After Karaoke I had my first official night in King’s Cross, the seedier side of Sydney. It’s all a bit of a blur, but Jaya I made it home at the wholly reasonable hour of 4.30am, while the rest of the gang stayed out until after dawn. Time is an alien concept in the Cross, it seems.
On Saturday, after wandering round town and checking out the Myer sale (more Elle Macpherson underwear!), I met up with Christina again, along with Lauren and Matt who I met on NYE, and we had a picnic in the Domain. Noite Brasil was held as part of the Sydney Festival - a night of brazilian music under the stars – it was so lovely dancing until 11pm on our picnic blankets, on a warm summer evening, with 20,000 other people. I love the Sydney Festival!
Sunday brought a numb bum, as I queued from 7am until 10am at the ‘Tix for next to Nix’ booth (Australian for ‘cheap standby tickets’). Managed to secure 2 tickets for the Batsheva Dance Company’s Mamootot. Ooh, I’m so proud of myself for trying all these new things. I lived in London for 7 years and never once ventured inside Sadler’s Wells, having a strange allergy to contemporary dance. Well now, along with shattering my prejudices of video art, I decided to give it a try. I’ve always felt very estranged by the world of contemporary dance – as if it’s a club I don’t belong to – something I felt I didn’t understand and felt sidelined by. Also it was never staged or presented in a way that suggested it would be accessible to me, or that I would be welcomed, so I avoided it. However, in the spirit of no cultural boundaries, I went to the carriageworks with a really open mind, thoroughly disposed to be thrilled and amazed.
My initial frustration when we left after the performance was tempered somewhat by talking it over with Matt, who knows a lot about dance and really enjoyed the performance. I suppose I was searching for narrative, and character, and felt frustrated by the lack of either. However as I started talking about it, and voicing my questions, I realised that I had been engaged with it – it did inspire emotion in me – I did question the meaning but in an intelligent way – and I didn’t feel stupid for not necessarily adoring the whole thing. Plus the performance did contain narrative and character, but that each audience member’s personal interpretation of the piece is just as important as the artist’s motivation behind devising it. The questions I was asking were my personal response, yet I was expecting hard and fast answers because of the art I’m used to engaging with. It’s a fascinating relationship between the audience and the dancers, and I can see that each time I venture to something like this I’m taking somewhat of a risk, because the dancing is so personal, but I wasn’t totally turned off by it, and would definitely try more.
The rest of the week has been really hard work – there’s so much to do at the moment on the festival and we’re all under a lot of pressure – I was up until 3am last night putting together a sponsorship proposal for a pitch to a telecommunications company who shall not be named (SFF confidentiality) and then spent the whole day today interviewing people for the first two positions in my team, so I’m pretty exhausted. As previously promised, I will update people on what I’m doing at work, but need to get some sleep now.
More pics on flickr by the way.
cx
1 comment:
Hi Carmel,
Thought I'd get a Google thingy so I could comment occasionally. So you don't think you're talking to yourself.
We had Betty & Keith over last night for dinner and an overnighter. Not exactly the Sydney festival but good fun.
Love from everyone here
Paddy
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