I spent today helping to man the Natural Sciences booth at the university's Open Day (more tomorrow), talking to sixth formers and their parents visiting Cambridge to find out about coming to university here. Late in the day we were standing about talking about how shockingly young some of the prospective applicants looked when I realised that this lot were born in the NINETIES and are applying to university. Much shock and horror from us ancient PhD students. People born in the decade after us have no right to be fully formed human beings yet, surely.
It was actually a fairly enjoyable way to spend the day out of the office and feel like you're doing something vaguely worthwhile. I did really enjoy the NatSci course and it is nice to be enthusing about it to young 'uns. Without the course there would be no way I would be working on the Great Barrier Reef following little blue and yellow fish around -- this was definitely not part of the game plan when fresh out of my high school's molecular biology-heavy A level course. I'm not sure when the epiphany struck. Possibly actually very early on, in the first week of Evolution and Behaviour lectures in my first year, when our sage old Cambridge don lecturer demonstrated to us the courting behaviour of the male long-tailed widow bird by crouching behind the lectern, then leaping all at once squawking into the air. What better subject could there be?
It was interesting talking to them because it reminded me how competitive and important it all seemed back then. (Not that it isn't actually competitive and important, it just seems less so in hindsight.) You had to choose the right subjects; know what to say in a personal statement; be prepared for interview; worry about whether 89.8% counts as 90% (!), and it just sort of goes on and on in a big stressful litany. Thank goodness that's all over (though I probably speak too soon, as the selection process for the real world rather than university still lies somewhere in my fuzzy future). Speaking to loads of new people was also really fun -- they run the gamut, from those who come right up to you and say, they are going to do neuroscience, what are the research opportunities and do I need to find a third year project as early as I can; and then there are those who "like animals"! Personally I rather like the ones who just like animals. Like I tell them, it's a pretty good start.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thingamajigs
Things I have done in the recent past:
- Produced and performed a contemporary dance show which was probably the most photographed small contemporary dance showcase in Cambridge's history, it was like being a drunken young star outside a nightclub, there was a camera click for every half movement you made. Despite being desperately, farcically last minute from a production point of view --including the entire venue being a wet mess of broken glass and left over bits of tree from the May Ball when we were trying to run a dress rehearsal the night before (fat chance), one dancer being unable to make it for the performance with 45 minutes confirmed notice, a choir showing up after the show actually started -- the audience actually seemed to think it was very slick (goodness me). Production values aside, I think that the dance itself was really rather not bad, both in terms of choreographic repertoire and performance. And of course the cloisters did their job in being generally gorgeous, and the heavens smiled upon us with beautiful sunshine and a brisk breeze to pleasingly rustle the dancers' costumes. So overall, it was not a bad start for Cambridge Contemporary Dance at all. There is loads to plan for next year so I'm very excited! Photos of Impressions are all linked on its Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=58680410592
- Went to a concert by the Gentlemen of St John's in aid of charity. The Gents are the choral scholars of John's, a male-voiced group which on this evening sang everything from early ecclesiastical music (beautiful but a tad boring in bits, particularly without the full ranks of a large choir to fill out the chapel with swelling voices -- although they did manage it with an Ave Maria) to traditional songs (particularly enjoyed Miss Otis Regrets which I thought gently funny and so very English) to, in the last quarter, full-on swinging a capella standards, jazz and a good sprinkling of Beatles. I must admit that I enjoyed the last part much more than the rest, probably making me a bit of a philistine, but it was all so much more fun than the seriousness of the first part of the programme; they even switched their sombre black bowties for comedy patterned red ones in recognition of this! Also I really enjoyed that the close harmony songs gave them the chance to showcase particular voices, instead of it all being a blended choral sound. They all had really wonderful voices, technically so impressive and all with their very own sound. As my friend remarked we really couldn't decide which of them had the best voice because they were all so great and different! I think my favourites were "Is You Is" (..or is you ain't my baby, etc.), and a very energetic "Surfin' USA" complete with vocal acrobatics and a hilarious operatic interlude.
- Saw the one year programme graduation performance at Laban, followed the next night by the Richard Alston company at home at The Place. Somewhat to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed both of them and found that they weren't actually as drastically different as I thought they would be, based on previous experiences of both Laban choreography and the Richard Alston company! Laban's style tends towards dance theatre and is often driven by some kind of meaningful avant-garde concept. This can often go right off the deep end of the "be-a-tree-and-then-have-an-epileptic-fit-whilst-wearing-some-bandages" style of contemporary choreography, which I have struggled in the past to enjoy, quite simply because I find it rather boring. However I was very pleasantly surprised to find a whole host of thoroughly engaging pieces -- yes, most were concept driven, but there was bucket loads of exciting dancey movement to watch as well, almost no mooing, and loads of humour, which made the fact that they were concept-driven really interesting rather than some kind of modern-art-huh? drag. I particularly enjoyed a piece where two men tried repeatedly to hug without really wanting to show their need for physical contact -- the epitome of simple and effective.
I always knew I would enjoy the next evening's performance -- Richard Alston almost never fails to delight me -- and with the calibre of dancers that they have you could almost just sit there and admire the superhuman control and energy of the performers even if the choreography turned out to be a bit of a drag. But the choreography was very good indeed. I was surprised at first by a Darren Ellis work 'No More Ghosts'; Alston is generally beautiful, elegant and classical, and here we suddenly had an electronic score, dancers in Converse sneakers and tank tops, frenzied floor work with spins on the knee and a duet involving the woman hanging nonchalantly upside down, cross-legged and -armed, the only support point one knee hooked around her partner's arm. It was fascinating to see the company in this departure from their usual style and I really enjoyed it. This was followed by more traditional fare for Alston with his own 'Nigredo' and then Martin Lawrance's 'Body & Soul'. The latter was a wonderful dramatic work, with live performance of Schumann's Dichterliebe, the dancers dressed in slightly period formal long black greatcoats and dresses which swung about them to great effect as they all engaged in a technical tour de force with emotional power and intriguing psychological relationships all into the bargain.
- Gave a talk on my work to fellow PhD students accompanied by beer and pizza. I feel this went down well enough. Little does not go down well when accompanied by beer and pizza. See, I do try to actually do some work when not engaged in my full time hobby of dance. I've also been starting to explore my spatial data collected from dragging GPS units around after fish, which is exciting in a rather geeky way.
- Went to the Pembroke June Event in lieu of a May Ball (the night before Impressions!). Enjoyed myself tremendously. I think there is a lot to be said for the events where you are less conscious of the fact that you have paid a LOT of money and therefore feel less pressure to do everything (also there is less everything to do which makes things easier). I ate a stupid amount (bangers and mash, fajitas, hog roast, sickening amounts of chocolate -- it was after all themed "The Chocolate Factory"), drank rather more than a stupid amount (including shots of Baileys with dark chocolate liqeur yum and tequila which I'd actually never had before -- I rather like the whole salt and lime faff!), oohed and aahed at the Acrobatic Rock'n'Roll performance, bemusedly bounced around confusedly at a ceilidh that put me rather in mind of human bumper cars, and went home early, full, satisfied, and happily woozy.
- Sat around chatting with friends variously from dance, college and work over rather copious quantities of alcohol about, well, nothing much (if you really want to know: fear of flying, protein crystals, what men want, evolutionary psychology, bird sex, &c.) , which is very much a good way to spend an evening.
- Produced and performed a contemporary dance show which was probably the most photographed small contemporary dance showcase in Cambridge's history, it was like being a drunken young star outside a nightclub, there was a camera click for every half movement you made. Despite being desperately, farcically last minute from a production point of view --including the entire venue being a wet mess of broken glass and left over bits of tree from the May Ball when we were trying to run a dress rehearsal the night before (fat chance), one dancer being unable to make it for the performance with 45 minutes confirmed notice, a choir showing up after the show actually started -- the audience actually seemed to think it was very slick (goodness me). Production values aside, I think that the dance itself was really rather not bad, both in terms of choreographic repertoire and performance. And of course the cloisters did their job in being generally gorgeous, and the heavens smiled upon us with beautiful sunshine and a brisk breeze to pleasingly rustle the dancers' costumes. So overall, it was not a bad start for Cambridge Contemporary Dance at all. There is loads to plan for next year so I'm very excited! Photos of Impressions are all linked on its Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=58680410592
- Went to a concert by the Gentlemen of St John's in aid of charity. The Gents are the choral scholars of John's, a male-voiced group which on this evening sang everything from early ecclesiastical music (beautiful but a tad boring in bits, particularly without the full ranks of a large choir to fill out the chapel with swelling voices -- although they did manage it with an Ave Maria) to traditional songs (particularly enjoyed Miss Otis Regrets which I thought gently funny and so very English) to, in the last quarter, full-on swinging a capella standards, jazz and a good sprinkling of Beatles. I must admit that I enjoyed the last part much more than the rest, probably making me a bit of a philistine, but it was all so much more fun than the seriousness of the first part of the programme; they even switched their sombre black bowties for comedy patterned red ones in recognition of this! Also I really enjoyed that the close harmony songs gave them the chance to showcase particular voices, instead of it all being a blended choral sound. They all had really wonderful voices, technically so impressive and all with their very own sound. As my friend remarked we really couldn't decide which of them had the best voice because they were all so great and different! I think my favourites were "Is You Is" (..or is you ain't my baby, etc.), and a very energetic "Surfin' USA" complete with vocal acrobatics and a hilarious operatic interlude.
- Saw the one year programme graduation performance at Laban, followed the next night by the Richard Alston company at home at The Place. Somewhat to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed both of them and found that they weren't actually as drastically different as I thought they would be, based on previous experiences of both Laban choreography and the Richard Alston company! Laban's style tends towards dance theatre and is often driven by some kind of meaningful avant-garde concept. This can often go right off the deep end of the "be-a-tree-and-then-have-an-epileptic-fit-whilst-wearing-some-bandages" style of contemporary choreography, which I have struggled in the past to enjoy, quite simply because I find it rather boring. However I was very pleasantly surprised to find a whole host of thoroughly engaging pieces -- yes, most were concept driven, but there was bucket loads of exciting dancey movement to watch as well, almost no mooing, and loads of humour, which made the fact that they were concept-driven really interesting rather than some kind of modern-art-huh? drag. I particularly enjoyed a piece where two men tried repeatedly to hug without really wanting to show their need for physical contact -- the epitome of simple and effective.
I always knew I would enjoy the next evening's performance -- Richard Alston almost never fails to delight me -- and with the calibre of dancers that they have you could almost just sit there and admire the superhuman control and energy of the performers even if the choreography turned out to be a bit of a drag. But the choreography was very good indeed. I was surprised at first by a Darren Ellis work 'No More Ghosts'; Alston is generally beautiful, elegant and classical, and here we suddenly had an electronic score, dancers in Converse sneakers and tank tops, frenzied floor work with spins on the knee and a duet involving the woman hanging nonchalantly upside down, cross-legged and -armed, the only support point one knee hooked around her partner's arm. It was fascinating to see the company in this departure from their usual style and I really enjoyed it. This was followed by more traditional fare for Alston with his own 'Nigredo' and then Martin Lawrance's 'Body & Soul'. The latter was a wonderful dramatic work, with live performance of Schumann's Dichterliebe, the dancers dressed in slightly period formal long black greatcoats and dresses which swung about them to great effect as they all engaged in a technical tour de force with emotional power and intriguing psychological relationships all into the bargain.
- Gave a talk on my work to fellow PhD students accompanied by beer and pizza. I feel this went down well enough. Little does not go down well when accompanied by beer and pizza. See, I do try to actually do some work when not engaged in my full time hobby of dance. I've also been starting to explore my spatial data collected from dragging GPS units around after fish, which is exciting in a rather geeky way.
- Went to the Pembroke June Event in lieu of a May Ball (the night before Impressions!). Enjoyed myself tremendously. I think there is a lot to be said for the events where you are less conscious of the fact that you have paid a LOT of money and therefore feel less pressure to do everything (also there is less everything to do which makes things easier). I ate a stupid amount (bangers and mash, fajitas, hog roast, sickening amounts of chocolate -- it was after all themed "The Chocolate Factory"), drank rather more than a stupid amount (including shots of Baileys with dark chocolate liqeur yum and tequila which I'd actually never had before -- I rather like the whole salt and lime faff!), oohed and aahed at the Acrobatic Rock'n'Roll performance, bemusedly bounced around confusedly at a ceilidh that put me rather in mind of human bumper cars, and went home early, full, satisfied, and happily woozy.
- Sat around chatting with friends variously from dance, college and work over rather copious quantities of alcohol about, well, nothing much (if you really want to know: fear of flying, protein crystals, what men want, evolutionary psychology, bird sex, &c.) , which is very much a good way to spend an evening.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Culture!
Or Why I Love Living In Cambridge.
The past week has consisted of everything I love about Cambridge life. Or pretty much everything; I didn't go sit in Heffers with a novel and a coffee, but that was just because it was too pretty and warm so I sat outdoors with a novel instead!
