (the swiss mime company), a Dance rappears on the set with a sheep cloth on and at her feet is a long red tube ..and the tube has a frog like mechanized toy at the end of it...I am not sure what the frog was all about but snippets of science fiction creeped into my head as I watched this allurment by the red tube with the creature at the end....Finally the female dancer is alone with a sheepskin on and in the center of her chest is a strange science fiction creature...a bird or a n alien of some kind...it was a hypnotic experience to see as this dancer concluded her piece in a strange robonic quiver and I am not sure if the bird like alien was the victor or if it was just part of the evening.....Most impressive piece.

I am a vestige... a relic from the flower power day... War is ugly... No More War ....

Grandmothers for peace...

But, recently I read a book on Art Therapy...The beauty of the exploding bombs in palestine is expounded upon and the product is a painting of that eruptive event.  War, the author and painter writes has the intrique of beauty.  McNiff is the author of this book.  He is being ironic, sarcastic, it seems. It caused me to ponder...then I recall Peter Schumann and his exhibit at the Boston Center for the Arts of two years ago.... He painted a large mural of the exploding bombs in Israel...every blown up soldier on this huge mural seemed to be his crocadile tears at the horror ...the abohorrent horror of war....POssibly the war is so ugly that it becomes beautiful....The rockets Red Glare...The Bombs Bursting in Air...It is our national anthem.  

The old school...

When I was a B.A. student.... put all of the rocks in geology into boxes, put all of the Milton's Greater Chain of Being into terraces to teach how the Greater Chain of Being is constructed...

Boxes, tiny little boxes....

But this is a nice path...

I found recently that the world of discrete boxes, of nicely organixzed clutter, of so sweetly distinquished and delineated art work and scholarship is not longer so segregated...The Apartheid of our compartmentalized academic world is changing...Art Therapy has a ticky tacky box project...but this is what is new, The Traditional Materials class has a project that is about ecology, and the portfolio class has cross currents of the challenges a dancer feels when confronted with so many overwhelmingly stifling technologies until, nearly expired from the challenge suddenly bursts in with a second wind ... and is reconciled to harmonize with technocracy...

The quilt project is reinformed from one class on Port Folio to a class on traditional materials. But most of all, and surprisingly reassuring of all...each of the classes reinforces the strange habit of keeping a journal and combining visuals photos, drawings...

So, I now have a closet full of little journals ...a journal for portfolio 2, a journal for traditional materials and a journal for art therapy...I even have morning pages to keep on my own life which if I ever get over all these journals might get a narrow breath in...Most likely by the time I finish with each journal they will be all I have to cook supper from, having forgotten to go shopping and forgotten to deposit my pay check in the bank.....   The nice thought is .... someone has invented a memory data base...so not only are all of my memories in journals, but if I so choose, I can data base...every one o f them...

Now,  Mneusemene has to re think her job...she has les and less power  to administer amnesia to his incredible effort at a kinder life...through attending school.