We went downtown to check out the Juneteenth Festival and the Solstice activities yesterday. It was pretty gray with light mist coming down now and then and finally rain when we left. But it didn't seem to bother anyone. People were having fun.
People waiting for the next band to play.
The Rollergirls were still there, but we missed the show.
Audrina from The Hills was there for photos and there was a steady line of people.
And the reindeer sausage folks were out.
Non-motorized activities kept the kids busy.
At 4th and F there was a series of different dance demonstrations.
There's a new Cake Shop on 4th.
A block of Corvettes on display
The Juneteenth celebration on the Park Strip was pretty sleepy.
The ACLU and the Alaska Right to Life had adjacent booths.
More non-motorized fun for the kids
Even on a gray day, it was fun to stroll around downtown and see people we knew and people we didn't. Then we stopped at the museum which we haven't seen since the opened the new exhibit halls while we were gone. Another post for that.
We went to see the Dance Team Performances at the JDHS Gym on Thursday night. The dance team's history includes first place wins at National Competitions and an International Competition in Japan.
They moved pretty fast, so my pictures aren't sharp as I'd like.
The light dancing in the dark is always impressive.
They went up.
And down.
And there were some performances by a Filipino dance group.
And even the Dad's had gotten pulled in and trained to do a dance routine.
And there was a Bollywood influence as well.
We're constantly amazed at what all goes on in Juneau.
We went to Out North last night to see dancers. The blurb said
Breaking Ground sprung up during a dinner conversation between Becky, Therese and I. [It hurts to write that on my blog - it should be "between Becky, Therese and me." Maybe I'll explain why in another post one day. In the meantime you can go to the link to find out why.] Our goal was to find a way to bring together artists and dancers in the community and give them the opportunity to produce and try out new ideas...
We knew that things might be a little crowded because of all the cars parked on the street and we were early even. I'd read that there would be about 10 five minute pieces by different people. So, the cars might just be those of all the performers.
There was also an art exhibit in the gallery, so we looked around.
While I wasn't excited about everything, there were some pieces - and parts of pieces - that felt good on my eyes.
When we went into the theater it was packed and we got seats way in back. Good strategy - lots of local performers means lots of friends and family who come to see them. Enough to fill up a small theater.
"Breaking Ground" means doing new stuff, so I was expecting to see something new. Maybe it meant new for the dancers rather than for Anchorage or for dancing. At least that went through my mind for the first couple of dancers. This caused me to think about how one should evaluate dancing, especially ground breaking dancing. (One could debate whether we should evaluate at all, but that too is a different post. I would note that someone this week mentioned a workshop she attended on non-violent communication which has as a main starting point, getting rid of judgmental language. When I read the book, I'll do more on that.)
Picture taking was specifically banned during the performances so you get after-dance pictures here. In any case, as I watched the dancing, I thought about what would be 'good' in this case. Some of the dancers were pretty young and this is Anchorage, not New York City. I came up with two factors - was the dancing 'good' and was it 'new'? What's good dancing? For me, the dancer is dancing, not performing. The dancer is moving naturally, is not thinking ('ok, now step to the left and ready for the next leap"), but just flows naturally. The body has to be able to move right to the music. I forget where I am and just enjoy.
What's 'new'? Not being a dance expert who keeps up with the latest trends, I guess I can only judge what's new for me. And it seems to me that while there are an infinite number of moves human bodies can probably combine into a piece, coming up with something that no dancer has ever done before (and should do) is probably not easy.
So I was ready to settle for 'good' and not worry about 'new'. I liked 'ChitChat' by Michelle "Shimmy Shoes" Steffens because it broke from what I'd call the ice skating routine type dancing to music of the first pieces. She started out seated, tying her shoes, then tapped while sitting, got up and tapped around. The only music was her shoes until she got the audience involved in a routine of foot tapping, finger snapping, more tapping, and two claps. It was different and it involved the audience actively in the dance. I liked it. J wasn't moved by it though. And she knows a lot more about dancing than I do.
But things changed radically when Krista Katalenich and Felix Bambury Webbe took the stage. Forget all the criteria - you know good dancing when you see it. They were there and I just enjoyed how they moved alone and then came together and then alone. It worked. They were somewhere else with the music, not on stage in front of an audience. We got to talk to them a bit afterward. They live in Fairbanks. Felix, who's from Cuba, has been there for two years and teaches Afro-Cuban (I think that's what he said) dancing. Krista is a student at UAF and at Felix's dance school.
The last piece was eleven dancers swinging to Swingset by Jourrasic 5. It was an ambitious piece with couples dancing, splitting, regrouping, moving here and there across the stage, and with choreographer and dancer Rick Ruiz lip-synching. You really should go to the video. The cool thing is that what they did on stage was way better than what happens in the video. Rick is in the picture with the other 'director' of the piece - Dorthy Fredenberg. The group will be performing at the State Fair and there's something else coming up in Anchorage, but I forgot what. Maybe Rick will tell us in a comment. Below he's telling us how the idea for the choreography came to him.
