Saturday 8 March 2014

Breakfast

When I was a kid in small-town Saskatchewan, and most of the time since, Saturday morning was the liveliest time of the week. Sevilla, though, is normally slowish by morning but lively all day, blossoming around 7, burstingly ripe after dark. Especially Friday after dark, which makes right now--10:24 am next morning--exceedingly quiet, more of what I knew as Sunday morning.
I was up late (by my standards) myself last night, catching "What The Body Does Not Remember" in the "Contemporary Dance/Music" series at Teatro Central. Wonders too numerous to mention, except the instrumentation of the ensemble (3 clarinets, 2 pianos, 1 each trombone, violin, cello, double bass--all switching to an elaborate percussion set later) and the inventiveness of the dancers (including, at one point, three of them moving about the stage in any way necessary to keep three feathers aloft with their breath). Encore? Three guys came out and sat down in a row before three small tables on which their scores lay open. The tables were wired, amplifying any touch of hand to table. And away they went, playing the tables. Fabulous
What people can do when they commit to invention.
Meanwhile, the Lorca translation project limps along. I had fun earlier yesterday looping a fragment of Lorca between English and Spanish via Google translation. To be continued.
Which gets me to Lorca's Poet in New York, written during his visit there in 1929-30. The experience was profoundly alienating, apparently (See "Landscape of Vomiting Multitude (Dusk at Coney Island)")--he was especially sickened by the excess of Wall Street at the time of the crash of '29--but transformative. This work (in a bilingual edition), finding language in/for encounter with a new place, offers obvious inspiration to a Canadian poet in Andalucia.
Inspiration aside--but man, do I ever love the Lorca, and the images from that dance show, and the many delights of Sevilla (incl. weather well into the 20s)--my job is to get to work, once I've finished Breakfast.
PS, by noon, things have picked up. Still more of a family than weekday feel, though. Here's a pan of Plaza Nueva at high noon;

No comments: