Alvin, Sufjan, and Theodore

Monday was the night my morning-wait paid off. Dressed to the seven-point-threes, we joined other freebie-seeking Kennedy Center goers for a little Alvin Ailey dance action.

I don't really understand dance. I have this problem with many of the visual arts. With music, if it gets my toe tapping- it's art. With food, if it sets my tongue wagging- it's art (or probably salty licorice fish). With prose, if it stirs an emotion or captures a moment- it's art. But with the visual stuff, I am often unsure of what exactly I am supposed to see. I mean I get paintings, at least I get the ones that resemble what they portend. Dance though...I had a whole theory going for this evening's dance numbers having to do with nature. There was a sunrise and some growing crops, a jellyfish, and some sunflowers. Then there were men in tuxedos (not the cookies) and my nature theory kind of lost steam.

From there, Sufjan rejects made their way to one of the halls to watch Sufjan live in the next room on TV. This experience threw me for a loop. I've never been a great concert-goer anyway. I find a lot of music seems to lose something when I can't sing along in my own piercing falsetto and/or flail my arms about wildly in what monkeys and I call "dancing." Now multiply that by sitting in front of a big TV and it equals something else. Somehow Sufjan made the experience powerful. I enjoyed watching people react to his music even as it was piped in to us. I searched throughout the show for some sort of comparable experience. The closest I came up with was the event of buying a new record, before downloads and the full musical immersion that life has become; I mean actual records where people got together with their friends and sat down and really listened. It required a certain level of respect and resolve to sit quietly and focus mainly on the music. It ocurred to me that there are so few times I take the time to do that. It was kind of moving. So maybe it was more like being in a giant mini-van rockin' out to Sufjan. A giant mini-van with 60 foot curtains, 5 people I knew and about one hundred I didn't all staring straight ahead at the road as played by Sufjan and members of the National Symphony Orchestra. Or maybe it was most like a movie without a plot and the lights turned up, a theater of reaction, where the visual is secondary, and everybody already has a favorite piece of the story.