Observance 08/06/2010 1:16am

It's late and I just spent way too long looking for a youtube clip that would illustrate how I felt watching a dance show this evening. The clip I want doesn't seem to exist. It's a clip from a scene in Amadeus where the emperor comes to watch a rehearsal of The Marriage of Figaro. By his own edict, the music to the wedding dance has been removed, so he sits, increasingly befuddled, and watches beautiful dancers doing beautiful dance moves without any context. He tries to pretend he appreciates what's being presented to him for a while, until eventually he looks around and says, "What IS this?" Don't get me wrong. The dancing I saw tonight itself was lovely. One dancer in particular was like some exquisitely muscled swan, and I could watch her make seemingly meaningful movements all over the stage all night, but I'd still ultimately feel frustrated that I couldn't ever figure out what that meaning actually was. The program used a lot of big words and made ambitious claims about the deep societal issues these dance pieces were addressing. But all I could see were beautiful bodies moving in an athletic and precise fashion to purposefully dissonant and jarring "music." I guess I didn't get it. Do I not get dance?? Or did I just not get that dance? Now I want to see more dance and find out. So maybe it did its job. One day in, and I'm already being thrust outside of my comfort zone. This is why the Fringe is so enlivening. It leads you into the only dance show you've seen in at least a year, makes you feel like an inbred 18th century Austrian emperor, then plops you down at Bedlam, where you meet Ahmed Naumann. Ahmed is directing