Friday evening: A free concert in the Master's Lodge by the Aronowitz Ensemble, who played Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat major and Schubert's String Quintet in C major. Was almost in two minds about whether to go, but I was so glad I did. The minute I sat down a very amiable old fellow started chatting to me about music and Trinity and the master and, when I told him I was a zoologist, geese... And then of course there was some glorious beautiful music played absolutely exhiliratingly (it was very energetic stuff, particularly the Schumann, and I thought perhaps the fact that they were all young musicians added to the vigour with which they played it), in a real chamber music format. It is quite something to be sitting in a room of the type which chamber music was designed for (old, small and intimate, portraits of Queen Elizabeth watching over you, drinks receptions waiting outside, lots of distinguished personages nodding away to it all, the summer dusk slowly dimming the view of Great Court and the college clock on occasion gently interrupting), the effect is very different to that of a larger venue. Although neither quintet struck me to the core, I did honestly enjoy a lot of it and pleasantly surprised myself with how complex and interesting I found the Schubert. Having recently read Vikram Seth's "An Equal Music", about a violinist in a quartet, and also in the middle of rehearsing a piece I made last year inspired by Jacqueline du Pre's playing, there was plenty to keep me interested above and beyond the venue and the music, though it hardly needed it!
Saturday: A day of dance. I hauled myself out of bed far earlier than I do in the week (hobbies are always so much more interesting than work!) in order to get to the Royal Opera House on time to queue for day tickets to the ballet that evening. Amazingly they now sell standing tickets as day tickets and so I managed to secure a prime view ticket to the Royal Ballet's much loved (and deservedly so) Romeo and Juliet for eight pounds, believe it or not. After a restocking trip to Chinatown where I did my usual goggling over the vast array of "food from home", I headed off to The Place for my now weekly Cunningham (contemporary dance) class.
The day was rounded off very wonderfully with the ballet. Having seen this production only a year or two ago I knew what I was in for, but as this was one of the best ballets I have ever seen I knew I wasn't to be disappointed at any rate. Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares debuted in the title roles only a few weeks ago, and were much lauded -- and again, I think, deservedly. Nunez is physically wonderful, with a truly awe-inspiring technique. Her control is such that she can take all sorts of wonderful risks with daringly off-kilter balances in her solos, and manages to achieve an amazing degree of heart-rending physical desperation in the steps she dances as Romeo leaves 'the morning after', and then soon beyond that her very reluctant duet with Paris (as ever it is the amount of control she has that enables her to let go more than a less steely technique would). For Nunez it is her dancing that brings the character across, rather than her plain acting (that long moment where she sits on the bed gathering courage to go to Friar Laurence wasn't quite as convincing as it could have been); whereas for Soares it is almost the other way around. His technique is unfortunately not quite as stellar as Nunez's and it shows particularly in the glorious sequences at the beginning of the balcony pas de deux in which Romeo spins and leaps his heart out to his Juliet -- he just didn't quite pull it off for me. He never did seem to be able to let go physically and trust to his technique to carry the emotion, and as a result his Romeo always seemed a little controlled and internal -- but nonetheless convincing for that. In the town scenes with the harlots and the villagers his dancing sparkled much more, and it was in his simple acting that he really became Romeo -- standing like a lovestruck fool when he first meets Juliet at the ball; mind filled to distraction with thoughts of love as his friends tease and cajole, his Romeo seems to love quietly, but so very completely. It is no trouble at all to stand for three hours when you have choreography and music and dancing of this quality to totally engross you.
Sunday: More cultural pursuits but in a much more modest and personal way. I (successfully) interviewed to choreograph a musical for November this year -- I've always admired the diversity and sheer quality of the work of the musical theatre group here and it is wonderful to be part of the creative team of one (I've publicity designed for them in the past but that doesn't really count). Part of the reason I decided to take this on is that I'm getting more interested in where movement comes from, and I think choreographing a rather serious dramatic story will help me to explore that -- no jazz hands in this one! It is exciting also to be working in a different medium to the 'showcase' contemporary dance shows that I'm now very used to. Otherwise I spent the day rehearsing, cooking and even (hurrah) lolling on the backs with a novel! Sadly my schedule meant that I had to miss the Trinity choir singing from the towers and from punts on the river which they do every Trinity Sunday to sort of herald May Week and the summer, but I did faintly make out their harmonious strains whilst I was waiting for my interview in Clare, and later again when we moved our rehearsal to the cloisters to work out spacing, so I didn't entirely miss out.
Monday evening: The Hummingbirds, an a capella group in yet another beautiful old college room (the OCR this time) -- very enjoyable barbershop stuff, with some Scissor Sisters thrown in, because that seems to be the a capella pop source of choice nowadays..
Tuesday evening: Yet more rehearsals.
Wednesday evening: BA Dinner! Crab cakes, roast pork, and the richest chocolate mousse ever. Yum. We even got champagne as pre-dinner drinks instead of sherry, they're pulling out the stops!
Entire cost of cultural and culinary pursuits of the past week: Twenty-four pounds. Where else would this happen?!
The past week has consisted of everything I love about Cambridge life. Or pretty much everything; I didn't go sit in Heffers with a novel and a coffee, but that was just because it was too pretty and warm so I sat outdoors with a novel instead!
Friday evening: A free concert in the Master's Lodge by the Aronowitz Ensemble, who played Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat major and Schubert's String Quintet in C major. Was almost in two minds about whether to go, but I was so glad I did. The minute I sat down a very amiable old fellow started chatting to me about music and Trinity and the master and, when I told him I was a zoologist, geese... And then of course there was some glorious beautiful music played absolutely exhiliratingly (it was very energetic stuff, particularly the Schumann, and I thought perhaps the fact that they were all young musicians added to the vigour with which they played it), in a real chamber music format. It is quite something to be sitting in a room of the type which chamber music was designed for (old, small and intimate, portraits of Queen Elizabeth watching over you, drinks receptions waiting outside, lots of distinguished personages nodding away to it all, the summer dusk slowly dimming the view of Great Court and the college clock on occasion gently interrupting), the effect is very different to that of a larger venue. Although neither quintet struck me to the core, I did honestly enjoy a lot of it and pleasantly surprised myself with how complex and interesting I found the Schubert. Having recently read Vikram Seth's "An Equal Music", about a violinist in a quartet, and also in the middle of rehearsing a piece I made last year inspired by Jacqueline du Pre's playing, there was plenty to keep me interested above and beyond the venue and the music, though it hardly needed it!
Saturday: A day of dance. I hauled myself out of bed far earlier than I do in the week (hobbies are always so much more interesting than work!) in order to get to the Royal Opera House on time to queue for day tickets to the ballet that evening. Amazingly they now sell standing tickets as day tickets and so I managed to secure a prime view ticket to the Royal Ballet's much loved (and deservedly so) Romeo and Juliet for eight pounds, believe it or not. After a restocking trip to Chinatown where I did my usual goggling over the vast array of "food from home", I headed off to The Place for my now weekly Cunningham (contemporary dance) class.
The day was rounded off very wonderfully with the ballet. Having seen this production only a year or two ago I knew what I was in for, but as this was one of the best ballets I have ever seen I knew I wasn't to be disappointed at any rate. Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares debuted in the title roles only a few weeks ago, and were much lauded -- and again, I think, deservedly. Nunez is physically wonderful, with a truly awe-inspiring technique. Her control is such that she can take all sorts of wonderful risks with daringly off-kilter balances in her solos, and manages to achieve an amazing degree of heart-rending physical desperation in the steps she dances as Romeo leaves 'the morning after', and then soon beyond that her very reluctant duet with Paris (as ever it is the amount of control she has that enables her to let go more than a less steely technique would). For Nunez it is her dancing that brings the character across, rather than her plain acting (that long moment where she sits on the bed gathering courage to go to Friar Laurence wasn't quite as convincing as it could have been); whereas for Soares it is almost the other way around. His technique is unfortunately not quite as stellar as Nunez's and it shows particularly in the glorious sequences at the beginning of the balcony pas de deux in which Romeo spins and leaps his heart out to his Juliet -- he just didn't quite pull it off for me. He never did seem to be able to let go physically and trust to his technique to carry the emotion, and as a result his Romeo always seemed a little controlled and internal -- but nonetheless convincing for that. In the town scenes with the harlots and the villagers his dancing sparkled much more, and it was in his simple acting that he really became Romeo -- standing like a lovestruck fool when he first meets Juliet at the ball; mind filled to distraction with thoughts of love as his friends tease and cajole, his Romeo seems to love quietly, but so very completely. It is no trouble at all to stand for three hours when you have choreography and music and dancing of this quality to totally engross you.
Sunday: More cultural pursuits but in a much more modest and personal way. I (successfully) interviewed to choreograph a musical for November this year -- I've always admired the diversity and sheer quality of the work of the musical theatre group here and it is wonderful to be part of the creative team of one (I've publicity designed for them in the past but that doesn't really count). Part of the reason I decided to take this on is that I'm getting more interested in where movement comes from, and I think choreographing a rather serious dramatic story will help me to explore that -- no jazz hands in this one! It is exciting also to be working in a different medium to the 'showcase' contemporary dance shows that I'm now very used to. Otherwise I spent the day rehearsing, cooking and even (hurrah) lolling on the backs with a novel! Sadly my schedule meant that I had to miss the Trinity choir singing from the towers and from punts on the river which they do every Trinity Sunday to sort of herald May Week and the summer, but I did faintly make out their harmonious strains whilst I was waiting for my interview in Clare, and later again when we moved our rehearsal to the cloisters to work out spacing, so I didn't entirely miss out.
Monday evening: The Hummingbirds, an a capella group in yet another beautiful old college room (the OCR this time) -- very enjoyable barbershop stuff, with some Scissor Sisters thrown in, because that seems to be the a capella pop source of choice nowadays..
Tuesday evening: Yet more rehearsals.
Wednesday evening: BA Dinner! Crab cakes, roast pork, and the richest chocolate mousse ever. Yum. We even got champagne as pre-dinner drinks instead of sherry, they're pulling out the stops!
Entire cost of cultural and culinary pursuits of the past week: Twenty-four pounds. Where else would this happen?!
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Impressions
In the thick of rehearsing for Impressions, a small May Week contemporary dance performance we (being our new dance company Cambridge Contemporary Dance) are putting on. Having had a May Week performance first suggested over a "yay I'm back in Cambridge" dinner with some dancers in late April this really has been a very speedy gestation indeed, made possible by a small cast and a essentially mostly a reworking of repertoire rather than making new work. I have thoroughly enjoyed producing this so far. It is such a pleasure to work with a small number of people whom you are familiar with and know you can trust; in addition the novelty of working in the really unusual space of the 300 year old cloisters under the Wren Library in Trinity has made things all very exciting. College has been really supportive, and it's nice to be running about speaking to my Tutor and the Junior Bursar and the Head Porter and Catering, after 5 years of being in this college and never really feeling part of the institutional side of things. I have high hopes for this performance and for Cambridge Contemporary Dance in general; I think we have some really wonderful talent in the group and it is all very exciting. We've even just received a rather large grant from the University's 800th Anniversary Events team, so we're commissioning ourselves to make something Very Very Good for next year. It feels good indeed to be able to be part of taking things to the next level. Scary, obviously, but good.
Dancing, producing for dance, watching dance -- saw some new work in the Linbury at the ROH a couple of weeks ago. Mainly choreographed by dancers within the Royal Ballet ranks, this was always going to be something of a mixed offering but for seven pounds to see Royal Ballet dancers, why not? I heartily disliked one piece, Vanessa Fenton's Monument, which with black unitards and bizarre gestures seemed to me almost ridiculous -- I'm sure it wasn't meant to remind me of a bad MTV style "dance team" routine but it certainly did in parts. On the other hand, I really thoroughly enjoyed three of the works -- two edgy duets by Viacheslav Samodurov (who had the good fortune to be able to choreograph this on co-principals Ivan Putrov and Sarah Lamb) and Matjash Mrozewski, and a group piece by Jonathan Watkins which had a really enjoyable fluidity to it. Reviewers seemed to enjoy a longer, slightly more traditional ballet by Liam Scarlett, but I have to say after the first enjoyable fast-paced witty section this left me cold by suddenly changing moods into something darker and more aggressive, which for me rather killed it all by making it clear that it did not really have anything coherent to say as a piece.
I think I am gradually becoming slightly discontented with movement for movement's sake, and seem to have to look for something more in anything I watch -- certainly not always a narrative or 'message', as I find physical relationships between dancers and space, or a mood and feel, do the job just as well -- so long as it is not just steps placed to musical notes just because those notes are there, so long as the choreography has some kind of aim, it is made so much more interesting for it. At any rate I shall soon have ample ground to test my developing thoughts on choreography as next week I shall be watching in quick succession two performances that possibly represent opposites in London's contemporary dance scene -- a graduation performance at Laban (full of dance theatre and what my Laban friend describes as "epileptic fits on stage"), and then Richard Alston at home at The Place (all Cunningham and beauteous leaping combinations across the stage). I instinctively tend towards the latter, in my watching and my own choreography, but I'm not entirely sure if I may be developing more tolerance and appreciation of the former, even if I still find it almost impossible to keep my attention fixed on people when all they are doing is walking about the stage, mooing. Anyway, I'll try and report back, not that any of you will be much interested (insert usual apology for going into esoteric dance discussion mode here).
