Yesterday night my laptop charger was in the Women's Center so I couldn't upload a sketch.
The Kennedy Center is having a "festival" of sorts. It's called Japan! Culture+Hyper Culture.
But I was made of fail so the only pic I got that day was
before my camera ran out of power.
So Anyway, My mom, Nicholas, Aiden and I went. Nicholas was happy with the Hall of Nations, but when we went upstairs to the show he had a blast. First we looked at the installation that was featured in the Weekend, Yayoi Kusama's Dots Obsession. Polka Dots are a recurring theme in her work and she considers the fields of pattern infinity nets. She considered the negative room (yellow dots on black) to exude a feeling of obliteration, while the positive room (black on yellow) felt to her like the infinity of the universe all the possibilities of the planets and stars. Upon entering the installation we felt the opposite, the dark room was soothing, it was crowded with lots of people and children playing and sliding over the forms on the floor. In the yellow room you wanted to leave quickly, the yellow making the black dots vibrate through the space as though shaking you out of it. Another installation separated the two rooms, one open-dark room with four illuminated glass cubes in the center, etched with a word repeating all over each box; water, CO2, Rubbish, and "future?". The water box had a slightly smaller cube within with rivulets of water running inside it in orderly columns, the CO2 had an illuminated image on the sky at the bottom of the inner cube, the rubbish box had a compacted cube of aluminum cans, and the future? box was empty. Nicholas said that box was scary.
Then there was the "Koi Currents" installation by Reiko Sudo, which was the best of the three. A roof with a school of Koi fish kites larger than life in size, running through the room to a wall at the end. They were in all kinds of colors and textures and then at the end was a projection of a koi pond on the floor behing the wall, and the first wind scoks were embeed in the wall so that you could see right through them and they were in the pattern of the festival logo! They had samples of all the textiles along the end on the room, and they were all cutting edge with little descriptions of the weaving or dyeing process. It gave a whole new insight to the installation walking back and looking at all the materials and looking as they turned into white ghost forms made from synthetics, silks, and woven paper.
Then we saw the Honda ASIMO robot, which is pretty much everything you ever wanted in a bipedal robot. At first they had all the children sit in the front, and Nicholas ran right up there and the docent lifted the red rope and let him right in, of course this had my mother unnerved the whole time and she left me with Aiden while she went to sit with Nicholas (and she did not get past the red rope, but a nice lady gave up her seat. I stood on the side and held up Aiden so he could see it. First they showed a little intro rell on the monitors around the stage which had . . .
THE TIN WOODSMAN!
AND THE HEL ANDROID FROM METROPOLIS!
I was in fangirl heaven. Then the lady started talking and the four foot robot came out, walking like a yogi or an old man. ASIMO talked to her, walked, balanced on one foot (both sides) walked backwards, and kicked a soccer ball. that was when Aiden started yelling and wouldn't stop so I took him over to the manga table and gave him some cookies.
Mom says he walked up stairs and stepped off something without falling, and truly ran. Then Nicholas petted the seal android and made a break for the dots again and then got upset when we told him he couldn't have the dragon model from the mecha timeline.(which was pretty badass)
Oh and there was Mikimoto Obidome! which were the most gorgeous jewelery I have ever seen, so many diamonds amazing because they were somehow set, but they were so tiny, like glitter. I was kind of disappointed that the Cherry Blossom Queen Crown wasn't on display though.
And they had manga tables with Shaman King and some other random titles, and an actual manga-ka. But he was like a total no-name, Robin Nishi. and they didn't even have his books on the tables, very disappointing.
The docents in the black dots room were overly permissive so the balloons were losing air in that room, so I don't expect them to last through the weekend, and when you call information for the Kennedy Center they basically know nothing about the show, so I suggest just go and check it out, it'll probably be open as long as the building is open, from 10:00 am till around 11:30 pm. They will know the times for the ASIMO robot so don't expect that you will see it if you haven't checked out the schedule for that.
They are showing premieres of 3 anime:
The Piano Forest
5 Centimeters Per Second
Appleseed: Ex Machina
$15 a ticket on this sunday.
And tomorrow there is a free master class with dancer Kenichi Ebina at 3:00pm
Okay that is enough of that!
I made some Valentime-flavoured Amigurumi
And finally, yesterday's sketch in black and today's in red all on one page (won't happen again . . . I hope)