Rainy Sunday

Feel like everything is disintegrating and it takes so much effort to not let that happen, to change anything, to stop the entropic slide.  I can't drop the class just because I have to move.  Things were already hanging very tenuously in the balance, the move just threw it over the edge.  All I want to do is sleep, but burying my head in the sand isn't going to make anything happen.  We have ten or so days off between quarters.  Yesterday in the workshop the facilitator mentioned something about setting a timer and working on one thing for five minutes.  That would probably be helpful.

The (audience engagement) workshop was good.  I thought maybe I would be an outsider because I'm not actively presenting anything, but it was helpful.  Before I went I was thinking perhaps there really was a difference between visual/music vs dance/theatre, because the first is often curated and you tend to get a story around why that choice was made.  I mean even when you see a band in a bar, they will often introduce songs, and in visual art, whoever curated made a choice of why they are showing this work and they tell you their point of view.  But after the workshop, I'm not sure it matters.  I think it's more that all parties directly involved come to an agreement on the point of entry for experiencing the art.  There were several steps in the process, but the last one, which I also like, and hadn't thought about was: what change do you wish to make in the "audience" by presenting this work?  We worked on this in groups at the very end, for about 20 minutes (this would be a much longer process).  My group had two Frida Kahlo pieces that she painted after she left Diego Rivera, and we thought about resilience and depression and so our entry point was "finding light in the darkness" and one of our audience engagement ideas was having people share stories of overcoming something in their lives, and the take away was that people would feel a sense of connection, both to others because they weren't alone, and also to their own inner strength.

I don't get the vote in Crimea to be controlled by Russia.  There wasn't freedom for the average person in the USSR (or maybe life was rosy, and it was the western propaganda I grew up with that makes me believe that, that is a possibility), why are people allowing this to be re-formed?  The Crimean people interviewed on the radio a week or so ago said they didn't want to be oppressed by Ukrainians because they were ethnically Russian...but it didn't sound like that had actually been happening.  It's fear-mongering.  They threw away an opportunity for self-determination, because they were afraid of something that might happen.  And now there is a nervous ripple throughout the former Soviet bloc that Putin will invade to "protect" ethnic Russians...like him or not, that man is shrewd, passing laws over the years to give himself unlimited power and to allow ethnic Russians to have Russian citizenship so now he can "freely" invade sovereign nations when he feels like it using the excuse that he's protecting "Russian" citizens...they could also be repatriated into (already existing) Russia without the land grab.  It's not about them.  Things are happening way too fast.  What's he really after?  We don't need another world war.  (My very surface opinion.)