Yesterday I played for the band Princeton in their effort with a dance troupe. In between my stints of playing for the band’s rock songs and the collaborative dance work, the dancer put on their own pieces. Some were incredibly boring, but one that I thought was unexpectedly effective was a dance where a short passage by Virginia Woolf was stated aloud by one of the dancers. When a punctuation mark was in the passage such as , or ; the other dancer would make a motion imitating it’s shape or function. Maybe my judgment of the effectiveness is skewed by the room being filled with a bunch of English, egg-head post-graduate academics, but they seemed to really get the work and appreciate it. I can clearly remember gasps of awe at the dancer’s movement representing the period, where they would kneel down and firmly punch their fist against the floor. That room was so nerdy.
Otherwise, the band and orchestra played well and all the old professors (the liberal academic elites I suppose) seemed to enjoy Princeton’s songs.