All that dance has left not much time or motivation for much else, although I have somehow miraculously managed to stay on schedule with my wrestling with Access and R, and have a sheaf of analysis summaries full of pretty graphs to prove it. I'm at a bit of a halfway point and hope to decide whether I'm heading out again for a third field season very soon. Personally, dance-pangs aside, I would love to head back to Lizard but have to actually think of something sensible to do in it, which is proving rather difficult! Otherwise, more analysis looms large till a conference and holiday break in August. I spent today actually reading some papers in preparation for the next lot of analysis, which was a very novel feeling after having slogged through field work and then stuck straight into statistics for over half a year. I'd forgotten how enjoyable it can be to learn about other people's science, especially when they involve African elephant dominance hierarchies (woo).
Plus, I've even found the time for drinks, dinners out, more experimental cooking, Indiana Jones, Sex and the City, Jude the Obscure, oh and a few weeks back a very nice birthday formal and everyone squished into my room afterwards drinking champagne and eating some very yummy chocolate cake. Life, overall, is really pretty good -- now I just need the sun to come out again so I can resume my lolling about on the backs (sadly interrupted for the past few weeks by a return to the typical miserableness of English weather).
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Risi e Bisi
Not really risotto, but as far as I can tell it is just as yummy and you don't have to stir! Hurrah. Rice, peas, onion, pancetta, parsley, chicken stock and Parmesan. Voila.
High culture and sunbathing
Friday evening I went to see the Ballet Boyz 'Greatest Hits' at Sadler's Wells. For the uninitiated the Boyz are a couple of ex-Royal Ballet male dancers with a 'trendy' moniker that has unfortunately stuck (I, too, would much rather say that I went to see George Piper Dances, their preferred but sadly not quite as catchy original company name). I have seen them multiple times in the past and have never tired of their brand of top quality contemporary dance interspersed with tongue in cheek videos. It was a great pleasure to watch again Chris Wheeldon's Mesmerics. It had a huge impact on me choreographically speaking when I first saw it years ago at the Cambridge Arts Theatre and I was pleased to see that I was still, well, mesmerised -- although now that I have seen more Wheeldon I don't think Mesmerics is the best of his work.
Towards the end of the evening there were a couple of pieces which I had not yet seen. One of these, EdOx, a Rafael Bonachela pas de deux for Edward Watson and Oxana Panchenko, was for me the very best part of the show. Edward Watson! What a dancer. I am not sure that I have ever seen him before and certainly not in this kind of work (despite having a poster of him and Alina in Chroma on my wall -- a work I have always very sadly missed). Edward is unique amongst male dancers for his flexibility and probably because of this it was a very unusual pas de deux in that it was very almost completely equal. They are both able to twist and bend and throw up 180 degree extensions and for quite a lot of the work they are not in contact at all, instead dancing the same steps if not in unison -- steps that most other male dancers could probably simply not do at the same level. They both seemed to take to the style of fluidly twisted spines and shoulders in a very similar way and in this respect they must have been a perfect pair to dance together. All this alone would have made it fascinating but there were also many semi-supported lifts which again were roughly equal in terms of who was lifted and who supported -- very impressive for Oxana as besides being flexible Edward is also tall and probably solid heavy muscle. So on the rare occasions when Oxana is lifted right up into the air at arm's length, seemingly without any effort at all, it is all the more an unexpected and wonderful surprise for the audience. I am afraid I am not able to be very eloquent about this work. But I loved it all -- the style in the upper body movement, the uniqueness of the equality of the work, and of course the gorgeous performance.
Saturday was busy -- dance class and then rushing back to Cambridge for a meeting (very exciting emerging dance/music collaboration project) and in the evening going to a concert of the Dante Quartet in King's. I am a music ignomarus but it seems the Dante Quartet is very well regarded and they certainly played (to me) gorgeously even in King's Hall which does not have the best acoustics. Of all the pieces I loved the most Puccini's "Crisantemi", which is a gloriously dark elegiac work that flows and emotes in an indescribably beautiful way that seemed to take me on some kind of journey in my mind. I now think that in watching concerts or performances often all you really need is one piece that strikes you to the core and it is all worth it. EdOx; Crisantemi; and I remember a year or two ago watching the Malaysian Philharmonic play Arvo Part's Fratres, which struck me so much I went on to make possibly one of my best dances on it. There was also the world premiere of a new work by the composer Roxanna Panufnik, inspired by Canto 23 of Dante's Commedia. It was for me a rarity to be listening to completely current modern classical music, and I have to say I was slightly surprised by how much I managed to enjoy it when forced to listen properly. Dissonant and almost astructural, certainly, but also so wonderfully rich and with such wonderfully disturbing emotional currents and quite simply very beautiful in parts.
Today, so far, has been spent in a far less culturally aspiring way -- chiefly lolling about on the backs in the sun with a horrendously expensive iced coffee concoction, watching the punts go by (always good entertainment as not only do you get tour guides repeatedly giving you a potted history of Trinity and the Wren Library, but also, well, lots of people falling in, other people trying to retrieve stuck punt poles, Canada geese having hissy fits, and even, bizarrely, two people actually going for a proper swim in our disease-and-old-bicyle-infested river) and reading an old Coupland. One of the benefits of living finally in the main part of college really is being so much closer to the backs, I have been there so much more often since moving here and it is always so beautiful and idyllic, and often wonderfully peaceful.
More experimental cooking tonight in the form of risotto. Yum.. hopefully!
Towards the end of the evening there were a couple of pieces which I had not yet seen. One of these, EdOx, a Rafael Bonachela pas de deux for Edward Watson and Oxana Panchenko, was for me the very best part of the show. Edward Watson! What a dancer. I am not sure that I have ever seen him before and certainly not in this kind of work (despite having a poster of him and Alina in Chroma on my wall -- a work I have always very sadly missed). Edward is unique amongst male dancers for his flexibility and probably because of this it was a very unusual pas de deux in that it was very almost completely equal. They are both able to twist and bend and throw up 180 degree extensions and for quite a lot of the work they are not in contact at all, instead dancing the same steps if not in unison -- steps that most other male dancers could probably simply not do at the same level. They both seemed to take to the style of fluidly twisted spines and shoulders in a very similar way and in this respect they must have been a perfect pair to dance together. All this alone would have made it fascinating but there were also many semi-supported lifts which again were roughly equal in terms of who was lifted and who supported -- very impressive for Oxana as besides being flexible Edward is also tall and probably solid heavy muscle. So on the rare occasions when Oxana is lifted right up into the air at arm's length, seemingly without any effort at all, it is all the more an unexpected and wonderful surprise for the audience. I am afraid I am not able to be very eloquent about this work. But I loved it all -- the style in the upper body movement, the uniqueness of the equality of the work, and of course the gorgeous performance.
Saturday was busy -- dance class and then rushing back to Cambridge for a meeting (very exciting emerging dance/music collaboration project) and in the evening going to a concert of the Dante Quartet in King's. I am a music ignomarus but it seems the Dante Quartet is very well regarded and they certainly played (to me) gorgeously even in King's Hall which does not have the best acoustics. Of all the pieces I loved the most Puccini's "Crisantemi", which is a gloriously dark elegiac work that flows and emotes in an indescribably beautiful way that seemed to take me on some kind of journey in my mind. I now think that in watching concerts or performances often all you really need is one piece that strikes you to the core and it is all worth it. EdOx; Crisantemi; and I remember a year or two ago watching the Malaysian Philharmonic play Arvo Part's Fratres, which struck me so much I went on to make possibly one of my best dances on it. There was also the world premiere of a new work by the composer Roxanna Panufnik, inspired by Canto 23 of Dante's Commedia. It was for me a rarity to be listening to completely current modern classical music, and I have to say I was slightly surprised by how much I managed to enjoy it when forced to listen properly. Dissonant and almost astructural, certainly, but also so wonderfully rich and with such wonderfully disturbing emotional currents and quite simply very beautiful in parts.
Today, so far, has been spent in a far less culturally aspiring way -- chiefly lolling about on the backs in the sun with a horrendously expensive iced coffee concoction, watching the punts go by (always good entertainment as not only do you get tour guides repeatedly giving you a potted history of Trinity and the Wren Library, but also, well, lots of people falling in, other people trying to retrieve stuck punt poles, Canada geese having hissy fits, and even, bizarrely, two people actually going for a proper swim in our disease-and-old-bicyle-infested river) and reading an old Coupland. One of the benefits of living finally in the main part of college really is being so much closer to the backs, I have been there so much more often since moving here and it is always so beautiful and idyllic, and often wonderfully peaceful.
More experimental cooking tonight in the form of risotto. Yum.. hopefully!
Monday, May 05, 2008
A Perfectly Lazy Sunday
Ah, I have been reminded why at heart I really am a lazy bum. At first I bemoaned the fact that once off Lizard my urge to work slaloms downhill at a precipitious pace, leaving me with that frustrating feeling (that I am alliterating too much) that procrastination provokes (still doing it). But the joy, the joy of a day off in an incipient summer, is that when not on Lizard I actually can enjoy it fully. Despite improving by leaps and bounds I never quite figured out how to totally switch off whilst living at a research station that, however wonderful, does suck my research money out of me second by second. But here in Cambridge I am a master at the art.
So. Sunday was a very nice day indeed and I should warn you that I am probably going to be sickeningly smug about how much I enjoyed doing nothing all through it. I woke about lunchtime, which to me is very much the Right Time to wake up on a weekend, and after all I had been up late the night before industriously updating a society website (http://www.cambridgecontemporarydance.co.uk), so I felt that I deserved that glorious feeling when you wake up under the quilt and stretch out and all is sweet and silky and swept with late morning light filtering in through the curtain, and then you go back to sleep. Whilst still in this pleasant drowsiness the boyfriend called, and there is a no better way to be introduced to the day.
Having eventually gotten up I went to market and had my weekly ostrich burger, which is according to the stall that sells it the "low fat red meat of the future" but in my books just exceedingly yummy, and wandered about peering at the crafts and Caribbean pasties whilst munching. And then to get a Caffe Nero mocha, takeaway because it is really so beautifully warm of late, and then chats with my Mum and sister on the phone variously whilst walking through Cambridge, sitting at Jesus Lock watching the ducks who were in turn watching small children smearing ice creams all over their faces, and standing in Sainsbury's in the midst of an enormous pre-experimental-cooking shop.
During this walk I saw a couple walking seven, yes seven, full grown Golden Retrievers at once! They were all so well-behaved. A pack of beauties. Then half a minute later I saw a Great Dane, who was so well behaved he wasn't even on a lead. He was kind of trotting along between his owners looking longingly at the ice creams they were eating which were, after all, held at about the same height as his head. What a temptation.
This took most of the early afternoon, and by the time I'd gotten home there was not much to do but sit and read Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story, which I'd bought for one pound (!) on Euston Road on Saturday whilst dawdling on the way to dance class at The Place, and which was rollickingly enjoyable. Eventually I bestirred myself to laboriously work out the combination setting of my microwave oven and make a potato bake and chicken cacciatore out of my new Italian cookbook. What fun! In the end both were not entries for the Greatest Hits of my cooking repertoire, but certainly tasty enough, and they had better be too because I foolishly made enough to feed me for most of the rest of this week; but I've put some in the freezer so I can have a break in the form of good old garlic fried rice tomorrow.
And then I meant to do some work in the evening. But of course instead I just sat reading my book, and reading my book, in a more and more horizontal position on my sofa, and of course at 11pm what was there for it but to transfer my horizontal self to the bed where it could be more satisfyingly horizontal, and then of course it was a matter of just feeling pleased as punch that I could enjoy a book so thoroughly that I'd read the whole thing by the night after I'd bought it (and it weren't no Harry Potter neither).
Of course I made up for it all today by going into department on a Bank Holiday and making myself rather sad but at least virtuous feeling by banging my head against stats for the best part of the day. Work hard and play harder, eh. I came back through the late May dusk to microwaved chicken cacciatore and Ian McEwan's absolutely gorgeously written Saturday, which both very pleasantly drove the stats from my mind. Life is good.
So. Sunday was a very nice day indeed and I should warn you that I am probably going to be sickeningly smug about how much I enjoyed doing nothing all through it. I woke about lunchtime, which to me is very much the Right Time to wake up on a weekend, and after all I had been up late the night before industriously updating a society website (http://www.cambridgecontemporarydance.co.uk), so I felt that I deserved that glorious feeling when you wake up under the quilt and stretch out and all is sweet and silky and swept with late morning light filtering in through the curtain, and then you go back to sleep. Whilst still in this pleasant drowsiness the boyfriend called, and there is a no better way to be introduced to the day.
Having eventually gotten up I went to market and had my weekly ostrich burger, which is according to the stall that sells it the "low fat red meat of the future" but in my books just exceedingly yummy, and wandered about peering at the crafts and Caribbean pasties whilst munching. And then to get a Caffe Nero mocha, takeaway because it is really so beautifully warm of late, and then chats with my Mum and sister on the phone variously whilst walking through Cambridge, sitting at Jesus Lock watching the ducks who were in turn watching small children smearing ice creams all over their faces, and standing in Sainsbury's in the midst of an enormous pre-experimental-cooking shop.
