Getting better with boredom

KAGEMI© Masafumi Sakamoto

I went to a dance performance this week at the National Arts Centre: Sankai Juku: KAGEMI - Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors. I'm sorry to say that I didn't really enjoy it. When I realized it was going to be boring, I decided to try to get what I could from it.

Here are some of the thoughts that went through my head:

• Maybe watching this performance will have some sort of positive effect on me that I'm not even aware of. Like meditation.
• Oh, oh. Didgeridoo music. You know you're in trouble when you hear a didgeridoo.
• Is the didgeridoo on Dave T's wank-o-meter? If not, it should be. And worth 25 points.
• It's probably uncomfortable for performers to be covered in powder, but it makes neat effects when they clap their hands.
• Am I jaded, or are obvious birth and death metaphors in a dance performance trite?
• If I review this performance I have to work in how the dancers had only two facial expressions: neutral and the Macaulay Culkin Home Alone screaming face.
• Why do I have to be so negative? Here is a group of artists who are doing their best to present art and I'm trying to come up with witty ways to put them down.
• It's like when the Maple Leaf Brass Band played our concert of inaccessible music in Toronto. Sure, the audience hated it, but we worked hard to get those atonal pieces down and play them as the composers had written them.
• Come to think of it, it is pretty obvious that only one person's artistic vision is informing this show.
• Maybe that's why I enjoy a local DanceAbility, Collective Gulp or Grasshoppa Dance Exchange performance so much more. Even when there's only one choreographer, with so much improvisation, the dancers all contribute to the artistry of the performances.
• So maybe my blog would be better if I had other people working on it.
• Say is that a cello on the soundtrack? Now things will get better. Everything improves when there is cello accompaniment.