Many of my weekly posts are reflections on activities or
experiences I have had in the previous week. This week, two activities are vying
for attention, and I decided to write about both of them. It’s a Saturday
night/Sunday afternoon special report.
Saturday night we attended a performance of Step Afrika!, a 30-year-old Washington,
D.C. dance company that specializes in step dancing.
I hadn’t ever heard of stepping before I saw it and, to be honest, I thought we
were seeing a company of dancers from an African nation. We were not.
Wikipedia describes stepping as “a form of percussive dance in African-American
culture that uses the performer’s entire body
as an instrument to produce complex rhythms and sounds through a mixture of
footsteps, spoken word, and hand claps.” Step Afrika! also added drums, flute
and saxophone, and singing to the mix.
We are dance aficionados. We have season tickets to the
Houston Ballet, attend four or five dance programs a year that, like this one, are
brought to town by Performing Arts Houston, and attend many small company or
pre-professional company programs in Houston and the surrounding area. Trips
this year have included Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and AIMED
Dance in Beaumont.
That is to say, we know dancing. And we have never seen
dancing like the movement swirling before our eyes on Saturday night. They
presented an all-encompassing visual display—feet moving faster than the eye could follow, legs repositioning
in ways the brain couldn’t decipher, hands clapping rhythms that beat right
into our bodies.
It was a “Wait, what!?” kind of experience that made both
halves of the evening flash by as though we were there for minutes, not hours.
The performers engaged the audience throughout the program, mostly with
invitations to clap, and call-and-response exchanges.
Black audience members outnumbered white ones
significantly, and, as in Black churches, people joined right in with shouts of
encouragement and joy as the performance unfolded. I was shouting and clapping
myself before long. What a night!
This brings us to Sunday afternoon. The Houston Ballet sponsors
a huge Christmas fair every year called the Nutcracker Market. When I say huge,
I mean enormous. It brings in $6 million dollars over four days to support
dance education for the Ballet.
I have never attended, primarily because I’m too cheap to
buy a $20 ticket and the $25 parking at the venue—which is part of Houston’s football stadium—is very difficult.
However, the Ballet included two free tickets in our subscription package this
year. I have been excited about going since April and had a long-standing arrangement
to go with my daughter Alix.
That all changed when I broke my foot. There was no way I
could manage getting around on my knee walker in that vast space with those
vast crowds. I sadly decided to give the tickets away, but Alix intervened. I
still have the old wheelchair from my non-walking days of illness. She offered
to do the driving and the wheeling for our adventure. I offered to cover the
parking and incidentals. Ta-da! We had a plan.
Parking was horrible. It took 40 minutes to drive to the
venue and another 40 minutes to find a space. Using my handicapped placard, we
managed to weave our way through numerous parking lots on secret routes that
the attendants whispered to us. We eventually ended up right at the front door
of the Nutcracker Market. How about that!?
Inside we found a riot of Christmas paraphernalia, gifts
and treats of all magnitudes, costumed visitors that included families in matching Christmas jammies, friends
in matching nutcracker outfits, and every sort of red and green design you can
imagine on shirts and leggings. We drank in a delightful visual feast.
I
love Christmas and have a really extensive collection of Santas and other
seasonal knick-knacks that I love to put out every year, but I do not need
another one! I steadfastly refused to buy anything that required a place to put
it. That left food.
Alix
and I sampled every single offering we could find, and I eventually left with
Mexican vanilla popcorn, Wisconsin baked cheese, sugar-free (mostly) saltwater
taffy, a giant cashew turtle (for Michael), and one gift for a friend. I went
way over budget because I didn’t plan to buy anything. Silly me.
On
the way out, I bought us both a large soda for the road. That cost $19!! I can
get pretty incensed over the abuse of customers at convention-type venues. Just
did it at the Quilt Festival, too. Highway robbery, but we needed the drinks. Alix
and I breezed out of the parking lot and made it home in good time.
Stepping
and Christmas. It was a wonderful weekend! I wish you could have been there.
Tschüß
(Tschüss)
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