During this walk I saw a couple walking seven, yes seven, full grown Golden Retrievers at once! They were all so well-behaved. A pack of beauties. Then half a minute later I saw a Great Dane, who was so well behaved he wasn't even on a lead. He was kind of trotting along between his owners looking longingly at the ice creams they were eating which were, after all, held at about the same height as his head. What a temptation.
This took most of the early afternoon, and by the time I'd gotten home there was not much to do but sit and read Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story, which I'd bought for one pound (!) on Euston Road on Saturday whilst dawdling on the way to dance class at The Place, and which was rollickingly enjoyable. Eventually I bestirred myself to laboriously work out the combination setting of my microwave oven and make a potato bake and chicken cacciatore out of my new Italian cookbook. What fun! In the end both were not entries for the Greatest Hits of my cooking repertoire, but certainly tasty enough, and they had better be too because I foolishly made enough to feed me for most of the rest of this week; but I've put some in the freezer so I can have a break in the form of good old garlic fried rice tomorrow.
And then I meant to do some work in the evening. But of course instead I just sat reading my book, and reading my book, in a more and more horizontal position on my sofa, and of course at 11pm what was there for it but to transfer my horizontal self to the bed where it could be more satisfyingly horizontal, and then of course it was a matter of just feeling pleased as punch that I could enjoy a book so thoroughly that I'd read the whole thing by the night after I'd bought it (and it weren't no Harry Potter neither).
Of course I made up for it all today by going into department on a Bank Holiday and making myself rather sad but at least virtuous feeling by banging my head against stats for the best part of the day. Work hard and play harder, eh. I came back through the late May dusk to microwaved chicken cacciatore and Ian McEwan's absolutely gorgeously written Saturday, which both very pleasantly drove the stats from my mind. Life is good.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Being Back
Bad Things about being back in Cambridge:
1. I have to sit in the office doing stats all day. Or more accurately teaching myself to do stats half the day and then doing it the other half of the day. Or, more accurately yet, surfing the web aimlessly procrastinating half the day, teaching myself to do stats the other quarter, going to tea, and then building maybe one little mixed model between 5:45 and 6pm.
2. Sometimes it is cold and wet (you don't say). But really overall the weather has not been that awful, getting very rapidly better since the two degrees it was when I first arrived back in England, so I have little to complain about, which I am sure is a state of affairs that cannot last.
Good Things about being back in Cambridge:
1. I am DANCING again. Finally. After 6 months of exile this is such a gorgeous feeling, accompanied with much masochistic enjoyment of delayed onset muscle soreness. Last week I did a bikram yoga/pilates class (everything hurt the next day, which was a fantastic feeling because it meant that everything had been worked), contemporary at The Place in London, and my on-and-off crazy London jazz class which is just great fun taken at a severely dehydrating pace. I may add a fourth class into the weekly mix, perhaps a good old ballet one or another contemporary. If I don't tire of the schedule I may maintain Lizard levels of fitness yet! Not only do I get to dance but also watch it, as Sadler's Wells has a fantastic season on and it is only really a desire to have some money left at the end of my PhD that is stopping me from going pretty much every weekend. Next up the Ballet Boyz, hurrah!
2. This evening I got to go to a lecture by Prof Lord Robert Winston (he of The Human Body etc. plus some rather good science) for the princely sum of one pound. And this Thursday similarly I get to listen to Jeremy Jackson talk about the ocean, which is also exciting in a rather geeky marine biologist kind of way.
3. Food that I don't have to cook for myself! Last Friday college very kindly provided for us graduates -- again for a somewhat nominal fee -- a very handsome dinner of sherry, king prawns (albeit English 'king' prawns which are 'shrimp' to anyone from the Indo Pacific region), white wine, duck, red wine, profiteroles with chocolate sauce, chocolate mints, coffee and Baileys. Tomorrow evening another college dinner beckons, this time as a reward for going to a graduate biologist seminar in which I will hopefully learn oodles about natural selection in mammalian promoters and then promptly forget it all during dinner with the high table menu, which for some very odd reason sometimes includes scrambled eggs on toast after dessert. It feels good indeed to be back in this mollycoddled Harry Potter- esque world.
4. My very lovely new room in the main part of college, which for all intents and purposes is a self-contained (bedder serviced) apartment with its own separate bedroom, gyp room (kitchen) and bathroom. I feel quite house proud really and have thus far managed to maintain levels of neatness previously unknown. There is even a pot of flowers and three pots of herbs. Before I know it I shall be baking cakes and inviting people round for cream tea.
I'm glad there is much to take one's mind off the fact that half a world away there is an island that I love sitting gloriously amidst a painfully bright blue sea. Ah, it's got to be blowing 35 knots out there nonstop (I tell myself).
1. I have to sit in the office doing stats all day. Or more accurately teaching myself to do stats half the day and then doing it the other half of the day. Or, more accurately yet, surfing the web aimlessly procrastinating half the day, teaching myself to do stats the other quarter, going to tea, and then building maybe one little mixed model between 5:45 and 6pm.
2. Sometimes it is cold and wet (you don't say). But really overall the weather has not been that awful, getting very rapidly better since the two degrees it was when I first arrived back in England, so I have little to complain about, which I am sure is a state of affairs that cannot last.
Good Things about being back in Cambridge:
1. I am DANCING again. Finally. After 6 months of exile this is such a gorgeous feeling, accompanied with much masochistic enjoyment of delayed onset muscle soreness. Last week I did a bikram yoga/pilates class (everything hurt the next day, which was a fantastic feeling because it meant that everything had been worked), contemporary at The Place in London, and my on-and-off crazy London jazz class which is just great fun taken at a severely dehydrating pace. I may add a fourth class into the weekly mix, perhaps a good old ballet one or another contemporary. If I don't tire of the schedule I may maintain Lizard levels of fitness yet! Not only do I get to dance but also watch it, as Sadler's Wells has a fantastic season on and it is only really a desire to have some money left at the end of my PhD that is stopping me from going pretty much every weekend. Next up the Ballet Boyz, hurrah!
2. This evening I got to go to a lecture by Prof Lord Robert Winston (he of The Human Body etc. plus some rather good science) for the princely sum of one pound. And this Thursday similarly I get to listen to Jeremy Jackson talk about the ocean, which is also exciting in a rather geeky marine biologist kind of way.
3. Food that I don't have to cook for myself! Last Friday college very kindly provided for us graduates -- again for a somewhat nominal fee -- a very handsome dinner of sherry, king prawns (albeit English 'king' prawns which are 'shrimp' to anyone from the Indo Pacific region), white wine, duck, red wine, profiteroles with chocolate sauce, chocolate mints, coffee and Baileys. Tomorrow evening another college dinner beckons, this time as a reward for going to a graduate biologist seminar in which I will hopefully learn oodles about natural selection in mammalian promoters and then promptly forget it all during dinner with the high table menu, which for some very odd reason sometimes includes scrambled eggs on toast after dessert. It feels good indeed to be back in this mollycoddled Harry Potter- esque world.
4. My very lovely new room in the main part of college, which for all intents and purposes is a self-contained (bedder serviced) apartment with its own separate bedroom, gyp room (kitchen) and bathroom. I feel quite house proud really and have thus far managed to maintain levels of neatness previously unknown. There is even a pot of flowers and three pots of herbs. Before I know it I shall be baking cakes and inviting people round for cream tea.
I'm glad there is much to take one's mind off the fact that half a world away there is an island that I love sitting gloriously amidst a painfully bright blue sea. Ah, it's got to be blowing 35 knots out there nonstop (I tell myself).
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
A Day in the Fish Life
Many apologies for the long absence (again).
Truth is life has been remarkably full and wonderful. Most times when I fail to write anything in this blog it is because there is nothing to report but the dismal, and as I see this blog as entertainment for the readers I would rather reserve any pathetic moaning about life being awful boohoo to a private diary or conversation. I think failing to write has also been because life here on Lizard, while rather stunningly wonderful, is really fairly routine and difficult to spin pithy blog entries out of. But I'll give it a go.
Most days here are pretty similar, so here is today's, rather in the spirit of that day in the life thing done in the UK a while ago where everybody was encouraged to write in a detailed description of the mundanities of their lives that day so as to capture a snapshot view of how people lived circa 2007.
- Got up late, about 8:30. Such a pleasure to sleep in as not diving till later than usual today. Finally got out of bed as it started to really properly tip it down, monsoon style, and sleeping further not really an option. Sleep-ins pretty difficult anyway on the island as when not raining it is too hot and you get sweated out of bed at about 9am. Breakfast of raisin toast, which I think is quite an Aussie thing and which we've all grown to crave, with, um, refried beans (had an open can left over from taco night!).
- Cleaned the house a little, sorting out our mountains of food as we are moving house in a couple of days to another one of the visitor houses (there are four). We seem to have enough food to feed an entire African village for about 3 months. It is difficult to really get it right when you only get food every 2 weeks and must place your order over a week in advance of it arriving. Some things still pretty mysterious though, e.g. how on earth we acquired six (SIX) separate opened jars of Vegemite (Aussie Marmite but really not the same). Being kicked out by a large group of 15 year old boys who will I imagine somewhat noisily invade our research station for 6 days next week -- now that the Aussie summer is over the mix of people at the station is shifting from bona fide researchers to various schoool/uni groups out here on excursions.
- Fed the fish which I'm keeping in the flow-through seawater aquaria. After over 800 15 minute focal watches and 300 dives they are still cute. Amazing.
- Late morning, went on a focal dive. Bit of a miserable weather day, still very grey and also fairly windy. Rather English really. Makes a huge difference to one's spirits -- when it is baking hot and sunny and calm life is so much easier! But didn't make much of a difference underwater, well at the second study site that we tried anyway (there was strong current at the first site but flexibility is one's best friend in the field), where it was really actually lovely and clear and calm and gorgeous. Watched some fish and did the usual data collection, chiefly counting foraging bites. I count everything slightly compulsively now: foraging bites, footsteps, mosquito bites (no not really -- too many to count).
- Back to the station for an hour where we had leftovers for lunch and I collapsed onto my bed for 10 minutes, waking up every 2 minutes with a start thinking I was late.
- Another dive laying out transects and videoing along them in order to get a measure of habitat quality. Exhausting stuff, these video dives, as we end up swimming each 30 m transect at least 4 times (laying it, videoing it, etc.). Large-ish white tip reef shark animal life highlight of the dive.
- Back to the station again for another hour. Caffeinated ourselves in order to be able to keep going for the last dive of the day, ate some more raisin toast (seem to have been nibbling on things all day and still hungry!), then headed out again. Our dusk dives are pretty uneventful but I don't mind them much; it's rather peaceful hanging about waiting for the fish to get it on, I practice hovering midwater and do somersaults whilst waiting. Tonight's was slightly more exciting than usual however as halfway through the dive it suddenly went very very dark underwater. I popped my head up as we were only about 2-3 m deep anyway to see a big black cloud in the sky; asked my assistant who was being boat person to let us know if it started to get worse and headed back down only to not be able to find my fish anymore. Three minutes later it was even darker and raining and the boat seemed to have very suddenly swung out of sight, after which it was a bit of a race to get back on the boat and try and get home in some whipping wind and really rather painful rain that had come up faster than I've ever seen a storm hit before. Driving very bumpily back I wondered about our almost empty fuel tank and what really would happen if we hit the reef and made a hole and the boat sank and which bits of kit I would grab first (I decided on the boat's safety box with radio and big orange V-sheet and flares and also fins and mask) and whether we'd be able to swim for it and how horrible it would be to swim without a snorkel... These dismal thoughts sustained me till we got back to the station. Still alive, huzzah!
- Rather less dramatically we made two pies for dinner, yum. Quite exciting really as never actually made a pie before.
Very sleepy now. Probably meant to write more in this blog about my Christmas hols, but think I'm going to have to leave it. Hope you are all having a lovely civilised time in all your cities going to restaurants and the theatre. Despite how I seem to have made life here sound pretty awful, I love it and really don't miss restaurants or the theatre very much at all; I'd much rather be watching fish and driving a small aluminium dinghy through tropical rainstorms!
Truth is life has been remarkably full and wonderful. Most times when I fail to write anything in this blog it is because there is nothing to report but the dismal, and as I see this blog as entertainment for the readers I would rather reserve any pathetic moaning about life being awful boohoo to a private diary or conversation. I think failing to write has also been because life here on Lizard, while rather stunningly wonderful, is really fairly routine and difficult to spin pithy blog entries out of. But I'll give it a go.
Most days here are pretty similar, so here is today's, rather in the spirit of that day in the life thing done in the UK a while ago where everybody was encouraged to write in a detailed description of the mundanities of their lives that day so as to capture a snapshot view of how people lived circa 2007.
- Got up late, about 8:30. Such a pleasure to sleep in as not diving till later than usual today. Finally got out of bed as it started to really properly tip it down, monsoon style, and sleeping further not really an option. Sleep-ins pretty difficult anyway on the island as when not raining it is too hot and you get sweated out of bed at about 9am. Breakfast of raisin toast, which I think is quite an Aussie thing and which we've all grown to crave, with, um, refried beans (had an open can left over from taco night!).
