Day trip.
26th January
Art excess
The course does not offer enough training, it offers too few trips to see some of the things we are meant to be engaging in. As a poor student a free trip or one subsidised wouldn’t go unappreciated. I could bring my own beer.
Either way and putting those gripes side for the moment, we, TAVA2, went to see ‘View from the shore’ at the Royal Opera House. The opera house is one of those buildings that was revolutionary in the 19th century. The Crystal Palace and a train station in London were both based on the same design. Pillars doubled up as drains to take water from the roof.
Sandwiches cost £6 and a glass of house red costs £8, the same price as the ticket for the show we were there to see.
There were two performances separated by the interval.
I don’t know what to make of the first performance, it was movement to music. It was good movement to good music but this seems insubstantial to a person who has loud flashing entertainment shot at him on demand. Clearly there were dancers who had different strengths and weaknesses, different training and styles. The dance featured repetitions of movements at different times so that one could see how one dancer performed the sequence and how that differed from another. The performance space was wide compared to the audience, this meant that it was not always possible to see the whole of the action. I think this was deliberate, moments of virtuosity were contrasted with stillness, one dancer standing away from the action yet still quite clearly in the performance space and quite clearly still performing.
The second piece was an honest to goodness show, it has been so long since I have seen something like that. It was based on New Orleans jazz and featured mixed samples of music and interviews with musicians. It was humorous, well some people laughed. They laughed in that over loud way that people laugh when in theatres. The same people guffaw violently at the ‘funny’ bits of Shakespeare plays, strangely in order for them to have understood shakesperean jokes they must have studied the text, if there is anything that is clinically proven to kill humour then it is studying humour. Back on track, I couldn’t accept the humour as a thing in itself, I was expecting it to be the prelude to a horrific scene, contrasted with violence and tragedy like A Clockwork Orange. I decided to wear white trousers, a white tee shirt and braces that day. My fashion sense could have me arrested in some countries.
Before all this, which began at 20:00 we arrived in at London Victoria at about 13:30. Took in the Tate Britain Gallery and the Tate Modern Gallery. Tate Britain displayed placards, banners and various protest paraphernalia like swords and shields hung on the wall of a baronial castle that commemorate a great battle. They belonged to Brian Haw a protestor who has maintained a watch in front of the houses of parliament since 2001, recent legislation prohibits protest in that area to a distance that I forget. The area that Brian Haw may protest in in three metres square.
One of the banners featured a quotation by Daisaku Ikeda.
Drank, ate, window shopped.
‘You’re going to reap just what you sow.’
Lou Reed, Kirsty MacCol, various others.
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