undershot

Tonight I went to see Caley in a show with the Travel Art Dance Company. It was brilliant! The whole thing was completely improvised, with each performance inspired by a request from the audience. They obviously know each other very well: even with no time to prepare, their dances were engaging and cohesive.

I took in two photos as requests:

Apartments and hospital in Japan

The lighting in this shot always felt quite mellow to me. But the director chose a very dark song to play with it: Tom Waits’ What’s he Building in There? The dancers skulked around in the shadows, making angular shapes and, at the end, working together to form steps. It worked very well, but I will never be able to look at the photo in the same way again!

Anti-Frost Fans over a Japanese Tea Field

This one was accompanied by an earthy Japanese song. At first no one moved and I thought it was going to bomb. Then one dancer got up and held his arm up straight, to be joined by another to form a shape similar to the fan on the right. Others then joined in with interesting mechanical movements.

Other requests included pieces of music, animations, and props. The props were often interpreted without any music, and were the most interesting: a pile of polished pebbles became the obsession of an oriental gardener; a bunch of flexible straws were exulted. A member of the audience even offered herself as a prop, and she was bent into all sorts of interesting shapes by the dancers.

I made the mistake of ordering a trio of dips, even though I was there alone. Never again! I felt like a fool eating them, and no one would help me – or even make eye contact. “Who is that weirdo eating a trio of dips by himself,” they said.