Moving Art
April 3rd, 2010 § 3 Comments
Something has changed in the city. During the week it’s all suits and ties but come the weekend, the laneways and cafes become living, breathing installation art destinations. Street art has a new domain, the limbs and torsos of the people, tattoos seemingly a new form of fashion – one that can’t be changed out of.
Getting some ink seems to hold as much attraction for the nubile young as it does for the tough guys.
Two women stroll past a café arm in arm. Twentysomethings, full of stories about last night, who texted who and what the hell was that about?
Entwined you cant help but notice their heavily tattooed arms. In prison these are called sleeves, but today, in Degraves Street they are a permanent fashion statement about what to wear.
One has even had ‘the work done’ on her legs, bones and grapes wrapping around her ankle, spider webs creeping up her outer thigh to eventually emerge from her black singleted torso to become two angel wings between her shoulder blades.
Jesse has her name tattooed beneath a sailor girl image on her left calf. She has proudly commissioned this design from a friend who fancies herself as an ink artist, and probably is. Her body is a living canvas, the symbols of her young fashionable life permanently etched in her flesh for all to see.
I can’t imagine making such long term decisions about what I like. I can barely stay committed to a brand of teabag let alone a tattoo that would be with me forever.
Fashion is notorious for change and Jesse’s body reads like a storyboard. With so many chapters still ahead of her, I hope she has left space on her canvas.
The gypsy in all of us
October 25th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
My performance troupe Zaar Bellydance has just been booked for a gig end November, so we are all reigniting our inner gypsies while we ponder set lists, rehearsals, music and costumes.
Dancer - Latcho Drom
I have spent hours trawling though the catalogue of music we have amassed over the years, searching for new songs to inspire us, a journey accompanied by zills and ud, misma and tabla.
We are a tribal gypsy style belly dance troupe and so the very nature of our dance and costumes is eclectically influenced by cultures far and wide, past and present. Rajasthani, Banjara, Flamenco, Egyptian Bellydance, even Goths have their place.
Like gypsies, we borrow and integrate this richness and variety into something that expresses who we are in this moment, in this place, today. We have been playing with the idea of dancing to a didgeridoo track, music and movement seem to oddly but naturally fall together, the drone of the dig and snake arms in perfect harmony. It’s a respectful cultural borrowing that provides a big picture metaphor for integration and acceptance without a word being spoken.
Whilst the ancient nature of this dance form, as reinvigorated by Fat Chance Bellydance in San Francisco, is sometimes an abstract concept, it is through the amazing film making of Tony Gatlif, a French/Algerian gypsy himself, that I so often realise the privilege afforded me to dance in the shadows of this history.
In particular his films, Latcho Drom and Gadjo Dilo, are glorious and timeless expressions of gypsy culture. Other films like Exils, Vengo and Swing are sensitive and detailed accounts of lives that are simultaneously diverse yet mythically familiar to us all.
Oh, to be able to barrel turn like the young woman in this clip!
