Saturday afternoon and all is /[wh]ell/. I'm at work trying to resolve a few nagging issues with our credit card processing system. It appears that the test server we have access to behaves a somewhat differently from the live credit card processors. As a result, we've been forced to to start testing 'live', with our own cards. If that doesn't give incentive to get things right, I don't know what will. I spent half an hour yesterday balancing our transactions to zero dollars.
Last night, I went to see Concrete Blonde in concert. It wasn't the best concert I've been to, but it was pretty good. Johnette Napolitano, the lead singer, still has an incredible voice. What really sold me on the show, though, was Don McLeod, a Butoh dancer. He opened the set with his dance "Dream of the RagMan". If you've not seen Butoh before (and I hadn't), you might find it a bit strange, but I was impressed.
I'm one of those people who falls in the poetry camp of "it's okay for people to disagree on the meaning of a poem", but until now I've never been able to apply that to dance. The following interpretation is my own, so take it with a grain of salt.
In "Dream of the RagMan", I found myself drawn into the dance and watched as a homeless man struggled with his demons, reminded us that he's human and has desires and saw the pain on his face as his desires turned into his demons. Since the homeless man has nothing but thoughts and desires, Don McLeod returned to primitive man, who had little (in the modern view) beyond thoughts and desires. Primitive man went hunting with a spear and then the dance transformed into the evolution of killing to war. Don McLeod (I think), then tried to show that we could get beyond killing.
His finish to this very long dance, though, was pretty striking. The music turned into more of a pop tune and he started dancing, playing air guitar, snapping his fingers and pointing at the audience. I felt he was, to a certain extent, mocking us and letting us know that we ignore bigger issues and just want to have fun.
After he was finished, I started chatting with my friends and most of them pretty much gave me blank stares. I was blown away by the performance, but they said "yeah, it was okay". I'm not one to try and bother performers after the show, but I saw McLeod after the concert and started chatting with him. He was actually grateful that someone appreciated what he was doing and, despite having a some different ideas about what he was trying to do, it pretty much meshed with what I saw, though he did say that he wasn't trying to mock the audience.
Can you tell I was impressed? :)
