Yeah…
Latest assignment:
Cover four Russians as they navigate the insanity of a festival on the Duke campus that hosts like 600 contemporary dancers from all over the US/World.
It’s really quite a genius scheme on the part of the US gov’t: pay for artists from Russia to come here on the pretext of professional development; I show them how rad america(ns) can be; they get a taste for the international arts scene which holds infinately more promise than, say, that of Kaliningrad (who puts a city in a spot where it doesn’t even touch the rest of the country anyway??); eventually, if said dance artists are motivated, they defect to new york, where, like baryshnikov, komar & melamid, brodsky, etc etc. Okay, so obviously i’m over-stating the reconossaince nature of my job for comedic value, and at the end of the day, all the artists are excited mostly by the prospect of meeting colleagues and potential collaborators from around the world, showing their work to entirely new audiences, and, um a free trip to a rad spot.
Anyway, major observations so far:
who knew that russian dancers don’t get to dance with live musicians pretty much ever, when it’s par for the course around here?
body language = everything ursula the sea witch promised
the adf, as with most large, well-funded arts institutions, tends to be more conservative than its participants (i.e. the productions in the festival program are awesome, but mostly not on the avant garde end of the spectrum)