- Cleaned the house a little, sorting out our mountains of food as we are moving house in a couple of days to another one of the visitor houses (there are four). We seem to have enough food to feed an entire African village for about 3 months. It is difficult to really get it right when you only get food every 2 weeks and must place your order over a week in advance of it arriving. Some things still pretty mysterious though, e.g. how on earth we acquired six (SIX) separate opened jars of Vegemite (Aussie Marmite but really not the same). Being kicked out by a large group of 15 year old boys who will I imagine somewhat noisily invade our research station for 6 days next week -- now that the Aussie summer is over the mix of people at the station is shifting from bona fide researchers to various schoool/uni groups out here on excursions.
- Fed the fish which I'm keeping in the flow-through seawater aquaria. After over 800 15 minute focal watches and 300 dives they are still cute. Amazing.
- Late morning, went on a focal dive. Bit of a miserable weather day, still very grey and also fairly windy. Rather English really. Makes a huge difference to one's spirits -- when it is baking hot and sunny and calm life is so much easier! But didn't make much of a difference underwater, well at the second study site that we tried anyway (there was strong current at the first site but flexibility is one's best friend in the field), where it was really actually lovely and clear and calm and gorgeous. Watched some fish and did the usual data collection, chiefly counting foraging bites. I count everything slightly compulsively now: foraging bites, footsteps, mosquito bites (no not really -- too many to count).
- Back to the station for an hour where we had leftovers for lunch and I collapsed onto my bed for 10 minutes, waking up every 2 minutes with a start thinking I was late.
- Another dive laying out transects and videoing along them in order to get a measure of habitat quality. Exhausting stuff, these video dives, as we end up swimming each 30 m transect at least 4 times (laying it, videoing it, etc.). Large-ish white tip reef shark animal life highlight of the dive.
- Back to the station again for another hour. Caffeinated ourselves in order to be able to keep going for the last dive of the day, ate some more raisin toast (seem to have been nibbling on things all day and still hungry!), then headed out again. Our dusk dives are pretty uneventful but I don't mind them much; it's rather peaceful hanging about waiting for the fish to get it on, I practice hovering midwater and do somersaults whilst waiting. Tonight's was slightly more exciting than usual however as halfway through the dive it suddenly went very very dark underwater. I popped my head up as we were only about 2-3 m deep anyway to see a big black cloud in the sky; asked my assistant who was being boat person to let us know if it started to get worse and headed back down only to not be able to find my fish anymore. Three minutes later it was even darker and raining and the boat seemed to have very suddenly swung out of sight, after which it was a bit of a race to get back on the boat and try and get home in some whipping wind and really rather painful rain that had come up faster than I've ever seen a storm hit before. Driving very bumpily back I wondered about our almost empty fuel tank and what really would happen if we hit the reef and made a hole and the boat sank and which bits of kit I would grab first (I decided on the boat's safety box with radio and big orange V-sheet and flares and also fins and mask) and whether we'd be able to swim for it and how horrible it would be to swim without a snorkel... These dismal thoughts sustained me till we got back to the station. Still alive, huzzah!
- Rather less dramatically we made two pies for dinner, yum. Quite exciting really as never actually made a pie before.
Very sleepy now. Probably meant to write more in this blog about my Christmas hols, but think I'm going to have to leave it. Hope you are all having a lovely civilised time in all your cities going to restaurants and the theatre. Despite how I seem to have made life here sound pretty awful, I love it and really don't miss restaurants or the theatre very much at all; I'd much rather be watching fish and driving a small aluminium dinghy through tropical rainstorms!
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
More Island Sightings
1. TWO MANTA RAYS, cruising past us on separate mornings at our study site right in the middle of a working fish catching dive. Having never seen a manta ray before it was the most lovely and bizarre experience to be looking up from a chaos of hand nets and clove oil and scared little blue and yellow fish in plastic bags to see this beautiful creature winging past, when I'd always thought that at some point in my life I would have to pay lots of money and travel 3 days on a boat to go to some godforsaken Indonesian Bornean island especially to see them. With the first one, the first thing I saw was a couple of really quite large remoras right next to me which cruise around with it -- the first thing I thought was "crap, there's got to be something HUGE in the water, what are the bets are it's a giant shark?" but then it turned out to be a manta! There are no photos as only my assistant had her camera with her to take photos of caught fish with, and she says by the time she had finished gaping at them and gotten to her camera they were gone...
2. Our frog doing this most horrible looking belching thing on the shelf yesterday. He kept gulping and his whole body looked like it was convulsing with each gulp. We were really worried but later on he hopped out on his nightly hunt looking as healthy as ever so we have decided he was just eating a really big spider. Here is a picture of him, not belching, in Helen's hand.
3. A couple of unbelievable dead calm days. Even on the best of days in Malaysia I had never seen the sea look quite like this -- like glass, so reflective I couldn't figure out where the reefs were to drive around them. Yet if you looked straight down you could probably do fish focals from the boat, so ripple-less and still was it, and we saw some lovely big rays in the lagoon sand on our drive home from work that day, and visibility was like being out on outer barrier at over 20 metres. Apparently more such calm periods are on the way as the summer develops, woohoo, it makes a gorgeous change from the 25-30 knot wind we had for a few days last week.
4. Don't like putting on a suit everyday to go to work? Here are my work clothes:
2. Our frog doing this most horrible looking belching thing on the shelf yesterday. He kept gulping and his whole body looked like it was convulsing with each gulp. We were really worried but later on he hopped out on his nightly hunt looking as healthy as ever so we have decided he was just eating a really big spider. Here is a picture of him, not belching, in Helen's hand.
3. A couple of unbelievable dead calm days. Even on the best of days in Malaysia I had never seen the sea look quite like this -- like glass, so reflective I couldn't figure out where the reefs were to drive around them. Yet if you looked straight down you could probably do fish focals from the boat, so ripple-less and still was it, and we saw some lovely big rays in the lagoon sand on our drive home from work that day, and visibility was like being out on outer barrier at over 20 metres. Apparently more such calm periods are on the way as the summer develops, woohoo, it makes a gorgeous change from the 25-30 knot wind we had for a few days last week.
4. Don't like putting on a suit everyday to go to work? Here are my work clothes:
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Lizard Island Part II
Our first day off here on Lizard, after a rather unexpectedly successful first week, i.e. we are actually on track. Perhaps having gone through the vagaries of last season I am now simply a little hardier and less liable to let things get me down, but in truth there has been very little to do so thus far. This is a rather pleasantly surprising state of affairs -- I feel I must savour it whilst it lasts, before the inevitable big problems kick in (they didn't do so till after the first week last time either... but fingers crossed). I'm absolutely sure at least something is going to go badly pear-shaped at some point, it probably wouldn't be a field season if it didn't, but I'll jump that hurdle when I get to it.
Notables so far:
- A tiny little squid that jumped onto our boat and lay in the middle of it turning very red and looking rather upset. I put it back in the sea but didn't see whether it survived or got chomped.
- A couple of schools of similarly quite tiny little squid hanging about under our boat
- A really large juvenile harlequin sweetlips -- for divers these are the spotty ones which swim in this totally bizarre flamenco dancery way. This one was about 15cm long!
- A green treefrog that lives in our bathroom. He sits on a shelf next to the sink, and occasionally in the packet of new loo rolls. Sometimes in the day he wanders out in search of food I guess, but mostly he sits and watches us brush our teeth. I've found him in the shower cubicle every so often as well, making it a neccessity to ensure one is not cooking frog before turning on the hot water.
- A boat breakdown as we were trying to move from one study site where we'd decided the current was too strong for comfort to another -- rather than not being able to start the boat, for a while we couldn't stop! I had absolutely no control over the throttle, could neither speed it up nor slow it down, trying to put it into neutral resulted in an insane revving noise and general unhappiness, so we drove at this rather compulsory speed back to the station -- at least I could still steer the thing -- and managed to switch it off just off the station, from where we got towed back by our gallant rescuers and switched to another boat. The second one wouldn't start between dives either, so we had to do two dives at the same site, but we somehow managed to get home when we were done. The drama! Later on in the day when we were heading out on the fixed first boat (turned out its throttle cable had broken -- a first in 19 years of the station's maintenance officer's tenure here) I rather belatedly realised that we were very low on fuel and by the time we had refueled it would have been such a short dive we gave up. It was just... one of those days! Much of fieldwork is learning how to deal happily and flexibly with uncooperative weather, currents and broken down boats I think...
- Several turtles coming up for air seen from our boat.
- No sharks at all! Rather odd.
- No crocodiles, which I have no problems with whatsoever.
- Cold water. At 24-25 degrees this may not sound too bad to some but being immersed in this for up to 80 minutes barely moving because you are watching a little fish that moves all of about 10 metres over the dive doesn't help. At the moment I am wearing a LOT of neoprene. Well not precisely at this moment as it is enough neoprene to fairly quickly induce heat exhaustion on land and also as sexy as wetsuits are I don't think much of them as fashion statements, but you get the idea.
- Great weather, after a first few very windy and rainy and generally mucky days. In contrast today it is blazing hot and about 5 knots wind (a nice little breeze). My days off always have gorgeous weather and I am never out making the best of it diving!
I'm settling back in -- it's the early days that are probably the easiest, but life here is good. We even had popcorn and beer whilst watching Crash (new additions to the somewhat limited film library!) last night, followed by our traditional day-off pancakes this morning. Yum.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Cavatelli alla Norma
We were in Sicily on a lovely villa holiday earlier this week -- the last stragglers are only returning to rather less sunny England today, but I reluctantly left on Tuesday to immediately head up north to Newcastle for my first scientific conference, where I learnt very cool zoological facts, e.g. birds can sleep with one hemisphere of their brain at a time. However, science aside, today back in slightly grey Cambridge I tried to recall the heady days of Sicily by cooking the wonderfully simple and yummy home-made pasta dish we were taught at a cooking class on Monday! Such intense solo cooking effort seems to me to only be quite worth it if you record it for posterity...
Making cavatelli reminds me a lot of making pork and lettuce dumplings with Mum and my sisters back in the days, and I think as a cultural event it is pretty much an identical thing. Simple food, fun shapes (I always used to end up making rather oddly shaped dumplings which I would have to search for in the cooking pan afterwards to claim) and the womenfolk sitting around chatting seems to be the idea. It's good fun and I see that generations everywhere are bemoaning the fact that nobody seems interested in this kind of food making anymore. But I like it so much I even do it whilst listening to Radio 4 instead of chatting!
The wonderful Sicilian lady who taught us to make this uses only flour and water in her pasta, without the eggs that they use up North. Just add water in parts and knead (tearing the dough seems to be important) until smooth and shiny, then leave to rest...
Then roll the dough into little sausages and chop small pillows off them.
And use your thumb to squidge each little pillow into a curvy shell-like shape - a cavatelli!
Making cavatelli reminds me a lot of making pork and lettuce dumplings with Mum and my sisters back in the days, and I think as a cultural event it is pretty much an identical thing. Simple food, fun shapes (I always used to end up making rather oddly shaped dumplings which I would have to search for in the cooking pan afterwards to claim) and the womenfolk sitting around chatting seems to be the idea. It's good fun and I see that generations everywhere are bemoaning the fact that nobody seems interested in this kind of food making anymore. But I like it so much I even do it whilst listening to Radio 4 instead of chatting!
The wonderful Sicilian lady who taught us to make this uses only flour and water in her pasta, without the eggs that they use up North. Just add water in parts and knead (tearing the dough seems to be important) until smooth and shiny, then leave to rest...
Then roll the dough into little sausages and chop small pillows off them.
And use your thumb to squidge each little pillow into a curvy shell-like shape - a cavatelli!
Make as many as you are feeling hungry for.
The sauce is simply fried aubergines and blanched/peeled/chopped tomatoes with a little garlic and basil and seasoning:
Cook the cavatelli, add some grated ricotta salata, and enjoy...
Preferably, of course, from the terrace of a real Sicilian villa overlooking the clear blue Mediterranean. (It will still taste nice if you eat it in a Cambridge student room though!)
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Fringe!
Had an utterly fantastic weekend at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, despite it actually pouring down on us nonstop all day Saturday. Umbrella has never gotten more use and my ballet pumps were threatening to literally fall apart, but they held on (just) for many traipses up and down the Royal Mile, rushing between shows. What we could see of Edinburgh between the rain was gorgeous, all beautiful old houses and quirky architecture, Cambridge on a grander and darker Scottish scale, and I am definitely going to have to go back to actually see the city!
We arrived late on Friday night and wandered out for a meal (the best we could find was a chippie, but they did very good fish'n'chips, and I'm sure their fried mars bars must have been a gourmet's delight), then sat ourselves down in a pub to try and sort out way through the >200 page Fringe Guide. With around 10 shows listed on every single page of this guide this was a bit overwhelming at first, but eventually by means of enough random flipping (flip flip flip say when... say when.. .stop!) we found some choice ones that we booked online back at the hotel...
Saturday morning we walked around in the rain, visited the farmer's market where we had porridge (not salted, mind you, but brown sugar and cream, yum!) and a hog roast bun in the rain, visited the Edinburgh Book Festival in the rain, walked through a shopping street north of Princes Street in the rain, took pictures of the castle in the rain, tried to go to a contemporary/break dance performance only to find out it was sold out in the rain...
