My dad sent me this picture. I don’t know where it came from – if he knew these animals or if he just found the image somewhere on the internet. Something about it doesn’t look quite right. But the dog looks pretty happy. You do you, dog.
ByGD
Seattle International Dance Festival 2019
I’ve meant to go the Seattle International Dance Festival for years. Then, getting to preview it for the Seattle Times this year, I got really excited about it and wanted to dive in and see a bunch of the performances. But the scheduling challenges that kept me away in the past (June is so hard) made me check my enthusiasm. I went to the free Art on the Fly event and found the program that fit most easily into my schedule. It was Program A of the Inter | National Series on the last weekend of the festival.
Inter | National Series
There are two main tracks to the festival, and maybe next year I can see some of both. But this year, the only program I could attend was part of Inter | National, a series of split bill programs shared by international and domestic (often local) dance artists. On the night I attended, the “local” company was actually based in San Francisco. The international artist was actually a substitute. As often happens with SIDF, the originally programmed artist was unable to perform due to visa issues. After the brochures were printed, they were replaced by an artist from India who is currently based in the U.S. (and therefore already had the legal authorization to perform).
Ishita Mili Global Expose’
Ishita Mili, who fuses traditional Indian dance, street style and contemporary dance, was the replacement for Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts from India. Her group, IMGE, comprising Mili and two other women, went on first. Too often artistic hybrids take on a mosaic effect. Clearly delineated sections show off their respective sources without really fitting together. But IMGE’s Territory, set to music that ranged from A.R. Rahman through Beats Antique to M.I.A., blended the disparate dance styles so thoroughly that felt like something completely new.
Imagine a Bollywood movie choreographed by Massive Monkees. Territory incorporated the stomping feet, extended heels, facial expressiveness and intricate hand shapes familiar from traditional Indian dance that Seattle audiences recently saw at ACT’s Devi. But the dancers dropped to the floor and jumped up like parkour traceuses and their shoulders moved like gymnastic dance ribbons. Sometimes they looked like toddlers stomping in puddles; sometimes soldiers sneaking through jungle; sometimes Krishna, if Krishna took up pole dancing and made a cameo appearance in a rap video.
Attitudes of defiance and militance evoked themes of social change and resistance to colonialism, but there was a wide range of emotional expression as well. In some of the more coquettish postures of traditional dance, the performers looked positively sarcastic. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen sarcasm in dance before.
.
ka.nei.see | collective
As my gushing last few paragraphs indicate, IMGE were a tough act to follow. In contrast to their maximalism, the seven dancers of ka.nei.see presented a spare contemporary dance with Contradictions of Blue. I found the first movement in particular to be quite beautiful. Almost like watching a foreign movie, the dancing was like watching a ballet told in the language of contemporary dance. The music for this part was particularly lovely as well.
I have to confess to (an entirely personal) pet peeve that affected my enjoyment of Contradictions of Blue. Dance-running has always kind of irritated me. Something about the jogging pace and perfect right-angle elbows pulls me out of a dance the same way anachronistic slang pulls me out of a story.
Contradictions involved a lot of dance-running. They ran laps around the stage for a really long time, and paired with the simple shorts and sports bras, it reminded me too much of P.E. class. I could see that there was pattern and variation, and possibly meaning, too, in the way that some dancers peeled off to do something else, or changed direction to follow a different leader. But even without my personal prejudice against the ballet jog, it went on a bit too long.
One of the things I like best about contemporary dance is how the different sizes and shapes of the companies require very different partnering from what I’m used to seeing in ballet. With ka.nei.see, this was particularly applicable to lifts. Early in the piece, six of the dancers lift and carry a seventh. It’s weirdly awkward, like they’re about to drop her the whole time. Throughout, the dance was peppered by unusual shapes, like one dancer holding another horizontal to the floor at waist height. Then near the end, the group lifts a single dancer again, but this time, so smoothly and precisely that you almost don’t see how she arrives in a perfect upside-down vertical.
The Festival
Now that I’ve finally been to an SIDF program, I will try harder to see more of the festival next year. With its dual mission of celebrating local dance and introducing audiences to performers from around the world, I think a person could learn a lot just by attending all three weekends.
Seattle International Dance Festival takes place over three weeks in June. Most performances take place on Capitol Hill in Seattle (this year they were at the Broadway Performance Hall and Erickson Theatre).
Single tickets start around $20 and full festival passes cost about $150. The tickets are surprisingly affordable, considering how many of the performers have to travel to be here.
{I attended this performance courtesy of SIDF; the tickets were theirs, but the opinions, as always, are entirely my own.}
ByGD
Art on the Fly
I first heard about the Seattle International Dance Festival when I started writing about family arts events. At the time, I couldn’t afford tickets for the whole family, and I didn’t think that I could convince anyone I was qualified it to review it as a “real” arts critic. But the free Art on the Fly event for families seemed like a no-brainer. But year after year, something always came up. Then this year, I got to preview the festival for Seattle Times. It steeled my resolve to finally explore the Seattle International Dance Festival.