For months now, Ropi, an 18 year old high school student in Budapest, has been blogging about the agony of preparing to dance the Pálotas, a traditional Hungarian dance, at a school performance. The tales of stepping on his partner's feet have been tucked in between accounts of ancient Roman history, scores on math tests, his thoughts about his somewhat cool personality and what others say about it, and what he will do when he gets out of school. It's a blog I follow regularly because it is so charmingly mixes maturity well beyond his 18 years with honest, age appropriate concerns about life, girls, parents, and the future. The look of his blog changes too, reflecting his own experimenting with who he is and could be.
So I was delighted when he posted this video of the dance. There is something very universal, in 2008, of a school dance in a decorated gymnasium, with parents taking shaky videos of their kids' performances. (Yes, there are places where kids don't even go to school, let alone have video cameras, but there are also many places where they do.) Ropi is the tallest kid in his class and he's wearing blue. I think he's right there in the beginning with his back to us.
After the Prop 8 protest Saturday, we went to the Intertribal Gathering at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Most of the attention was focused on the dancing. We saw a little bit of Alaska dancing, but there were tribal groups from the rest of the Lower 48, and even a local Irish tribe.
Of course you need to hear the drumming and see the movement to get even a tiny sense of what it was like.
The little kids were raptly watching the Irish dancing.
Then J wanted to go through the display hall to see the beading demonstrations.
This is a follow up of yesterday's post about interesting stuff going out of sight that having kids helps you to find. In the evening we went to West High's Dance Department's show. Wow! This was good stuff - original choreography, interesting music, great lighting, and some fine dancing. I've seen little kids from Barbara's School of Dance to the Martha Graham Dance Troupe at West High. This was closer to the Martha Graham in quality and interest.
I didn't get going with the video until the first three pieces were over, but here's a hint.
The video does give you a good sense of the variety and quality of what we saw last night. Lori Bradford, I'm told, is the Dance teacher who is basically responsible and she's listed as the director for the show. Leslie Kimiko Ward choreographed several of the pieces and danced solo in Spectrum. Michael Alfaro is listed as a guest artist in Moving Statues, and if he's the dancer I caught in that one, you can see why I highlight him. There were lots and lots of talented students and it was good to see that they had various shapes. They were all good dancers. It reminds me of some of the great things going on in the Anchorage School District.
The program says you can buy a DVD of the performance if you email creativemotionproductions@gmail.com.
[Video has been closed to public access at request of Lori Bradford. Recognizable faces on photos have been blurred also.]
how much I'm missing because my kids are grown up and gone
how much is happening, but invisible
I got invited to see some friends at their TaeKwonDo Kickathon. If you drive, even walk or bike, by this mall, you'd have no idea of the excitement going on inside. In other cultures much of what is going on is much more out in the open and the whole community is at least aware if not involved. But here, lots of things are going on, well hidden from the rest of the world.
Malls like this aren't built for bikers. The positive spin would be this is a "natural and recyclable" bike rack. There are a lot of these in Anchorage, but not enough near destinations if more people start biking.
But what could be more fun for kids that breaking things and making noise. I have to say they were also very quiet and attentive when they were supposed to be, but they were also given time to break boards and make noise. All in the framework of breaking boards as an inspiration to break bad habits. (The only actual bad habit I heard about that someone was breaking was biting fingernails.)
We had lunch with Masami and Shpresha and Sharon, people I knew when I was a guest faculty member at Portland State University for six months in 2003-4.
After lunch they put me in my old seminar room to work on a few things and catch up with all the hits coming in about Palin. Like other Alaska blogs, apparently, this was my second highest hit day - 563 right now.
Later we walked around downtown before meeting friends for dinner. The sky was very blue, temps in the low 70s, as we passed the Art Museum.
In a little park area between streets the Oregon Ballet Theatre was practicing in a tent.
A costume store.
One of the great book shops in the United States. Powell's is room after room after room on several floors or used and new books. A favorite place of our when we lived here.
We had dinner here with Gary and Roxanne who we knew from Anchorage and from when we lived here. It was great to see them again.
We checked the tram station near Marty's yesterday. It's about a 20 minute walk home from the end of the line. But both ticket machines at the stop were broken. We turned down Gary and Roxanne's offer of a ride home (way out of their way) and decided to board without tickets. The guy with the beard told us to push the emergency button and tell the driver who said we could ride free then. Then the two Obama canvassers got on. As we were pulling into one station we heard screaming at the other end of the train (about four cars away.) The driver came onto the loudspeaker calling for police. Who boarded immediately as we entered into the station. A young black woman and a young white woman slipped quickly off the train. The police - Wackenhut Security guys - stayed on the train to the end of the line where we got off. At the end we heard the driver reporting the incident - a white guy had been yelling racial epithets at a white girl and black girl sitting together.
