xt1me

The first was “Home is Where the Art is” which were a group of ladies from all around the world who were doing some kind of art course and they got an empty shop and put all the things they made all around it. They had different teas and coffees from the places where they were from and you could go in and have a cup of tea and some cakes or something that they made, they’d give the recipes if you asked, and talk to the ladies. You could also do various crafts they had set up like embroidery or printing. And it was all for free. It was a very good way of displaying their stuff rather then a regular old art gallery.

(My job was to run up to the shops when hey ran out of something like cream or pens.)

The other thing was “Tomorrow in a Year.”

We just had to hand out flyers and programs and then we could go in the back and watch the show.

Thank goodness I didn’t pay money for it.

I know I’m not really the intended audience for this kind of experimental performance stuff but this was the kind of pretentious art you think of when you’re making fun of pretentious art.

It was supposed to be about Dwain and evolution or something but really it was a complete waste of lasers and an industrial smoke machine. They had a projector as well but it manly showed random, vaguely biological things at intermittent intervals throughout the show. By the way, Art is no excuse for shoddy camera work!
And the music! When I heard there was going to be singers and dancers and an electronic opera it sounded cool. Someone should have told whoever made this that random noise and sounds are not music. You could make it into music, but if it’s all lumped together randomly then you have failed to. Also, the audience is unlikely to be forgiving if halfway though the first song you try to destroy their ears.

I felt sorry for the performers. The dancers could obviously dance and the singers could really sing but they seem to have been told to randomly freestyle while making sure they didn’t match anyone else. Actually no, If they were freestyling they probably would have looked better. The singers were carrying the ‘opera’ part of the show. As with all opera, it’s probably better if you don’t try and pay attention to what they’re saying. They put the words on a screen above the stage as they sang them and it really didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t that they were random words. They were strung into sentences, but the sentences didn’t make much sense were you read them back.

Halfway though the show they did have a moment when things looked like they were picking up. They had music that had not only a tune but a decent beat and the dancers started to, if not dance together, the at least seemed to be aware of the other people on stage. Near the end they seemed to stop performing and start actually dancing. Maybe because they finally had something to dance to. The words in the song started to string together into sentences which, if were not proper sentences, then at least ones that followed a theam. Darwin’s birds and how he used them to discover evolution. You could almost feel that maybe all that chaos at the start was some kind of arty way of saying we all came from random disjointed stuff.

And then the music cut to loud droning noise and the dancers were left dancing to the previous song for another few minutes until the next song. The next song something that had a beat but there was no dancing to it.

It continued on with this waste of talent until I had to leave to catch my bus. I wasn’t waiting around to see if they pulled a miracle in the finally. I think they were on the last song anyway. This one actually had words that made sense and decent music. Still not enough for me to stick around though.

What the hell did I just watch?