3:40pm: Flanders and Swann: at the Drop of a Hippopotamus. My sister is a proper Flanders and Swann fan so we absolutely had to go to this. Two blokes singing the best of their comic songs in a very enjoyable manner. I particularly enjoyed Ill Wind, sung to Mozart's Horn Concerto in E Flat Major (see the wikipedia article for an excerpt), The Gnu and of course, The Hippopotamus. Mud, mud, glorious mud/There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood... Time was everyone and the Queen could all sing this! We felt slightly embarrassed that we were quite clearly the youngest people in the show, children dragged along by their parents notwithstanding. Not a new phenomenon however.
5:10pm: Nicholas Parsons' Happy Hour! Mr Parsons hosts Radio 4's Just a Minute, and happily, did exactly what he does best, by bringing in guests and chatting to them about their acts. Aussie comedian Adam Hills regaled us with stories of that wonderful Scottish energy drink Irn Bru and showed us his appendicitis scar and his prosthetic foot, prompting the entire audience to "ooo" like wide-eyed schoolchildren. An amazing a capella group called The Magnets also did a few songs -- they call their music "a capella for the rock and pop generation", and they pulled it off totally with such showmanship and the sharpest suits this side of Milan. Not so much barbershop as Mika and the Scissor Sisters with a beatboxer. We enjoyed it so much we decided to go to see them again later that evening.
7:15pm: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This was a group of mainly Cambridge musical theatre people and as I had a friend and some acquaintances in it I was really looking forward to it. Again, fantastic -- much as I like the big old Rodgers and Hammerstein style, I also love the more modern musicals that have something darker and meatier to them. In this case, the meat being human flesh, conveniently provided by the rather obsessive barber's neat throat slitting of his customers, who then slid conveniently down to the pie shop below his barbershop where his partner Mrs Lovett made them into truly delicious meat pies for the ravenous public. Macabre, chilling, darkly humorous, lovely tunes, with a great twist at the end, and all done in a stripped down and thoroughly effective manner.
10:20pm: Reduced Edinburgh Fringe Improvised Comedy (or some such). These were a really quite enjoyable improv troupe, complete with improvised songs (an Adolf Hitler in Scunthorpe with a dream of being a professional golfer), spooky stories about deaths on the Royal Mile (revolving around a donkey in a chip van), and pithy mimes ("Liverpool" is apparently universally understood by a 5 second sketch of some unsuspecting guy having his wallet pickpocketed).
12am: Adam, Jason and Friends. On the strength of Nicholas Parsons' introduction earlier in the day we got tickets to see this, which turned out to be in a huge lovely venue up near the castle and was even being filmed. Adam Hill's laidback Aussie chatting style played off really well against Irishman Jason Byrne's absolutely insane antics -- Catholic jokes layered over a stand up style that meant that he never actually ever stood still because he was too busy floating away in bubbles and pulling men around the stage in giant cardboard boxes. Again they had several guests, but the highlight of the night must have been their Punch and Judy act got up to interview Nina Conti's Monkey (a totally foul mouthed little ventriloquist puppet), which surely could have had no better ending than Jason's attempts to pick up his interview questions with his mouth through the puppetry screen causing the entire edifice to collapse... you had to be there. The Magnets rounded it all off a few of their songs, including a repeat of the Jackson 5's "Blame it on the Boogie" which is their big finale piece where they get everyone up and dancing. The fact that we had already been taught the moves that afternoon didn't stop us from enjoying it!
Sunday morning we didn't quite make it out of bed till halfway through it. We thankfully found a wonderful little Mediterranean cafe in the Old Town where we had our first real meal since getting to Edinburgh (apparently everybody loses weight at the Festival running up and down between shows, never having time to eat, and sweating in claustrophobic venues heated by hundreds of human bodies), and very lovely it was too. Finally we headed to our last show of the weekend (boohoo), one of the many "showcases" where they get many different acts from Fringe to come on and do excerpts. Many of these were fantastic, including an American duo who did a hilarious spoof of a particular brand of Christian evangelist (dorks singing "Team Jesus" with a 2-note xylophone accompaniment), Japanese mime artists Gamarjobat who, identified by one guy's red mohican and the other's yellow mohican, do the physical comedy thing in a truly awesome way. And for the finale of this whirlwind tour through the Fringe, we had, to our rather bemused surprise (or not)... The Magnets! and the familiar strains of Blame it on the Boogie. (Although the Sunday 1pm crowd wasn't quite as dancey as twelve hours earlier at Sunday 1am!)
Don't know why I haven't been before, it is possibly one of the most enjoyable ways to spend a weekend ever, seeing act after polished act (most of whom want to make you laugh) for about five to ten quid each and traipsing the streets of a truly wonderful city in between. It's definitely going on the August calendar for as many years to come as possible!
We arrived late on Friday night and wandered out for a meal (the best we could find was a chippie, but they did very good fish'n'chips, and I'm sure their fried mars bars must have been a gourmet's delight), then sat ourselves down in a pub to try and sort out way through the >200 page Fringe Guide. With around 10 shows listed on every single page of this guide this was a bit overwhelming at first, but eventually by means of enough random flipping (flip flip flip say when... say when.. .stop!) we found some choice ones that we booked online back at the hotel...
Saturday morning we walked around in the rain, visited the farmer's market where we had porridge (not salted, mind you, but brown sugar and cream, yum!) and a hog roast bun in the rain, visited the Edinburgh Book Festival in the rain, walked through a shopping street north of Princes Street in the rain, took pictures of the castle in the rain, tried to go to a contemporary/break dance performance only to find out it was sold out in the rain...
3:40pm: Flanders and Swann: at the Drop of a Hippopotamus. My sister is a proper Flanders and Swann fan so we absolutely had to go to this. Two blokes singing the best of their comic songs in a very enjoyable manner. I particularly enjoyed Ill Wind, sung to Mozart's Horn Concerto in E Flat Major (see the wikipedia article for an excerpt), The Gnu and of course, The Hippopotamus. Mud, mud, glorious mud/There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood... Time was everyone and the Queen could all sing this! We felt slightly embarrassed that we were quite clearly the youngest people in the show, children dragged along by their parents notwithstanding. Not a new phenomenon however.
5:10pm: Nicholas Parsons' Happy Hour! Mr Parsons hosts Radio 4's Just a Minute, and happily, did exactly what he does best, by bringing in guests and chatting to them about their acts. Aussie comedian Adam Hills regaled us with stories of that wonderful Scottish energy drink Irn Bru and showed us his appendicitis scar and his prosthetic foot, prompting the entire audience to "ooo" like wide-eyed schoolchildren. An amazing a capella group called The Magnets also did a few songs -- they call their music "a capella for the rock and pop generation", and they pulled it off totally with such showmanship and the sharpest suits this side of Milan. Not so much barbershop as Mika and the Scissor Sisters with a beatboxer. We enjoyed it so much we decided to go to see them again later that evening.
7:15pm: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This was a group of mainly Cambridge musical theatre people and as I had a friend and some acquaintances in it I was really looking forward to it. Again, fantastic -- much as I like the big old Rodgers and Hammerstein style, I also love the more modern musicals that have something darker and meatier to them. In this case, the meat being human flesh, conveniently provided by the rather obsessive barber's neat throat slitting of his customers, who then slid conveniently down to the pie shop below his barbershop where his partner Mrs Lovett made them into truly delicious meat pies for the ravenous public. Macabre, chilling, darkly humorous, lovely tunes, with a great twist at the end, and all done in a stripped down and thoroughly effective manner.
10:20pm: Reduced Edinburgh Fringe Improvised Comedy (or some such). These were a really quite enjoyable improv troupe, complete with improvised songs (an Adolf Hitler in Scunthorpe with a dream of being a professional golfer), spooky stories about deaths on the Royal Mile (revolving around a donkey in a chip van), and pithy mimes ("Liverpool" is apparently universally understood by a 5 second sketch of some unsuspecting guy having his wallet pickpocketed).
12am: Adam, Jason and Friends. On the strength of Nicholas Parsons' introduction earlier in the day we got tickets to see this, which turned out to be in a huge lovely venue up near the castle and was even being filmed. Adam Hill's laidback Aussie chatting style played off really well against Irishman Jason Byrne's absolutely insane antics -- Catholic jokes layered over a stand up style that meant that he never actually ever stood still because he was too busy floating away in bubbles and pulling men around the stage in giant cardboard boxes. Again they had several guests, but the highlight of the night must have been their Punch and Judy act got up to interview Nina Conti's Monkey (a totally foul mouthed little ventriloquist puppet), which surely could have had no better ending than Jason's attempts to pick up his interview questions with his mouth through the puppetry screen causing the entire edifice to collapse... you had to be there. The Magnets rounded it all off a few of their songs, including a repeat of the Jackson 5's "Blame it on the Boogie" which is their big finale piece where they get everyone up and dancing. The fact that we had already been taught the moves that afternoon didn't stop us from enjoying it!
Sunday morning we didn't quite make it out of bed till halfway through it. We thankfully found a wonderful little Mediterranean cafe in the Old Town where we had our first real meal since getting to Edinburgh (apparently everybody loses weight at the Festival running up and down between shows, never having time to eat, and sweating in claustrophobic venues heated by hundreds of human bodies), and very lovely it was too. Finally we headed to our last show of the weekend (boohoo), one of the many "showcases" where they get many different acts from Fringe to come on and do excerpts. Many of these were fantastic, including an American duo who did a hilarious spoof of a particular brand of Christian evangelist (dorks singing "Team Jesus" with a 2-note xylophone accompaniment), Japanese mime artists Gamarjobat who, identified by one guy's red mohican and the other's yellow mohican, do the physical comedy thing in a truly awesome way. And for the finale of this whirlwind tour through the Fringe, we had, to our rather bemused surprise (or not)... The Magnets! and the familiar strains of Blame it on the Boogie. (Although the Sunday 1pm crowd wasn't quite as dancey as twelve hours earlier at Sunday 1am!)
Don't know why I haven't been before, it is possibly one of the most enjoyable ways to spend a weekend ever, seeing act after polished act (most of whom want to make you laugh) for about five to ten quid each and traipsing the streets of a truly wonderful city in between. It's definitely going on the August calendar for as many years to come as possible!
Friday, July 20, 2007
Cookies rrr-umumumumum
I couldn't figure out how to phoneticise what, I have been informed by Wikipedia, is officially known as the "Cookie monster noise" (you would think that the people who create Kermit and Bert and Ernie on a daily basis would have a more creative name for it). Rrrr-ummumumumum it will have to be. Clear I have no future in poetry. Or writing children's books.
Anyway Cookies rrr-umumumumum were what my sister and I made last weekend! More art and craft than cooking, but what fun! Note especially our favourite, the chick on the right.
Technically I think these are biscuits and not cookies, but you do cut them out with a cookie cutter after all...
Anyway Cookies rrr-umumumumum were what my sister and I made last weekend! More art and craft than cooking, but what fun! Note especially our favourite, the chick on the right.
Technically I think these are biscuits and not cookies, but you do cut them out with a cookie cutter after all...
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Four and twenty blackbirds...
Well really just one. She was not sitting in a pie but rather in my bedroom, whence she hopped out in a most startling manner about twenty minutes ago. And then she sort of did a tour of my living room and desk while I bemusedly wandered around checking that, yes, all my windows were indeed shut. So she must have been exploring my closet and checking the softness of my mattress since my bedder came in in the morning (sometime after nine, before I went to work).
I open a window.
She flaps across to the windowsill, gratefully, I think, but then flies back down again, preferring my carpet.
I open the door. She wanders across, and then down the stairs towards the shared loos and the laundry.
I open the other door, to the outside.
She hops back up the stairs and outside! Hurrah! Here she is in the courtyard where she wandered around for a bit and picked at crumbs. Free as a bird (you don't say).
P/S I hope it really was a blackbird and I haven't just embarrassed myself. Anyway I don't know many nursery rhymes about other birds.
I open a window.
She flaps across to the windowsill, gratefully, I think, but then flies back down again, preferring my carpet.
I open the door. She wanders across, and then down the stairs towards the shared loos and the laundry.
I open the other door, to the outside.
She hops back up the stairs and outside! Hurrah! Here she is in the courtyard where she wandered around for a bit and picked at crumbs. Free as a bird (you don't say).
P/S I hope it really was a blackbird and I haven't just embarrassed myself. Anyway I don't know many nursery rhymes about other birds.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Mm, crackling.
Today I had a craving for roast pork. So I made some!
With roast potatoes, apple sauce and a mandatory bit of green.
Now I only have to eat roast pork for the next half a week... but this is not such a chore. I shall feed some to friends.
I think, if by some kind of freak change of opinion I ever (purposely) become pregnant, I will be cooking all the time. Oh dear.
With roast potatoes, apple sauce and a mandatory bit of green.
Now I only have to eat roast pork for the next half a week... but this is not such a chore. I shall feed some to friends.
I think, if by some kind of freak change of opinion I ever (purposely) become pregnant, I will be cooking all the time. Oh dear.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The new world.
Spent the first half of June blisfully blanking out the PhD in sunnier climes across the pond, on a giant family holiday. So very needed, after the travails of field season, and all the more fully enjoyed.
