d-pict | dance odyssey

By my third day in Cuba, I was feeling optimistic. I had made three attempts to get on the Internet and one of them was successful. I had also found an eerie and magical park near my B&B, called Quinta de Molinos. It reminded me of similar decadent walled estates in Portugal, that testify to the deep inequalities of the colonial empires. You step out of the dusty, concrete cacaphony of Havana’s urban highways, through guarded gates, into a green tropical paradise about eight city blocks in extent.  The Quinta contains a ruined summer Palace, an educational institution, an aviary and various smaller buildings. Like the rest of Havana it has quite the faded grandeur. There are towering palms and figs, statues and busts, ponds linked with bridges and crowned with gazebos. You might expect such an urban lung to be popular with tourists and locals – but most of the visitors I saw that day were students with Downes Syndrome on an excursion. When I asked the guardian at the ga...

Dozing and waking to the earth-shaking roar of unmuffled car and truck engines, I heard the sound I hate the most in the world: the whiny, pointless gurgling of motorbikes. There were loud conversations, hawkers, car horns, barking dogs. I leaned out of bed to check the time: 07:40. "Six more days of this? I will be exhausted!" I thought, wondering if I had made a mistake in coming to such a noisy place. The infernal din was soon augmented by the sound of drills and hammers. I walked from my bedroom through my private lounge room onto the patio and looked down on the wide street for the sources of the noise. There were very few vehicles, but the few that were passing through were old and extremely noisy. From cross the road, inside a building, came the hammering and drilling. In the street below my patio, nothing interesting was happening, just people idling their engines while shouting to each other over the noise. That first morning in Havana I was reminded of Bali....

The dancers were sitting in a circle when I arrived. A stranger, I was greeted with words of welcome and invited to join the end of a class by Yaeli. We danced as seaweed buffeted by waves, brushed by fish... first anchored on rocks, then taking flight into the water. This seaweed dance was one of my best trio experiences, taking turns with David and Fergus in the roles of weed or wave or fish. A friendly jam followed, including dances with Isabel and Jacob.  When the jam was over, we said goodbye with hugs. I felt great... welcomed to the community, emotionally and physically invigorated. I walked to my bus stop with a smile on my face. Though bus rides are usually tedious and smelly in the damp Dublin winter, I smiled the whole way. I got off and walked the few hundred metres home in the freezing rain. Soon I was home with hot tea, a hot bath, and downy bed – a happy body, drifting into dreams. Going bananas at the Lab The offer to share dance skills came at a d...

Petit Espanish Blues Festival held a warm-up party in the Big Mamma Ballroom. I laughed out loud as I realised I was dancing to filthy lyrics. It was a blues song called Kitchen Man. “Oh, how that boy can open clam No one else is can touch my ham I can't do without my kitchen man. When I eat his doughnuts All I leave is the hole…” Later, when the singer Jesse Gordon asked us for requests, I called for more dirty songs. She began to sing a jazz song… after the first verse Gaston gestured us all to gather around. The small audience sat on the floor before the beautiful redhead with her ukulele and joined in for the chorus " ... my girl's pussy! " Singing those lyrics in unison was probably the funniest, most intimate moment of the whole festival weekend. I wonder did everyone understand what we were singing about? Art about architecture Mads is a dancer from Denmark who I had met at Mountain Blues in France. Now in Madrid for the blues festival, he joine...

On my first visit to Madrid, I wrote about exploring Lavapies Tabacalera by day – sophisticated art installations in warehouse galleries. On this second visit to Madrid, I discovered the Tabacalera studios by night – a living, breathing art community. Cuban flautist and poet Liz stayed in touch after our chance meeting in Lisbon, and joined me for this contact improvisation adventure. Tabacaleras are former tobacco factories, given over to the arts by many Spanish municipalities. Passing through the unmarked portal into this furnace of creativity, I quickly felt relaxed and at home. Liz said she had never seen anything like it it. To get the dance studio, we traversed a cavernous room of giant murals into a corridor of spectacular street art, past booming reggae and African DJ dens, out into the yard. A few oil drum fires burned, and people gathered around to keep warm, under the gaze of Albert Einstein. If only he could see his two-metre high portrait, spray painted on old wo...

After a few days of catching up on chores, I took a stroll and lost myself in the laneways south of Graca. I emerged at the Mirador of Portos do Sol about 12 noon. It's a large, public, paved area, with views over the city to the ocean-blue estuary. There was a crowd: a TV crew shooting a talking head segment, buskers, a few African hawkers selling jewellery to tourists. The buskers were a 3-piece band … drums, strings and vocals, playing reggae in the sunshine. I started grooving and danced solo for a few tunes – the sea breeze and the distant, sparkling waves danced with me.   I noticed a woman quietly appreciating the music and enquired if she was also a visitor in Lisbon. I learned that Liz was from Cuba, today exploring Lisbon for the first time. She had flown to Lisbon from Angola one day before, on her way to start a new life in Madrid. It was easy for us to chat because she is fluent in Spanish as well as Portuguese, so I invited her to join me for lunch.  The ba...