Dance performance and more!

Le soir est la période idéal pour ruminer sur ce que j’ai fait toute la semaine. Savez-vous que après avoir mangé, le girafe se met à ruminer pendant six heures! C’est beaucoup, moi je ne pourrait pas mâcher pendant aussi long de temps. En tout cas, je suis là, à vous écrire, décrire et raconter ce qui me reste à l’esprit. Pour faciliter que le maximum nombre de mes amis comprenne mon blog, je vais passer à l’Anglais, mais d’abord je dois vous dire que la solitude dans laquelle je me retrouve est tranquille, elle me fait se reposer et réfléchir sur ma vie actuelle. Pourtant, j’essaie de ne pas être rendu léthargique en ce moment de repose, car je sais que chez les herbivores de la savane, la rumination émousse les muscles.

In any case, my muscles are fine. I danced today outside a shop in the Wernhill mall in Windhoek! It was for a fundraiser for the college of the arts, where I dance biweekly. Today is Saturday, the Sabbath and what a blessed Sabbath it was. There was us, three of us, the choreographer Angelika Schroder, another student Nangula and myself. We danced the Trio choreographed by Angie. It was at about quarter to twelve. There was improv and there was falling. I realised that about all of my improv came from movements from earlier pieces I had made at Princeton. I guess the more pieces I create, the more material I will have for spontaneous improvisation.The Ovahimba movments where there, the movements of me on the floor, like a lizard, from the Harbor (originally created for Christopher Williams in 2006) and some other things.
My mother was there, so was my brother (whom I had to pay about U$ 25 to come and watch me), funny is it not. In any case, I had planned to give him some of the money I earn from work.My brother sleeps in, he is rarely up before 1pm, being the teenager that he is. He asked me earlier, not today, earlier about hip hop and breakdancing. I gave him a contact number I found on a poster of a black figure with his legs in the in a breakdance style pose, I tore off the number in downtown Windhoek and brough it home. He still has to call.

Nora, a friend of ours, a family friend, came afterwards. She missed the performance, but was thrilled to see me. She said to my mom"see he can do both, and you were so afraid". To what extent does her statement mean I have achieved anything and that I am living my ideal of harmony between me doing epidmeiology and me doing art? I don't know. Everyday, I have to recast my realtionship to them. Just recently, I decided to start writing articles and letters to the media about public health issues rather than dance reviews. Why? Well, let's say I need to explore epidemiology. My newest letter is going to be about Namibian prisoners. Both literally and figuratively, the cracks in our countries AIDS policy is to be found in our prisons, just put a little thing in those cracks and AIDS can spread faster than we anticipated. We don't know the prevalance in the prisons, but officially, the should not have condoms, lest we are encouraging the sin of sodom in our 95% christian country. Sin is happening, I guess, it is, regardless, and in the rural areas, nurses are already depositing, dropping off, giving condoms to the prisons. Whether these reach the inmates is unknown.
The dance, in many ways, was supposed to relate to part of what I wrote above, or at least me falling and screaming the word "gat", which in Afrikaans means "hole". The hole, the black hole that is our prisons, the glory hole and all that which allows fast spread of HIV. However, I forgot about that somehow, for most the off dance, till I fell and I was caught. We did the whole say a word and fall, randomly, while dancing all over the space, similar to the whole "me" game that was done and is still done in places where there is dance in the US. Bill T Jones. He told us, we should do something and ask make someone care.