Fueled by something, some thing, the kids were racing around chasing each other at home after I’d picked them up from Montessori and kindergarten. They were so happy together and playing beautifully; now reading a book together, now pushing cars around on the carpet, now playing dog and owner… Wait, dog and owner? Yep. Owen actually likes to be the dog and Finney certainly swells with importance getting to be the owner. She leads him around with an imaginary string and he slumps along the floor on hands and knees licking things (he shouldn’t be licking) and sniffing things that should probably make him sneeze. Suddenly Finney picked up a woven bracelet C made and covered her eyes with it as she wavered around the room barely missing obstacles and giggling like crazy. Owen laughed and declared her the title of this journal’s entry.
She still had her sippy cup in one hand and I gently admonished her to be careful about dropping it. “OK daw-ling” she declared and kept on going. Owen shrugged his shoulders and wrangled a smile under control.
It was C’s birthday the other day and I took us to the Hummingbird Centre in the city to see a modern Japanese dance group called Sankai Juku. Fantastical and enigmatic hardly decribe the process. It was process more than anything else, although we both struggled to understand it while it played out on stage before us. We had front row seats and felt very close to the performance. There were no spoken words, just occasional hisses and intakes of breath throughout. I wondered if these were for the 6 dancers to operate more closely in unison, acting as sort of notifiers of performance phrasing. The dancers were all male with shaved heads and powdered completely in white with white/off-white robes. Most physical expressions were slow and extremely mannered – but never boring. One sequence was highly animated and involved much swooshing across the stage and whirling or arms, powder lifting off arms and heads and legs. The dancers were often backlit as well as frontlit and this made them seem like wraithes, ghosts, automatons. I was drummed by the music, flattened and struck through. I immediately on getting home ordered a CD of the music from their website and it arrived today. Here is a 12 minute sample of the music to the animated sequence [Manebi – Two Mirrors] :
[audio:Manebi-Two Mirrors.mp3]This also arrived today, but via email:
The children had all been photographed, and the
teacher was trying to persuade them each to buy a
copy of the group picture.
“Just think how nice it will be to look at it when
you are all grown up and say, ‘There’s Susan,
she’s a lawyer,’ or ‘That’s Michael, He’s a doctor.’
A small voice at the back of the room rang out, “And
there’s the teacher, she’s dead.”