Art on the Fly
Art on the Fly is a free, all-ages event that kicks off the Seattle International Dance Festival (SIDF) each year at Denny Park. (In all the years I’ve lived in Seattle, I don’t think I had ever actually set foot in Denny Park – a former cemetery and one of the cities oldest public green spaces.) Art on the Fly includes free dance classes and performances. It is always the first Saturday of the festival, running from around noon to mid-afternoon, in conjunction with the South Lake Union Saturday Market. This year Art on the Fly was on June 8.
Getting There
June 8 turned out to be almost as challenging as the June Saturdays in previous years. In the event, the family had to split up to get all the things done. But my 10-year-old and I finally managed to catch a bus towards downtown and arrived at the park an hour or so after they started. Lake Union is never a good place to park, and with all the road construction in the neighborhood this year, taking the bus was a very good choice.
What We Found
We wandered around the park, where it was hard to tell where the festival ended a normal Saturday in South Lake Union started. Gold-painted women danced on a small stage just feet away from a rousing game of ping pong. On the other side of a shrub border, people were playing badminton.
Along one path a man sat on a speker, playing electric cello. A DJ spun in one corner of the park while a group of people participated in a dance workshop on the grass in another. If I hadn’t known there was a festival going on, I might have mistaken them (and the various groups rehearsing elsewhere in the park) for friends teaching each other a new dance.
What We Did
After we watched the dancers in gold, and wandered around, we passed through the Saturday market. We’d had a late breakfast, so we bypassed most of the food trucks. But my daughter couldn’t resist the taro boba tea in a flashing light bulb cup. It cost as much as buying lunch. We wandered back to the stage area and listened to a set by a woman with a ukulele.
The highlight of the day, for me, was getting to see the Massive Monkees perform. I’ve seen them on video, and got to interview a member a few years ago, but this was the first time seeing them live. Even though this performance was more like an educational demo, with lots of interruptions to explain breakdancing and how the group works, just getting to see how they move was sort of unreal.
Watching breakdance when you’re used to ballet is like watching parkour when you’re used to karate. It almost seems like they are not using the same gravity you are using. I can’t count to four the same speed twice, but it was fun watching the little kids in the audience who couldn’t resist joining in – even before they called for volunteers to come on stage. And watching the little kid who already knew how to dance was just – ah, nothing beats the combination of cuteness and skill.
What I Felt
Wandering around the festival reminded me of lazy summer Saturdays when I was in college and still exploring the city. Back then, I would leave my apartment and just start walking, often ending up in a park I’d never seen before. One time, I stumbled on the Mural concerts; another time I discovered the Peace Concerts. I didn’t always discover a new concert series. Some walks would reveal a flower I’d never seen before or just a street with cool houses. Sometimes I listened to buskers or made friends with panhandlers. Sometimes friends would show up with frisbees or hackey sack.
It’s been years since I had the kind of free time that allowed for an aimless wander. And so Art on the Fly was the first time in years that I felt that sense of neighborhood discovery and community life that drew me to Seattle in the first place.
ByGD
Music I Like – Throat Singing
It’s funny. I don’t really think of throat singing as something I like. But whenever I stumble on a musician who does it, I find myself intrigued, and often it turns out to be music I like.
Genghis Blues
I suspect that my interest in throat singing started when I saw the movie Genghis Blues at the Seattle International Film Festival. In that movie San Francisco bluesman and composer Paul Peña makes a musical pilgrimage to Tuva. For a long time after that, I thought Tuva was the only place where the technique was used. I’m sure there’s a soundtrack out there somewhere.
.
Tanya Tagaq
My next experience with throat singing was when music writer Kim Kelly started to champion the music of Canadian First Nations artist Tanya Tagaq. (Actually, I had heard her earlier on Bjork’s album Medúlla, but didn’t know what I was hearing.) Her latest album is the brilliantly named Toothsayer.
.
Silla + Rise
I wrote about them recently in a post on indigenous artists.
.
Nytt Land
I wrote about these guys before. Inspired by the traditional music of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, Old Icelandic epics, and the atmosphere of classic Norwegian black metal, Nytt Land is multiple flavors of my catnip. They make their own traditional instruments and you guessed, they also include throat singing. Check out their latest full album, Odal.
,
Alvin Curran
Canti Illuminati by Alvin Curran is a modern classical work that incorporates throat singing. It lacks the immediacy of more traditional presentations but it’s interesting as a recontextualization of ancient techniques.
.
Nine Treasures
Nine Treasures is so good. To be honest, I don’t really hear the throat singing on Wisdom Eyes. But it’s tagged “mongolian throat singing” and I’ll take any excuse to talk about this band. Blues, heavy metal, Mongolian folk melodies and instrumentation. You can’t go wrong with this.
ByGD
Shopping Gods
I don’t know what possessed me to visit the Night Market in Qingdao first thing in the morning. As a shopping experience, it left much to be desired. But the gods never sleep, and these gods watch over the night market even during the day.