dancepulse

Today I made it to the exhibit Nick Cave: Meet Me At the Center of the Earth at the Seattle Art Museum — its last day here! I’ve had it on my list to go since before it even arrived, so when I realized today was it, I called a friend, grabbed breakfast & took off.  If you ever have a chance to see an exhibit of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, GO!  They’re fabulous & you need to see the detail work up close. I hope the exhibit you see comes with videos of dancers inhabiting them because it’s phenomenal to see them move.

It’s great to be able to look up & see the world again, in the aftermath of performance…

…which came off just fine. Students were higher than kites. Teachers & principal loved it. Parents’ comments were hugely favorable — and they put ALL the chairs away at the end, which must mean something!

I always like the afternoon performance better, when the kids perform for each other. It’s a long performance because it takes awhile for all the classes to get on & off the stage from the audience.  But not only are the kids hugely appreciative of each other [have you ever watched the quiet enrapture of a kid-audience during “Show & Tell”? …they hang on every word, no matter what the topic!] but they’re a much quieter, more polite audience than their parents.  I also like it better because ALL the kids are there performing.

At night we get a good turn-out, but our demographics are such that it runs about 35% in the primary grades & up to 90% at the intermediate level.  The non-attendees come from families with small children, folks who don’t understand English, religions that don’t believe in dance & music, or parents with night work…

But the evening performance is just plain noisy. Note to self: don’t release the kindergarteners to their parents next year after they perform, because the parents don’t supervise them & they hang on the edge of the stage chatting noisily through the whole thing! Send them back to their classroom like the rest of the classes, to watch videos & play games until it all ends.

But it’s over now — except for the 3 dances that I need to rerecord in order to get a video without the single child in each dance for whom I don’t have permission to video.

On to other things… report cards, submitting scores for the 5th grade assessments, sorting through all the materials in my classroom that wound up in a tangle by the end of the performance… and the world out there beyond the classroom!