Spend more time at the Ann Arbor Summer Festival. We've been here close to 4 years and I don't think we do enough at the Festival. So this year, we've decided to make more of a conscious effort to go to the shows and special events. It's rare enough to get good acts in Michigan, and even more rare that they're right in town and a mere bus-ride away. Last week was great coz we managed to catch a double-bill of Cesaria Evora and Seu Jorge- Latin/Brazilian/Portuguese samba jazz vocals. Awesome!... Cesaria has a truly spellbinding voice and Seu Jorge was really fun to watch too! You may remember him as the Portuguese-speaking David Bowie-singing crewmember in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Needless to say, by the end of the night, the crowd was all up and dancing :) The promo site for their performance has some really good sound clips you can listen to.
Then last night, Jude, Rachael and I met for dinner before walking to Top of the Park to watch Happy Feet. By chance, we managed to catch the last 15 minutes of Strange Fruit, an Australian-based troupe that performs on 4-meter tall stilts. The lighting wasn't very good but Jude managed to snap some pictures of them here. They were delightfully elegant and whimsical. It was part dance, part circus, part Cirque du Soleil, all art.... :) The best thing was how they were performing right amidst the crowd rather than on stage or somewhere removed from the audience. It wasn't participatory or anything, but I think their proximity to everyone lent a certain carnivalesque feel to the whole thing which was really nice.
Happy Feet was a wonderful treat for me :) It's definitely not Finding Nemo, and by no means a kid movie; but it had a real soul to it that I wasn't expecting at all. The soundtrack is amazing, the narrative strong and thoughtful, and some of the underwater sequences are nothing short of breathtaking. Everyone was grooving, tapping their feet and there was clapping all around by the time it was over. Sitting out in the open watching a movie was really fun- kinda like how I'd imagine a drive-in movie would be like. I think we're going to try to catch Dreamgirls next week.
So there- Ann Arbor's just lovely in the summer, and having the Summer Festival right downtown reminds us of that just a tad more :)
2 comments:
i miss summer! in europe that is. where people just go out of their houses and enjoy life as it shld be enjoyed. prancing in the sun, picnicing in the shade....
enjoying my crim law class, so much that im typing this in class! haha. but its a good class. very thought provoking.
hope u have fun at the summer fest! and watch more gigs!
In any other small town, I think I would be so annoyed at how tiny it is. For some reason, I totally missed the small town part of Ann Arbor. So much going on, I guess.
(I wish I could miss summer in Europe!)
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