Every time I visit New York I like it more and more. This time round it turned out to be a great cultural tour, my parents being very enthusiastic about such things. All these things I'd not done on previous visits because I was being a cheapo student got done and were really totally worth it.
My second evening there we went to Carnegie Hall -- just a block away from my sister's place! I love that people are living and there are corner delis selling flowers and pastrami sandwiches literally next door to the hall, yet you step inside and it is hallowed as any other great performing venue brooding darkly over a rain-soaked square -- and watched the Emerson String Quartet play the entirety of Beethoven's, no prizes for guessing, string quartets. Starting at 5pm with a dinner break at about 6:45 and starting again at 8pm, this was something of a marathon, but it was amazing music, amazingly performed, and I'm glad I went. It is probably a good thing it was Beethoven and not, say, Schubert, because Beethoven is always complex (and sometimes humorous) enough to keep you awake!
Also trips to Broadway, once to watch Journey's End, a British import: 4 men in a WWI trench talking to each other, largely about how scary dying is and how nevertheless sometimes you ought to go and get yourself killed anyway. Pretty grim-sounding, I know, but it was actually quality theatre, if only I hadn't been jetlagged and perhaps if I'd been male I might have loved it (the boyfriend did -- I wonder what they teach you in NS, hee). A second, more jovial time, to watch Spamalot! So daft you couldn't help enjoying yourself. Enjoy I suppose is the key word here. Sometimes I am a bit of a theatre snob and feel that at some point at least you should also be moved and awed, but I know that I really shouldn't turn up my nose at bad puns (at one point after a rather Tarantino-style fight scene somebody wanders across the stage gathering arms for the poor...) because I do still laugh! :)
We also queued for 5 hours in Central Park, along with many other patient people with picnic blankets, food delivery from the local deli, and a couple of dogs, for free Shakespeare in the Park tickets. It just seemed like something you should try once, and it wasn't at all the ordeal it might have been (other than the temperature -- we ended up making a playlist of sunny songs on my iPod to ward the cold off), and the play actually turned out to be really excellent. I thought it was an incredibly accessible piece of Shakespeare -- I suppose Romeo and Juliet is fairly accessible anyway -- but still it seemed particularly modern in this production. The outdoor theatre and the revolving stage with a giant pond in the middle were also something to be seen. There were even celebrity actors, although the only one I actually knew was Camryn Manheim (The Practice), who was a fantastic Nurse.
Finally, and I've saved this for last because nothing triggers fangirl reactions in me quite like this, was the ballet. I had never been to the Metropolitan Opera House before and it was simply gorgeous. Everything an opera house should be, red velvet and gold everywhere, and the foyer with all those gorgeous curving staircases was a work of art in itself. We saw a new production of the Sleeping Beauty. Great costuming, fireworks for Carabosse, loads of wire flying (woo!) -- it was definitely a big one for the kids. But also, of course, there was also Paloma Herrera rock steady in the Rose Adage, Angel Corella whizzing off his trademark lightspeed turns, and Sascha Radetsky (yes, he of Center Stage) seeming to literally defy gravity in his Bluebird brises. Despite enjoying it, though, I felt it didn't quite have the magic of the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker, nor any of the more modern ballets that I love.
And so I had to go again! We were wandering by the Lincoln Centre one evening at the appropriate time when a funny feeling came over me and I had to go and find out what was on. And it was Manon, the MacMillan ballet that I had yet to see. And so the boyfriend in an act of tremendous kindness and understanding actually encouraged me to abandon him on our last evening in New York and go to watch the ballet instead. Er... so I did. (Oops... but he likes bookshop browsing. ;)) I shall resist going into yet another MacMillan related rave, I've done them too many times on this blog, but I loved it, it was all worth far more than the last-minute-$25-student-ticket price I paid to sit ten rows from the front. To be honest it's a bit of a fragile story, but with choreography like this it was all okay. MacMillan's ability to draw little character vignettes never fails to delight me -- I particularly enjoyed Lescaut's (Sascha Radetsky again after Ethan Stiefel injured himself in Act II and couldn't continue beyond the intermission -- the drama! though I didn't even notice he was injured) drunken bits in Act III. But of course, Manon is a ballet built on pas de deux for the central pair. I had the incredible luck to find myself watching Alessandra Ferri and Roberto Bolle dance these exuberant joyous unrestrained declarations of love and passion, weeks before Alessandra was to retire (which she has done by now), replacing Xiomara Reyes who unfortunately was also injured. Again, surely the best spent $25 of my life. Roberto, whom I'd seen just a few weeks before in London, seemed almost too tall for Alessandra, but I did still like him very much. He has such really beautiful lines and is a gorgeously clean dancer, although I sometimes felt that he has yet to gain the maturity of interpretation that dancers like Jonathan Cope bring to the dramatic MacMillan roles. Alessandra was, quite simply, wonderful. Small and girlish and mature all at once, in a body made for ballet and perhaps an intellect made to act dramatic roles. But of course Manon is, after all, her role (she was MacMillan's muse before Darcey). It seemed strange to be watching these two ballerinas retire at the same time, both still totally at the top of their game, and it is a shame to see them go, but I'll count myself lucky that I did manage to watch them.
I've ended up writing far more and far too haphazardly than intended about the cultural New York experience, so I'll have to leave the rest to another time. But in case I never quite get round to it, the rest was eating: Grimaldi's for definitely the best pizza in New York, the Brooklyn ice cream company next door for fantastic simple ice cream, Joe Shanghai still for its amazing xiao long bao, Burger Joint for the most unexpected yummy hole-in-the-wall burger experience ever, and Han Bat for late night satisfying Korean.
And to think today I had to have a ham, egg and tomato sandwich from EAT for lunch. Sheesh.
Every time I visit New York I like it more and more. This time round it turned out to be a great cultural tour, my parents being very enthusiastic about such things. All these things I'd not done on previous visits because I was being a cheapo student got done and were really totally worth it.
My second evening there we went to Carnegie Hall -- just a block away from my sister's place! I love that people are living and there are corner delis selling flowers and pastrami sandwiches literally next door to the hall, yet you step inside and it is hallowed as any other great performing venue brooding darkly over a rain-soaked square -- and watched the Emerson String Quartet play the entirety of Beethoven's, no prizes for guessing, string quartets. Starting at 5pm with a dinner break at about 6:45 and starting again at 8pm, this was something of a marathon, but it was amazing music, amazingly performed, and I'm glad I went. It is probably a good thing it was Beethoven and not, say, Schubert, because Beethoven is always complex (and sometimes humorous) enough to keep you awake!
Also trips to Broadway, once to watch Journey's End, a British import: 4 men in a WWI trench talking to each other, largely about how scary dying is and how nevertheless sometimes you ought to go and get yourself killed anyway. Pretty grim-sounding, I know, but it was actually quality theatre, if only I hadn't been jetlagged and perhaps if I'd been male I might have loved it (the boyfriend did -- I wonder what they teach you in NS, hee). A second, more jovial time, to watch Spamalot! So daft you couldn't help enjoying yourself. Enjoy I suppose is the key word here. Sometimes I am a bit of a theatre snob and feel that at some point at least you should also be moved and awed, but I know that I really shouldn't turn up my nose at bad puns (at one point after a rather Tarantino-style fight scene somebody wanders across the stage gathering arms for the poor...) because I do still laugh! :)
We also queued for 5 hours in Central Park, along with many other patient people with picnic blankets, food delivery from the local deli, and a couple of dogs, for free Shakespeare in the Park tickets. It just seemed like something you should try once, and it wasn't at all the ordeal it might have been (other than the temperature -- we ended up making a playlist of sunny songs on my iPod to ward the cold off), and the play actually turned out to be really excellent. I thought it was an incredibly accessible piece of Shakespeare -- I suppose Romeo and Juliet is fairly accessible anyway -- but still it seemed particularly modern in this production. The outdoor theatre and the revolving stage with a giant pond in the middle were also something to be seen. There were even celebrity actors, although the only one I actually knew was Camryn Manheim (The Practice), who was a fantastic Nurse.
Finally, and I've saved this for last because nothing triggers fangirl reactions in me quite like this, was the ballet. I had never been to the Metropolitan Opera House before and it was simply gorgeous. Everything an opera house should be, red velvet and gold everywhere, and the foyer with all those gorgeous curving staircases was a work of art in itself. We saw a new production of the Sleeping Beauty. Great costuming, fireworks for Carabosse, loads of wire flying (woo!) -- it was definitely a big one for the kids. But also, of course, there was also Paloma Herrera rock steady in the Rose Adage, Angel Corella whizzing off his trademark lightspeed turns, and Sascha Radetsky (yes, he of Center Stage) seeming to literally defy gravity in his Bluebird brises. Despite enjoying it, though, I felt it didn't quite have the magic of the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker, nor any of the more modern ballets that I love.
And so I had to go again! We were wandering by the Lincoln Centre one evening at the appropriate time when a funny feeling came over me and I had to go and find out what was on. And it was Manon, the MacMillan ballet that I had yet to see. And so the boyfriend in an act of tremendous kindness and understanding actually encouraged me to abandon him on our last evening in New York and go to watch the ballet instead. Er... so I did. (Oops... but he likes bookshop browsing. ;)) I shall resist going into yet another MacMillan related rave, I've done them too many times on this blog, but I loved it, it was all worth far more than the last-minute-$25-student-ticket price I paid to sit ten rows from the front. To be honest it's a bit of a fragile story, but with choreography like this it was all okay. MacMillan's ability to draw little character vignettes never fails to delight me -- I particularly enjoyed Lescaut's (Sascha Radetsky again after Ethan Stiefel injured himself in Act II and couldn't continue beyond the intermission -- the drama! though I didn't even notice he was injured) drunken bits in Act III. But of course, Manon is a ballet built on pas de deux for the central pair. I had the incredible luck to find myself watching Alessandra Ferri and Roberto Bolle dance these exuberant joyous unrestrained declarations of love and passion, weeks before Alessandra was to retire (which she has done by now), replacing Xiomara Reyes who unfortunately was also injured. Again, surely the best spent $25 of my life. Roberto, whom I'd seen just a few weeks before in London, seemed almost too tall for Alessandra, but I did still like him very much. He has such really beautiful lines and is a gorgeously clean dancer, although I sometimes felt that he has yet to gain the maturity of interpretation that dancers like Jonathan Cope bring to the dramatic MacMillan roles. Alessandra was, quite simply, wonderful. Small and girlish and mature all at once, in a body made for ballet and perhaps an intellect made to act dramatic roles. But of course Manon is, after all, her role (she was MacMillan's muse before Darcey). It seemed strange to be watching these two ballerinas retire at the same time, both still totally at the top of their game, and it is a shame to see them go, but I'll count myself lucky that I did manage to watch them.
I've ended up writing far more and far too haphazardly than intended about the cultural New York experience, so I'll have to leave the rest to another time. But in case I never quite get round to it, the rest was eating: Grimaldi's for definitely the best pizza in New York, the Brooklyn ice cream company next door for fantastic simple ice cream, Joe Shanghai still for its amazing xiao long bao, Burger Joint for the most unexpected yummy hole-in-the-wall burger experience ever, and Han Bat for late night satisfying Korean.
And to think today I had to have a ham, egg and tomato sandwich from EAT for lunch. Sheesh.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Domesticism
I almost called this blog entry "Cooking, yoga and novels" but then I realised that makes me sound a bit like a new agey housewife (where oh where is the PhD work in this pithy rundown of bloggable bits of my life?). Hence domesticism. Actually the PhD work is at this moment being a little frustrating and aimless, so it is far better to write about cooking, yoga and novels...
So. Over the weekend in one of my usual epic waste time on the web sessions I wandered into the brave new world of podcasts courtesy of the iTunes store. Podcasts being the only thing you don't actually have to pay for in this store I had a little browse. And I found Gordon Ramsay making sticky lemon chicken with champ! Having almost all the ingredients already I decided to give it a go. It was most exceedingly novel to have Gordon yammering away in full colour and sound on my iPod (what a way to follow a recipe, just plug yourself in whilst in kitchen) as I've not used its video function before. I was spared almost all stove-top swearing, perhaps because it was for Times Online. Have to say it smelled really lovely all the way through cooking. I am not really a fan of lemony anything in my main course (other than fish I suppose), but still it was more than passably yummy. I cheated by not using stove heated double cream + full cream milk in my champ (glorified mash with spring onions in), I used my regular semi-skimmed instead, which I am sure deadened the full creamy taste of the champ and I should be ashamed of myself really and what would Gordon say, but on the other hand I can claim to have made the 2% committed dieter's version of sticky lemon chicken... voila. Microwaved leftover version for tomorrow's dinner. Hee.
Such a splash-out dinner must have been just reward for the bikram yoga class I went for earlier this evening. It's a series taught by a dancer I'm friends with, but I'd just never managed to drag myself over to class before. It was tough! I've only ever really done one or two yoga classes in my life before and I think they were more ashtanga. But this! I fell out of balances all the time and I am absolutely certain I will ache like anything tomorrow. Think I may try to keep going for it -- it's not as fun as a dance class because it requires such iron determination (in dance class the music and the performance aspect usually keep me distracted from the pain), but it is a good challenge. We also did some Pilates work, which I hate because my abs are nonexistent, but it will be very good for me, what sort of fake dancer doesn't have a strong core huh.
