The Social Whirl

Months go by and not much happens outside the normal work, grocery shopping, family-stuff, you know that kind of stuff. Today was not that kind of day!

Today started out by meeting up with Mom and cousin Marsha. We headed up to SPAC where we had great seats to see the New York City Ballet perform Square Dance (Vivaldi & Corelli/Balanchine – 1957), Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes (Copland/Peck – 2015), and Western Symphony (Kay/Balanchine – 1954). This was a special treat arranged by cousins Wendy and her daughter Tiffany and at second intermission we got whisked away by Tiffany for a quick tour to see the stage from the wings and the back of house rehearsal area and Tiffany and Matt’s office. Very cool and our 91 year old seat neighbor of course couldn’t help but wonder who we were that we got to go in and out of stage doors with someone wearing a mic and headset!

The performances were thrilling. Two Balanchines from the mid-1950’s and a newly commissioned work which debuted earlier this year combined to give a view of ballet in the new world, still developing and new and yet rooted in the history and tradition. The newest is an interesting twist, using fifteen male dancers with one female. I hope Mr. Peck will continue to write pieces like this that take advantage of what the male dancer can do. In Square Dance, Balanchine added a solo for the principle male dancer and it also gave a different spin to the work.

Then, it was on to the next engagement – a poetry event at the East Greenbush Library. Somehow I’d missed the first one but decided I’d work extra hard to get to the second. Elizabeth K. Gordon is a poet and teacher and there were four others plus myself. We read some poems we’d brought – either our own work (I read a few of this week’s haiku) or a favorite and then some poems Elizabeth had prepared for us to share. Then we did a couple writing exercises which were unexpected and fun (and just a little scary but we all did quite well I thought). It was a bit of NaNoWriMo mentality: just write, don’t self-edit, just get it all on the paper in the time allotted and figure out the rest later.

For the second exercise we chose five words: Popcorn, racing, colorful, ocean, diamond. We had two minutes to write and we did write. We had a very short grace period to finish the line being written when time was called. Then we all read them aloud. Good stuff. Here’s mine:

Frothy, popcorn on oceans
which breaks as diamonds
chasing spark on spark
racing to the sands, resting,
chasing colorful scoops of sky
and calls of birds
that are contained
racing to the ending phrase
and resting in the dark

Nothing like a challenge to get you going in new ways!

I came home and read the rest of the sheets of poems and looked at my workroom wall and had a glass of wine. And, as if this wasn’t enough Art for the week, Sunday I am taking an all day watercolor class over at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. I love to collect watercolor supplies but I don’t know much about actually using them… So here I go!