library!
1/24 The Hubbard Street Dance Collective at the Detroit Opera House
My mom and I have been in a swing of being cultured this month, I guess! We saw the Hubbard Street Dance Collective perform a handful of contemporary and jazz peices, and I really enjoyed it. I danced all my life and I felt a yearning in my chest! They performed some beautiful contemporary--I was struck by their musicality, lines, and lightness. You could hear their breathing even from all the way in the back so to not hear their steps was incredible. My favorite piece was Beauty Chasers. It was a trio, and had a section of Journey in Satchindananda in it. This dance (and actually all of the contemporary pieces) had some beautiful lighting design that was very integrated into the choreography without being overpowering.
They also performed two Fosse numbers. I love watching films he has choregraphed/directed so I was very excited to see his dances performed in person and they did not dissapoint! It seems that humor is an important value to the company.
I did not like their last piece Impasse and honestly that was enjoyable in itself because sometimes I worry that I don't properly engage in art LOL! The piece was a cautionary tale about instant gratification the social ills and yaddah freaking whatever. I find a lot of commentary like this boring and incomplete. This one in particular had a group of dancers representing the peer pressure of quote un quote newness. The group was wearing like clown and stripper costumes and they were twerking, doing more vernacular (black) dance, in contrast to the contemporary dance that the victims (all white dancers!) were doing. The decision to change the genre of dance is understandable, but unnecessary and read as racist but also very prudish. Why is sex bad and social dance bad, especially if a statement of the dance is supposed to be that "we are stronger together"? The dance was in poor taste and I wish that is not what I was left with. TLDR: the dance reminded me of I don't twerk, I read and that is so mindnumbingly against what I understand the company to be trying to do.
1/11 Dimanche performed by the Chaliwaté and Focus Companies
For Hannukah, I got my mom and I tickets to see a puppetry/mime/clowning performance at the Power Center in Ann Arbor. It was about a family trying to maintain (in vain) normalcy among mass extinction and climate disaster. It was equal parts disturbing and amusing, which I guess results in absurd? Overall I enjoyed it as a work, but not really in the moment. There were some really special sections of movement and the puppets were beautiful. But I was just in a bad headspace that day and so watching the performers took backseat to my anxieties.
2025
12/30 The Art Preserve at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
I went to the Kohler Art Museum, and their Art Preserve yesterday. It was truly a singular experience to go to the Art Preserve. The Art Preserve is a museum solely dedicated to artist built environments and features mostly folk artists, though there are insider (?) artists represented.
I could (and maybe should) have spent much more time at the art preserve. My notebook is covered with the words “emotional” and “moved.” It was almost shocking to see the amount of art a singular person created and displayed in their homes. Shrines to a religion, a person, a curiosity, a material displayed in the backyards, homes, and sheds across the midwest were featured. AWESOME!!! I spent a lot of time thinking about how much a "home" can give an artist.
I particularly loved recognizing materials as what I use day-to-day. It begs the question: why am i not making? I really loved how the museum explained their curatorial choices and why items are displayed as they are. And especially the inclusion of artists personal collections into displays of their work. Many of the academic-y artists collected works of the other artists displayed in the museum, in addition to toys and random commercial items. It felt so intimate to see the prompts they used for their work!
Highlight artists for me: Dr. Charles Smith, Nick Englebert, the Zahn family, Mary Nohl, Eugene Von Bruechenhein. Their website also is a great resource.
The home of Mary Nohl. It was interesting how they tried to recreate peoples homes (lives) in a museum environment.
12/29 Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
A woman follows the arctic terns on their last migration, in the midst of the mass extinction. I read this mostly on the train to chicago, and then to milwaukee. The rhythm of the book was so dreamy, with lots of biting prose. Such an apt style for a book on loss. Sometimes, the plot was secondary to huge emotional explosions, which sometimes made the book feel trite. Overall, I enjoyed and would reccommend.
12/24 Mythic Chaos: 50 years of Destroy All Monsters.
I went to see this exhibit first with my bandmates, 12/17, then again with my dear friend and her dear sister 12/20. I have never been so quickly back to a specific exhibit before, and it was a nice experience.
Retrospective of the work created in and around the noise band Destroy All Monsters. lots of silver gelatin prints, xerox collages, raw grossness. They were active where I went to college in the 70s. One of the members grew up in the same square mile suburb that I did, then went on to open the independent book store that I frequented as a kid. I was touched to see that you can be from my flavor of "white bread" as my mom calls it.
My big takeaway from the exhibit, I guess, is that bands are not just conduits that music come out of. If they are worth anything, they represent a shared commitment to a method or five. And Destroy All Monsters perfects that by expanding that commitment past music. I realized that the band I am in acts similarly, and has given me the space to be creative in so many aspects outside of music. Now that I realize this, I feel that I and the band must nurture this art collective vibe like crazy!
highlights of the exhibit: a collaged, board game. silver gelatin where niagras hair has been recolored to be sparkly beyond compare.