Party time

The other thing we did yesterday was attend parties. First there was Olivia’s 30th at La Camera at Southgate. An excellent lunch with good company, including our new friends Sherry and Jason. For some reason we’ve met them several times over the past few weeks at dinner and jazz related activities organised by Ben & Olivia. We just seemed to hit it off. Jason is from Atlanta, Georgia, and has the kind of unshakable accent you can only find in the south of the US. The trick is that the Georgian drawl shares some vowels with a broad Australian accent, and having been here for a couple of years Jason tends to say names and proper nouns in the native lingo, so you’re left staring at his mouth wondering exactly where to place him. Anyway it turns out that Jason is a jazz and MST3K fan and Xbox enthusiast, so we have a lot to talk about. We’ve decided we’re getting together soon for an MST3K night.

Yesterday night after Dance Card we headed to The Swedes’ abode for their official housewarming. I can’t quite figure out why the house needed to be warmed, because they moved in a fair while ago and one of their housemates is moving out as well, but we had fun nonetheless. Here’s a pic, courtesy of Doz.

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More good performances

Yesterday was a busy day. We actually went to two dance performances in between everything else. In the morning we went to the National Theatre in St Kilda to see this year’s VCE TOP Class Dance — basically the cream of the crop from this year’s secondary school dance students from the VET and TOP programs. They had three divisions: TOP Technique, TOP Composition, and VET. We were both blown away by the quality of the perfomances. These kids are amazing.

Then at night we went along to Dance Card, a program of improvised dance solos by 5 very different dancers to ‘live’ sound and audio. In fact the music was produced mostly electronically with occasional instrumental interludes (banjos and cowbells and things) by a guy called Mark Lang. The main reason we went was to see Lotte’s teacher Helena, a Korean born dance master whose performance eclipsed the others for me. I highly recommend checking it out, but I think the last performance of the season is this afternoon at 5pm, so you’d better be quick.