(no subject)
Had an interesting flex today (after a semi-frustrating weekend of trying to appear competent training foster carers in yass). i'd never seen Floriade, despite actually being a resident of canberra for the last one, so i thought i'd check it out. and i was also feeling a bit lonely and grumpy or something. in need of some vitamin d. the flowers were plentiful, though the displays seemed a bit random (the theme is 'Carnivale', but then the sub theme is 'flowers of the world'. so we have displays from chile, turkey, spain etc etc. except they all seem to be similar beds of tulips, with tags like 'Canada, Tulip Top Fair, celebrated in March and April'. Maybe I'm just not educated enough in the subtleties of tulip landscaping to appreciate).
what was tops though was the bit of street theatre i saw, consisting of an acrobat in a khaki-print cotton body suit. through his 15 min performance he stripped down to black rubber bands, and latex shorts. he was from Darwin, as he repeatedly told us. he was really hot (bleached blond hair, blue eyes, hot body, akubra hat). his actual acrobatics were pretty tame (he lined some people up on the floor and did flips over them, and he did a backflip over the same four people). but i watched this guy stand in the middle of a noisy park full of mild, picture taking, middle class tourist types; get people's attention(with a stockman's whip and a really intentionally cheesy country song on his cd player), make an impromptu stage and do a performance.
the good bit wasn't his stunts, it was his interaction with the strangers in the crowd: the cheeky/rude comments, the theatricality attached to the way he got his volunteers, the way he asked this pastel-pink, public-serventy, middle age lady to give him a kiss for luck before his last big trick, then at the last minute, turned his head and smacked her full on the lips. just before the end he asked everyone to pay him, in folded notes or gold coins, or come and give me a handshake, don't bother with the silver; he asked people to leave before the big end stunt if they weren't even willing to say thanks, "that's just polite". i could see how confronted everyone was by that; but they all paid him.
having the chutzpah to do that, and the charisma to pull it off, is what i find fascinating in the situation i guess. this guy's ability to make a crowd of total strangers into a collective, an audience. his okness with baring himself open to this makeshift audience, knowing nothing about them, their backgrounds, their sense of humour, their political views, their willingness to engage with strangeness or with strangers or to be an audience. i suppose this fascinates, because it's so utterly unlike my own personality.
after that i went to manuka and saw some big houses, and a movie called 'friends with money' which was quite inconclusive.
what was tops though was the bit of street theatre i saw, consisting of an acrobat in a khaki-print cotton body suit. through his 15 min performance he stripped down to black rubber bands, and latex shorts. he was from Darwin, as he repeatedly told us. he was really hot (bleached blond hair, blue eyes, hot body, akubra hat). his actual acrobatics were pretty tame (he lined some people up on the floor and did flips over them, and he did a backflip over the same four people). but i watched this guy stand in the middle of a noisy park full of mild, picture taking, middle class tourist types; get people's attention(with a stockman's whip and a really intentionally cheesy country song on his cd player), make an impromptu stage and do a performance.
the good bit wasn't his stunts, it was his interaction with the strangers in the crowd: the cheeky/rude comments, the theatricality attached to the way he got his volunteers, the way he asked this pastel-pink, public-serventy, middle age lady to give him a kiss for luck before his last big trick, then at the last minute, turned his head and smacked her full on the lips. just before the end he asked everyone to pay him, in folded notes or gold coins, or come and give me a handshake, don't bother with the silver; he asked people to leave before the big end stunt if they weren't even willing to say thanks, "that's just polite". i could see how confronted everyone was by that; but they all paid him.
having the chutzpah to do that, and the charisma to pull it off, is what i find fascinating in the situation i guess. this guy's ability to make a crowd of total strangers into a collective, an audience. his okness with baring himself open to this makeshift audience, knowing nothing about them, their backgrounds, their sense of humour, their political views, their willingness to engage with strangeness or with strangers or to be an audience. i suppose this fascinates, because it's so utterly unlike my own personality.
after that i went to manuka and saw some big houses, and a movie called 'friends with money' which was quite inconclusive.