Dancing

Watching The Chorus Line last weekend brought back memories of high school when I actually knew huge portions of it. It's a dreadful movie - oozing self-important melodrama, missing some of the best dance numbers, and containing every bad 80's haircut possible - but my recollection of dancing it is one of glitz-filled excitement and sheer terror.

Terror owing to my stage fright, but it was also hitherto the most awed moment of my 12 or 13 years. It was a show that people knew so it felt important that we were doing this professional piece and it had all the crazy glammy costumes and endless rehearsals and a weekend of shows! Stage fright be damned, I thrilled to the show biz of it all.

Anyway, The Chorus Line arriving in the mail started the trifecta of dance.

The documentary Ballerina had some beautiful dancing in it but the narration was so dispassionate and clinical that I'd have sworn they were talking about the mating of some rare species of bird. Too bad, since they missed an ideal opportunity to find out more about the art and the artists.

To complete the trio, I caught Bill T. Jones at The Kennedy Center performing a vaudeville-themed dance/theater show called "A Quarreling Pair". Fun times and the q&a afterward was cool, too.

It all half made me want to dig out my tap shoes and find a class...we shall see.

Relational

It was a weekend of entertainment that either made perfect sense or not much at all.

The film The Secret of the Grain lets you into the life of this family so thoroughly that you might as well be walking into their kitchen for dinner. Unhurried in its pace and willing to take the time to get to know its characters, the film lets you into its world for the two and a half hours you're at the movies. Sure, it could've been at least a half-hour shorter if the editing had been tighter, but it's an interesting place that you get to when you're turning away from the screen because you're seeing too much and the camera's gotten too close. Trailer here.

David Rousseve's Saudade (excerpts here and here), however, was the opposite experience. Rousseve talks about so many themes throughout this non-linear performance art/modern dance piece: slavery, racial and sexual subjugation, joy, the emotional trauma experienced by Hurricane Katrina survivors, the tortune of Abu Ghraib prisoners, sickness, identity - and it's all combined with a fado soundtrack and a chameleon-like tiled backdrop that draws considerable attention to itself. So, yes, it lacked narrative coherence, but still managed to achieve a sense of closure at the end.

Visually, the dance was arresting and intimate but also repetitive. The constant breaching of the fourth wall was distracting, too. I'm glad I went, but I'm not convinced that a moment of closure and a tableau of interesting images was enough to outweigh spending most of the piece hop-scotching around the choreographer's brain.

So, I'm now off to spend a few days skipping through the collective brain of the media/music/tech community. Come out if you can...or watch the live webcast on Wednesday, February 11 from 9 am - 6 pm (*fingers crossed*).