Sunday, July 15, 2012

Jacob's Pillow 80

We had an early performance time today, 2pm at Jacob's Pillow, to see Tero Saarinen's Borrowed Light. Saarinen is Finnish who began his career with the Finnish Ballet. The piece is inspired by the Shakers and uses original Shaker music. However, the work is not about Shakerism but rather community and devotion. There are 8 dancers and 8 singers from the Boston Camerata. The dancers and singers share the stage; their costumes are black and the light is stark, cast at an extreme angel from stage left. The title comes from the Shaker practice of adding interior windows to a building in order to extend daylight hours. There were many aspects I liked. The dancers make exaggerated zombie like movements with a lot of stomping. All of us would have preferred more traditional dance. But I did appreciated Saarinen's ability to extract and project a visceral feeling of human struggle both emotionally and physically within a community or space. Here is a brief clip of Borrowed Light from the company's website. I don't believe it is the Camerata performing the music here, though.
Tonight we ate at Bistro Zinc. It was amusing that at our 8pm reservation the menu was practically empty of all selections. All these old folks around here eat early and wiped out the kitchen.