Finally I treated myself to a bunch of novels on the last of my book tokens from college, one of which was David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green". So very very readable, I found myself staying up till 4am last night finishing it off. I am not sure I have that much to say about it. I could only describe it as another nostalgic isn't adolescence such an awful and wonderful journey book, but that would only be its structure I think and not really its heart. Not how it carries you along on such an enjoyable ride. The only other David Mitchell I have read is Cloud Atlas, which was a world away, wonderful but I am always wary of 'gimmicky' devices like that of Cloud Atlas, so I didn't quite expect this straightforward, feel-good, funny, intimate narrative. But it was quite simply a good read. What an unsatisfying review this is. I should've left it as "I recommend it"!
So. Over the weekend in one of my usual epic waste time on the web sessions I wandered into the brave new world of podcasts courtesy of the iTunes store. Podcasts being the only thing you don't actually have to pay for in this store I had a little browse. And I found Gordon Ramsay making sticky lemon chicken with champ! Having almost all the ingredients already I decided to give it a go. It was most exceedingly novel to have Gordon yammering away in full colour and sound on my iPod (what a way to follow a recipe, just plug yourself in whilst in kitchen) as I've not used its video function before. I was spared almost all stove-top swearing, perhaps because it was for Times Online. Have to say it smelled really lovely all the way through cooking. I am not really a fan of lemony anything in my main course (other than fish I suppose), but still it was more than passably yummy. I cheated by not using stove heated double cream + full cream milk in my champ (glorified mash with spring onions in), I used my regular semi-skimmed instead, which I am sure deadened the full creamy taste of the champ and I should be ashamed of myself really and what would Gordon say, but on the other hand I can claim to have made the 2% committed dieter's version of sticky lemon chicken... voila. Microwaved leftover version for tomorrow's dinner. Hee.
Such a splash-out dinner must have been just reward for the bikram yoga class I went for earlier this evening. It's a series taught by a dancer I'm friends with, but I'd just never managed to drag myself over to class before. It was tough! I've only ever really done one or two yoga classes in my life before and I think they were more ashtanga. But this! I fell out of balances all the time and I am absolutely certain I will ache like anything tomorrow. Think I may try to keep going for it -- it's not as fun as a dance class because it requires such iron determination (in dance class the music and the performance aspect usually keep me distracted from the pain), but it is a good challenge. We also did some Pilates work, which I hate because my abs are nonexistent, but it will be very good for me, what sort of fake dancer doesn't have a strong core huh.
Finally I treated myself to a bunch of novels on the last of my book tokens from college, one of which was David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green". So very very readable, I found myself staying up till 4am last night finishing it off. I am not sure I have that much to say about it. I could only describe it as another nostalgic isn't adolescence such an awful and wonderful journey book, but that would only be its structure I think and not really its heart. Not how it carries you along on such an enjoyable ride. The only other David Mitchell I have read is Cloud Atlas, which was a world away, wonderful but I am always wary of 'gimmicky' devices like that of Cloud Atlas, so I didn't quite expect this straightforward, feel-good, funny, intimate narrative. But it was quite simply a good read. What an unsatisfying review this is. I should've left it as "I recommend it"!
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Darcey dancing.
Yesterday in a bit of a birthday treat to myself a friend and I went to Darcey Bussell's 'Farewell' show at Sadler's Wells. It was an amazing evening which lived entirely up to all the most ridiculous heights of expectation I'd elevated it to, helped by the centre front of stalls seats I had managed by some miracle to get (they were the last two seats in the entire five night run of the show). Funnily enough it wasn't so much Darcey that I enjoyed so much as the chance to watch varied excellent choreography, all of which I had heard of often but never managed to watch before. Of course, though, she was as beautiful and as amazing as ever. She still has ridiculously high extensions. She still reaches all those extensions with a gorgeous fluidity that melds itself, chameleon-like, into wildly varying choreographic styles. It is simply a real pleasure to watch her -- those giant grant jetes (and giant they are -- you don't quite realise how tall she is until well into the show when tiny Tamara Rojo comes on) eat up the stage in a truly exuberant fashion that is hers alone.
Funnily enough, for a dancer who has danced all the biggest classical roles, I enjoyed the Sylvia pas de deux the least in the entire show, perhaps because sometimes these classical pieces can seem a little odd taken out of context, perhaps because I am perhaps no longer as enamoured as I used to be with the classics. On the other hand, I really enjoyed her Cinderella variation, shown on film, Ballet Boyz style, while she changed backstage betwen dances. Such speed! Such turns! Such neatness! It really does put paid to all the "Darcey is too tall to dance Ashton" myths.
The rest of the first half was made up of two modern pas de deux, both of which I loved. The first, from William Forsythe's In the middle, somewhat elevated, was fantastically exciting and sexy to watch. From the moment the sinfully good looking Roberto Bolle swaggers onto stage and muscles his way into an off-centred balance it holds you in a really physical way. And then Darcey comes on and the remainder is a whirlwind of thrown 180 degree extensions as she is manipulated into one impossible angular pose after another. If anything I liked Chris Wheeldon's Tryst pas de deux even more. Johnny Cope came out of retirement to perform this with Darcey and I could not imagine this being danced by any other than these two gorgeous dancers on whom it was created. In feel it could not be further from the Forsythe, all melting gentleness from which emerge the most breathtaking moments of counterbalance and flexibility that if you hadn't seen for that split second between all the rest of the flowing moment you would think weren't humanly possible. Whilst the Forsythe for me blended into one long impression of Darcey's leg up by her ear, the diversity of the beautiful images left indelibly by Tryst I think makes it for me the more appealing of the two works (though both were brilliant in very different ways!). Darcey on pointe in fourth, tipping so perilously and yet also so stably from side to side, pendulum-like, balanced on just one of Johnny's arms round her waist; Darcey held high as if caught upside down in soaring mid-flight, balancing for one long beautiful moment on the soles of Johnny's feet; Darcey in a full split sitting almost comfortably across his thighs in an expansive grand second plie, look ma no hands. It shouldn't have been possible, but they did it, and they did it in such an unassuming and quiet way that made it all the more powerful and impressive.
The second half of the night was a full performance of Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, based on Chekhov's Three Sisters. Not being familiar with the play I had a lot of fun concocting my various theories of what complicated love entanglements were going on -- though I did understand that it ended it tragedy for everybody (not uncommon for Chekhov I understand). But more seriously, this was perhaps the most satisfying part of the evening. I've already waxed on and on about MacMillan's ability as a dance dramatist in this blog, but I can't stress it enough. His ballets have an amazing ability to make me lose sight of the dance for the story that they are so movingly telling. In a way I suppose this is a pity because I rather enjoy enviously admiring the beauty of an arch or the line of an arabesque, but on the other hand this is the dramatic form of dance at its very very finest. I thought that of all the choreographers of the evening perhaps MacMillan understood Darcey's dancing the best, with her lush fluidity more obvious here than anywhere else. Jonathan Cope was a revelation, such an amazing actor; his was truly tortured role as the husband who is left by Masha (Darcey) for another man, layered with complexity and filled with so much pathos. But again, it was a quiet, internal torture that he put himself through, and the choreography was quirky but so very, very effective in his hands. Their farewell pas de deux, again, was fraught with emotion.
I tried to understand, what it is I love so much about these ballets, why being moved by the story and the characters is so emotionally fulfilling. Why not, indeed, watch a play, where they are not restricted to stylized dancing but instead can speak their despair, where lovers can fall into each others' arms without triple pirrouetting first? I don't really have a good answer, but some part of it would be that the dance form really is more global. Other than the obvious language issue, the minute you open your mouth you are labelled, particularly in this land of a thousand accents, and with that labelling comes a host of associated social contexts which I think many of the stories that are told through dance can shed. True, this makes them simpler, less interestingly complex. But that doesn't make their simple stories any less powerful. Another part of my answer would perhaps be that often, in our deepest agonies of joy and despair, there are no words, not if you aren't Shakespeare. It is a physical feeling, falling in love as Masha does, being tied to your loneliness as her husband is; and dance is perhaps one of the best ways to express such things. Don't we all want to leap for joy sometimes, even if it's not with pointed feet and in a full split as Darcey can?
Enough rambling, I must have utterly lost all of you by now; forgive me but I no longer write a diary and thus have no other outlet for these ramblings that could only interest, well, me.
I had a really lovely birthday, despite the fact that I spent most of it working as usual. After work I had a really nice long dinner with a friend who shares my birthday, and I've also received in the mail not only my teddy bear all the way from Australia (hurrah) but also this ecstatically received present from the boyfriend. He knows me and my gluttony inside out and I love him for it :)
Funnily enough, for a dancer who has danced all the biggest classical roles, I enjoyed the Sylvia pas de deux the least in the entire show, perhaps because sometimes these classical pieces can seem a little odd taken out of context, perhaps because I am perhaps no longer as enamoured as I used to be with the classics. On the other hand, I really enjoyed her Cinderella variation, shown on film, Ballet Boyz style, while she changed backstage betwen dances. Such speed! Such turns! Such neatness! It really does put paid to all the "Darcey is too tall to dance Ashton" myths.
The rest of the first half was made up of two modern pas de deux, both of which I loved. The first, from William Forsythe's In the middle, somewhat elevated, was fantastically exciting and sexy to watch. From the moment the sinfully good looking Roberto Bolle swaggers onto stage and muscles his way into an off-centred balance it holds you in a really physical way. And then Darcey comes on and the remainder is a whirlwind of thrown 180 degree extensions as she is manipulated into one impossible angular pose after another. If anything I liked Chris Wheeldon's Tryst pas de deux even more. Johnny Cope came out of retirement to perform this with Darcey and I could not imagine this being danced by any other than these two gorgeous dancers on whom it was created. In feel it could not be further from the Forsythe, all melting gentleness from which emerge the most breathtaking moments of counterbalance and flexibility that if you hadn't seen for that split second between all the rest of the flowing moment you would think weren't humanly possible. Whilst the Forsythe for me blended into one long impression of Darcey's leg up by her ear, the diversity of the beautiful images left indelibly by Tryst I think makes it for me the more appealing of the two works (though both were brilliant in very different ways!). Darcey on pointe in fourth, tipping so perilously and yet also so stably from side to side, pendulum-like, balanced on just one of Johnny's arms round her waist; Darcey held high as if caught upside down in soaring mid-flight, balancing for one long beautiful moment on the soles of Johnny's feet; Darcey in a full split sitting almost comfortably across his thighs in an expansive grand second plie, look ma no hands. It shouldn't have been possible, but they did it, and they did it in such an unassuming and quiet way that made it all the more powerful and impressive.
The second half of the night was a full performance of Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, based on Chekhov's Three Sisters. Not being familiar with the play I had a lot of fun concocting my various theories of what complicated love entanglements were going on -- though I did understand that it ended it tragedy for everybody (not uncommon for Chekhov I understand). But more seriously, this was perhaps the most satisfying part of the evening. I've already waxed on and on about MacMillan's ability as a dance dramatist in this blog, but I can't stress it enough. His ballets have an amazing ability to make me lose sight of the dance for the story that they are so movingly telling. In a way I suppose this is a pity because I rather enjoy enviously admiring the beauty of an arch or the line of an arabesque, but on the other hand this is the dramatic form of dance at its very very finest. I thought that of all the choreographers of the evening perhaps MacMillan understood Darcey's dancing the best, with her lush fluidity more obvious here than anywhere else. Jonathan Cope was a revelation, such an amazing actor; his was truly tortured role as the husband who is left by Masha (Darcey) for another man, layered with complexity and filled with so much pathos. But again, it was a quiet, internal torture that he put himself through, and the choreography was quirky but so very, very effective in his hands. Their farewell pas de deux, again, was fraught with emotion.
I tried to understand, what it is I love so much about these ballets, why being moved by the story and the characters is so emotionally fulfilling. Why not, indeed, watch a play, where they are not restricted to stylized dancing but instead can speak their despair, where lovers can fall into each others' arms without triple pirrouetting first? I don't really have a good answer, but some part of it would be that the dance form really is more global. Other than the obvious language issue, the minute you open your mouth you are labelled, particularly in this land of a thousand accents, and with that labelling comes a host of associated social contexts which I think many of the stories that are told through dance can shed. True, this makes them simpler, less interestingly complex. But that doesn't make their simple stories any less powerful. Another part of my answer would perhaps be that often, in our deepest agonies of joy and despair, there are no words, not if you aren't Shakespeare. It is a physical feeling, falling in love as Masha does, being tied to your loneliness as her husband is; and dance is perhaps one of the best ways to express such things. Don't we all want to leap for joy sometimes, even if it's not with pointed feet and in a full split as Darcey can?
Enough rambling, I must have utterly lost all of you by now; forgive me but I no longer write a diary and thus have no other outlet for these ramblings that could only interest, well, me.
I had a really lovely birthday, despite the fact that I spent most of it working as usual. After work I had a really nice long dinner with a friend who shares my birthday, and I've also received in the mail not only my teddy bear all the way from Australia (hurrah) but also this ecstatically received present from the boyfriend. He knows me and my gluttony inside out and I love him for it :)
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