richardsebastian.com

 Bible lesson
One of the Professor Brothers schools us hardcore on what really went down in pre-divine destruction Sodom & Gomorrah. (Don’t watch if you don’t want to hear a cartoon fella say nasty words and describe lewd acts)
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 History lesson
George Washington was more than silver dollars, wooden teeth and cherry trees. Did you know he was almost 7 feet tall and had atypical gonads? Find out more amazing facts about the father of our country in this entertaining educational music video (See the disclaimer above)
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VCU continues its Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age lecture series, kicking off the spring schedule on February 6th with a Roundtable discussion on blogging in the arts and humanities. Guest bloggers include Charles Bernstein, founder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY—Buffalo, Tyler Green, editor and writer for the Modern Art Notes blog, and Dan Cohen, Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Three men, zero women, by the way, a fact that would be of interest to Kathryn Hayles, author of My Mother was a Computer and Hillis Professor of Literature and Media Arts at UCLA. She will talk on Gender in Cyberspace on February 26th. On April 11, the lecture series ends with a collaboratively edited bang flourish whimper “conversation” with Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia.

Dancer Moses Pendleton made a big impression on me when I was 13 or 14 years old. Not as a dancer, but as an eccentric personality and avante-garde artist. After watching a PBS documentary called Dance in America in which Moses was featured, I started carrying around a cheap tape recorder in my pocket and recording every minute of my day, like Moses did in the film. In the documentary, Moses, whose elongated features reminded me of an exaggerated Mick Fleetwood, had an an enormous wooden chest in his NY apartment overflowing with tapes of his daily recordings. The best thing about those tapes, though, and what made me want to imitate him, was that he threw them into the chest without ever listening to them. In fact, he never listened to them. For some reason, I thought that was brilliant. So I tried it too, but quickly came to realize I wasn’t as committed to the idea as he was. And besides, I was sending all of my paper route money to TDK.
Last night, Moses’s dance company Momix was at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for a performance called The Lunar Sea. This performance clearly demonstrated that Moses is as much an artist, or in his words, an illusionist, as a dancer. The performance was about an hour and half long, without a break, and took place behind a large scrim at the front of the stage that displayed close-up images of astral objects and natural landscapes. The dancers moved behind the scrim, their bodies transformed by black-lights and reflective costumes into organic shapes that seemed to float on air, like undersea creatures.

From a review by The Stage:

Dancers morph into one another, their foreheads pressed together, bodies rippling in clever physical illusion to become ghosts flitting through the night, ethereal mermaids swimming across the dark stage, ice skating planets, glowing, shunting, whirling and spinning mid-air.

The brilliance of the company can be seen in that they do not only rely on the spectacle created by costumes and props but by the shapes that can be created by the body and that powerful tool - the imagination. Give them a shower curtain and an umbrella and you get jellyfish. Give them a pair of stripy Camden market tights and you get a carnivorous spider or two.

The music was as ambient and ethereal as the dancers’ movements, creating an otherworldly, underwater atmosphere.

Still, for me, the overall performace came off as a bit gimmicky. I enjoyed its visual cleverness and imagination, but after the initial and quite pleasing opening performance, the visual tricks got a bit old, and I yearned for a respite from the floaty, eerie, Windham Hill world on stage. And besides, the images dancing across the scrim often seemed too neutral and predictable, and I wondered if they were actually just big Windows Vista screensavers.

I also couldn’t help comparing this performance to the BattleWorks performance we saw at Modlin last fall, but perhaps this is unfair. The two performances had quite different goals and used radically different techniques. Still, I suppose I was in the mood for something more physical and visceral, like Robert Battle’s pieces, not the hypnotic, aquatic mood piece of The Lunar Sea.

This should be a gen-u-wine hoot:

Guest artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude will speak on Wednesday, Jan. 31, at 6:30 p.m. at the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts as part of the VCU School of the Arts’ Windmueller Arts Lecture Series. Christo and Jeanne-Claude — widely acclaimed for transforming monumental works of art using fabric — will discuss their current work in progress, “Over the River: Project for Arkansas River, Colorado.” This event is free and open to the public.

Afterward, Christo and Jean Claude are going to wrap the decrepit and crumbling Franklin Street Gym (where I work) in swaths of Reynold’s aluminum foil (sponsored by Alcoa). Guest illusionist David Copperfield will make the building completely disappear–for good–during his VCU campus appearance in February.