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Much to my surprise, I am really enjoying the new Nine Inch Nails album: Year Zero. It's pretty darned rockin', unlike the last, piece of whingey, emo self-aggrandizement.
And then there was my weekend....
First of all, the Rocky Horror Show was amazing. I have officially fallen in lust with David Lopez, who played one of the phantoms. Seriously. I think I've finally hit puberty. I never ever did go through that boy-crazy stage that seems to afflict every other heterosexual, or mostly heterosexual, female out there. But after seeing this show.... Ohmyohmyohmy....
When I could pull my eyes away from him, the rest of the show was excellent stuff, too. Adam Brazier makes an excellent Frank N. Furter (and is pretty damned easy on the eyes, to boot). I was also really pleased by Christine Rossi's performance as Columbia.
The audience was a strange one, though. I think well over half of the audience was over retirement age, which was a new experience for me. To get people into the spirit of things, at the beginning we were all to give a big hug to the person sitting next to us. I turned and hugged an elderly lady, and to my surprise, she was a very huggy lady, giving me a giant hug back. I'm not terribly surprised the audience wasn't very rowdy. The elderly folks sitting next to me left at the intermission, which makes me rather sad. Still, there were enough people shrieking "asshole," "slut," and dancing the timewarp to make it a proper Rocky show.
If you're in Toronto, you really, really, really need to see this. It runs until May 5, so there's still time.
Secondly, I stayed with the lovely and hospitable![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redlyra. While she and snowy_kathryn had a night on the town, I opted to turn in early as I'd had little sleep the night before. Alas, but my attempts at sleep were stymied by the cat of yowling doom. Chances are, you've heard a Siamese cat in full throat, or the relentless horny screeches of a cat in heat. Lengthen the yowl and increase the volume fourfold, and you can approximate the sounds this black tom made. As I approach sleep, my OCD tendencies become stronger. When the cat began howling, I began counting. He miaoued SIXTY-ONE TIMES in a row, with less than a second of silence between each utterance.
I never did figure out what his problem was.
The next day, I went to the belly dance conference where I did a "belly popping" workshop with Bellyqueen of NYC. The workshop was very clear and easy to follow, and the room was very spacious and uncrowded. My only qualm was the microphone volume. The music was potted up significantly louder than the vox, so it was almost impossible to hear what was being said. However, the movements were broken down clearly from a raised stage, and were easy to follow along, so this wasn't as problematic as it would have been with less-skilled instructors. Combinations included arm waves (from breakdancing), popping, hits, travelling steps, and combinations incorporating arm waves, undulations, and umis. I got my money's worth.
The rest of the day was more of a mixed bag, though. I attended a slide show and movie presentation by Tamalyn Dallal which basically amounted to a belly dancer's version of vacation pictures. Parts of it were interesting, but I found myself nodding off for most of it. Perhaps the book shall be more interesting. However, the accompanying music, taarab from Zanzibar, is simply gorgeous: 40 Days and 1001 Nights.
I also attended a panel discussion on ethics and professionalism in belly dance, and found myself disagreeing with almost everything they were saying. I was surprised to see the entire panel appeared to be in total agreement with one another. I'm used to there being at least one dissenting opinion at these things. Anyhow, as an example, I learned that the panel is dead set against the idea of belly dancers wearing cowboy hats in performance, unless the dancer in question is Dina. And Dina can get away with it because she is Dina.
Right.
I also attended Venus's talk on her shimmy lab, where she was hooked up to motion capture equipment for data gathering. Although this is the sort of thing that I'm especially interested in, the presentation was not tailored for her audience. We spent the vast majority of our time with her looking at chart after interminable chart of inscrutable data (the text was too small to read on the overhead) and listening to her attempting analysis on the spot.
It became more interesting when she provided concrete examples, showing us which muscles fired and which ones relaxed during particular movements. Unfortunately, very little of that took place, and I found myself nodding off several times during the presentation.
After Venus's talk, I watched the open stage performances, which ranged from the very bad to the very good. I didn't apply to be in the show because I had ethical problems with it. It cost money to apply to be a presenter or performer, and I'm under the impression that this money was not recouped by the presenter/performer. That's right, you had to pay to perform at an event where people where paying $600 or so to attend.
This is one of the problems which perhaps ought to have been brought up by the ethics panel.
When everything was over, we all went out withchangingwomon for Dolsot Bibim Bop at HoSu. If you're in Toronto, check this restaurant out. I stumbled across it fortuitously several months back, and keep returning. The food is delicious, and not overly expensive.
Then we took off to the bus station sosnowy_kathryn and I could return to Kitchener, only to discover the next bus wouldn't be leaving for 90 minutes. So we went and sat on a large piece of modern art in front of City Hall (film site of the climactic moments of Resident Evil. No zombies came to get us, so we played a dancer's version of charades. I'll call it the fusion fusion game.
To play this game, one dancer is It. Two types of dance/movement styles are yelled out, and the dancer has to fuse them together. Some of the fusions we created are as follows:
Great fun, I'll tell ya! In retrospect, we really ought to have filmed it, because it was damned funny, and probably the high point of my day!
And how did you spend your weekend?
And then there was my weekend....
First of all, the Rocky Horror Show was amazing. I have officially fallen in lust with David Lopez, who played one of the phantoms. Seriously. I think I've finally hit puberty. I never ever did go through that boy-crazy stage that seems to afflict every other heterosexual, or mostly heterosexual, female out there. But after seeing this show.... Ohmyohmyohmy....
