Saturday

Went and saw the Chamber Dance Company tonight.  This is the same show as the rehearsal/performance I saw a couple of months ago.  I actually liked the last two pieces (Nacho Duato's Jardi Tancat, and Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith's To Have and To Hold) more tonight.  When I saw the rehearsal I preferred Susan Marshall's Cloudless, but I think the combination of different dancers, and the shock value of the latter wearing off (and people laughed in strange places), plus just the full ensemble work of the Jardi Tancat and To Have and To Hold, altered my connection to it tonight.  Cloudless is more on the edge of performance art (which I like), whereas the other two were more straight-up dancing, with a sheer beauty of movement, and the intricacies of six dancers moving through and negotiating the space at the same time, that I enjoyed more.  (And the dancing between Bruce McCormick and I'm not sure who the woman dancer was, was gorgeous in Jardi Tancat.)

Last night I went to the Murphy/Lachow Company's The Man Who Can Forget Anything at On the Boards, and while I enjoyed it, I don't really have a clue what it was about. There was film, live music, acting, and dancing, and the second half was particularly poetic.  There were references to Chekhov's The Three Sisters (Chekhov is coming up all over the place, at the moment), many of which were things I marked down as wanting to remember while I was attempting to read it.  (I did finally sit down, and start it for the fourth time today.  Finished it, at last.  Now I just have two other translations I want to read, for comparison.)

In the talk back after the show, someone asked, "What was it about?"  One of the answers was that it was about whatever it made you think of, and that it changed for them every night.  Charlie Lachow, one of the performers, summed it up as, "To build. To balance. And to pass on."  And there was something about the linear, yet also circular, nature of time, and how everyone has a different memory of the same instance, so how do you go back to recreate it?  And then how every act in the Chekhov, is basically the same thing (only things have gotten more bleak, and hope has faded.)  I don't know.

And then on the bus, there was this woman across from me, I thought she knew the man she was talking to, and then suddenly she burst out crying.  He finally asked what was wrong, and she said, "You wouldn't understand, it's a female problem."  And then another woman came over and sat with her and tried to find out what was going on.  She said she was hungry.  She said she was scared, that she didn't know where she was gonna sleep.  Yeah, I was eavesdropping.  But it just all felt wrong.  She said she'd lost her ID, and she handed  the other woman a luggage tag with and address and phone number on it. She said she couldn't go home because someone would be mad.  She seemed to know about the shelter system.  The address was Ballard, but we were on a bus coming out of Ballard to Downtown...I don't know.  We all got off at the same stop.  The other woman offered to buy her food and was trying to call someone.  The whole thing didn't sit well.  This morning I was still thinking about it, and wondering was she a trafficking victim? Playing mind games?  Just having a really bad night?  I don't know what I could've done, the other woman had more of a handle on it than I would have. (I wasn't carrying a phone, for one, nor cash.)  I hope something worked out...Belltown is a bad place to be out on the street all night.  And she was at the end of her rope.  I feel like I should've done something, but I don't know what that would have been (especially without a phone on me.)