Monday, November 5, 2007

Dancing on the Walls


I finished a really great weekend of camping in the redwood forests by going to an interpretive dance show up in the city. We went to see Owen's friend Susan Voyticky, who is a fantastically athletic aerial dancer and circus performer, perform in "Sky Dancers": an aerial dance presentation at Dance Mission in the Mission district. She did a really heartwrenching dance to Bjork's "Broken". Her costume was half ballet costume, lovely in shillouette until she turned, revealing that the rest of her costume was a bondage getup with a boxing glove and a painted black eye. She likes to do acrobatics around a ring hanging from the ceiling, and managed to bend her body in ways that mine wouldn't bend in my wildest, most Salvadore-Dali-esque dreams. It was a powerful performance.
The opening number was my favourite. It took place in the alley outside the theater. The dancers began on the building's rooftop and then rappelled down the side of the building, doing a weightless sideways ballet on the wall of the second floor. It was really spectacular.

Also of note was a lady doing a dance involving a trapeze and stilts at the Same Time, some beautiful ballet-like dances on the ends of bungie cords, and a really beautiful performance on green tissue where the wave of green cloth hanging from the ceiling was treated as both a climbing rope and the extravagant train to a flowing garment.
There was some of the usual San Francisco fuzzy granolaheaded anti-bush stuff. (Honestly, I hate bush as much as anyone, but sometimes the melodrama is just too much.)
Here are some blurry cellphone pictures which I don't have permission to post. I hope that you get enough of the gist from them that you want to go and see a performance for yourself. It was really quite spectacular. Unfortunately, Owen borrowed my programme so I can't tell you who is who in the following pictures...the performance starred the following people:
Jo Kreiter and Flyaway Productions, Susan Voyticky (the glowing blurr on the ring), Project Bandaloop (the building dancers), Sonya Smith and Alayna Stroud (I think the bungie dancers), STRONGERCircus, Chandra Krown, Beth Clarke, Hannah Griffith (I think the green tissue girl), Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters.

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