When I could pull my eyes away from him, the rest of the show was excellent stuff, too. Adam Brazier makes an excellent Frank N. Furter (and is pretty damned easy on the eyes, to boot). I was also really pleased by Christine Rossi's performance as Columbia.
The audience was a strange one, though. I think well over half of the audience was over retirement age, which was a new experience for me. To get people into the spirit of things, at the beginning we were all to give a big hug to the person sitting next to us. I turned and hugged an elderly lady, and to my surprise, she was a very huggy lady, giving me a giant hug back. I'm not terribly surprised the audience wasn't very rowdy. The elderly folks sitting next to me left at the intermission, which makes me rather sad. Still, there were enough people shrieking "asshole," "slut," and dancing the timewarp to make it a proper Rocky show.
If you're in Toronto, you really, really, really need to see this. It runs until May 5, so there's still time.
Secondly, I stayed with the lovely and hospitable
redlyra. While she and snowy_kathryn had a night on the town, I opted to turn in early as I'd had little sleep the night before. Alas, but my attempts at sleep were stymied by the cat of yowling doom. Chances are, you've heard a Siamese cat in full throat, or the relentless horny screeches of a cat in heat. Lengthen the yowl and increase the volume fourfold, and you can approximate the sounds this black tom made. As I approach sleep, my OCD tendencies become stronger. When the cat began howling, I began counting. He miaoued SIXTY-ONE TIMES in a row, with less than a second of silence between each utterance.I never did figure out what his problem was.
The next day, I went to the belly dance conference where I did a "belly popping" workshop with Bellyqueen of NYC. The workshop was very clear and easy to follow, and the room was very spacious and uncrowded. My only qualm was the microphone volume. The music was potted up significantly louder than the vox, so it was almost impossible to hear what was being said. However, the movements were broken down clearly from a raised stage, and were easy to follow along, so this wasn't as problematic as it would have been with less-skilled instructors. Combinations included arm waves (from breakdancing), popping, hits, travelling steps, and combinations incorporating arm waves, undulations, and umis. I got my money's worth.
The rest of the day was more of a mixed bag, though. I attended a slide show and movie presentation by Tamalyn Dallal which basically amounted to a belly dancer's version of vacation pictures. Parts of it were interesting, but I found myself nodding off for most of it. Perhaps the book shall be more interesting. However, the accompanying music, taarab from Zanzibar, is simply gorgeous: 40 Days and 1001 Nights.
I also attended a panel discussion on ethics and professionalism in belly dance, and found myself disagreeing with almost everything they were saying. I was surprised to see the entire panel appeared to be in total agreement with one another. I'm used to there being at least one dissenting opinion at these things. Anyhow, as an example, I learned that the panel is dead set against the idea of belly dancers wearing cowboy hats in performance, unless the dancer in question is Dina. And Dina can get away with it because she is Dina.
Right.
I also attended Venus's talk on her shimmy lab, where she was hooked up to motion capture equipment for data gathering. Although this is the sort of thing that I'm especially interested in, the presentation was not tailored for her audience. We spent the vast majority of our time with her looking at chart after interminable chart of inscrutable data (the text was too small to read on the overhead) and listening to her attempting analysis on the spot.
It became more interesting when she provided concrete examples, showing us which muscles fired and which ones relaxed during particular movements. Unfortunately, very little of that took place, and I found myself nodding off several times during the presentation.
After Venus's talk, I watched the open stage performances, which ranged from the very bad to the very good. I didn't apply to be in the show because I had ethical problems with it. It cost money to apply to be a presenter or performer, and I'm under the impression that this money was not recouped by the presenter/performer. That's right, you had to pay to perform at an event where people where paying $600 or so to attend.
This is one of the problems which perhaps ought to have been brought up by the ethics panel.
When everything was over, we all went out with
changingwomon for Dolsot Bibim Bop at HoSu. If you're in Toronto, check this restaurant out. I stumbled across it fortuitously several months back, and keep returning. The food is delicious, and not overly expensive.Then we took off to the bus station so
snowy_kathryn and I could return to Kitchener, only to discover the next bus wouldn't be leaving for 90 minutes. So we went and sat on a large piece of modern art in front of City Hall (film site of the climactic moments of Resident Evil. No zombies came to get us, so we played a dancer's version of charades. I'll call it the fusion fusion game.To play this game, one dancer is It. Two types of dance/movement styles are yelled out, and the dancer has to fuse them together. Some of the fusions we created are as follows:
- I'm a little teapot / poi
- Salt n' Pepper / classical Egyptian
- krumping / dressage
- butoh / The Matrix
- tango / breakdancing
- modern / country line dancing
- yoga / hokey pokey
Great fun, I'll tell ya! In retrospect, we really ought to have filmed it, because it was damned funny, and probably the high point of my day!
And how did you spend your weekend?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
I don't want to talk about my weekend...
Date: 2007-04-24 12:28 pm (UTC)From:I quoted your review of RHPS on fameorfamine.com, hope you don't mind. Linklove has been sent, though I hope your server recovers soon.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 04:15 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 07:38 pm (UTC)From:Wow, you're right that does seem unethical. Were you able to ask the ethics panel any questions, would you have asked about this? I would've been interested in their response.