Always more to do

Well, I asked.  And now for all the correspondence I've been putting off (because I don't know what to say, because it intimidates me, and yet it's hanging over me like a cloud to remind me to do, etc.)

Spent the earlier part of the day raking gravel for the garden project (leveling for ADA accessibility.) Ran home and then caught a bus to St. Mark's just in time to meet up with the procession for Alice Gosti's "How to Be a Partisan."  A five-hour immersive performance, on the anniversary of Italy's liberation from fascism.

While I didn't always understand what was going on, the experience overall was phenomenal.  Very site specific: the music was written/chosen for the acoustics of the space, as well as the choreography, and the use of natural light, ending the performance as the daylight disappeared.  The music was transcendent (although, at one point was louder than any rock concert I'd ever been to.)  The soloist managed to stay in the basic same position, at the front of the space, for five hours, all while a red liquid, pooling from melting ice, slowly dyed her dress from white to red; by the last half hour of the five, it was completely transformed, and must've been uncomfortable, but you'd never know if from looking at her (Hanna Benn.)  And she had a gorgeous voice.  And the dancers performed during most of the five hours, doing lifts four hours in...humbling, they must've been exhausted.

And the performance and the audience shared the space.  The audience was free to move, to come and go, while the performers also moved in the same space (sometimes literally, as when they used the pews people were sitting in, to move through).  People talked throughout (not loud enough to be a distraction), though during the last half hour, as the lights dimmed, and an occasional tone would emanate from the organ, the dancers lit only by pen lights they held, moving methodically from aisle to aisle, until they had wound through the entire audience, you could've heard a pin drop.  (I thought I heard a radio, but when I put my ear to the door, it was the evening song of birds.)

There's another event related to this one, to get a sense of the bigger picture of where this came from, and what people experienced (and what questions emerged, what do you do now?)  (There was a pre-event as well, but I wasn't able to make that.)

There's a lot of exciting art happening in the city right now.  Get out and experience it.