Break Dancing + Yoga + Arthur Cadre = Remarkable Possibility

While I process photos along with the intense amount of thinking I did while I was at the Mom 2.0 Summit in Laguna Niguel, California this last weekend, I urge you to watch this video, and not only because this guy does insane things with hips:



When I watched it, I was struck with the possibility it points out. I doubt that anyone looked at Arthur Cadre at birth and thought "At the 33-second mark in a video in 2013, he is going to demonstrate a remarkable dedication to yoga, dance, and art that is exceeded by few others, if any", but he does it anyway, because human beings have an incredible faculty for surprising themselves and each other.



Each of us has created or been a part of something remarkable that stretches the bounds of possiblity, even if it doesn't have the polish of good filmmaking and wasn't done quite on purpose. We can't help ourselves but be a part of remarkable things. It's just what happens with the incredible spark of existence with which this universe endows us.

What really makes me marvel at Arthur Cadre, though, is that he can do these things with his body on purpose without being involved in some kind of violent accident.

Check out Arthur Cadre's YouTube channel for more.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Wonderland Left Me With A Sense of Muddled Disconnection

I forgot to tell you about that time we went to the ballet!



We went to the ballet. I was given a pair of free tickets to go see the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Wonderland, and I hadn't been to the ballet in quite a while, so off we went.

I would like to be able to tell you I loved it! What culture!, because I don't want to look like some kind of uncultured boob and I love Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and the review in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix was good, but I'm maybe going to have to look like some kind of uncultured boob, because I didn't love it.



The set was amazing. You can't tell from the above picture, because I was a good citizen and put my camera away during the performance. They used panels and gauzy curtains, light and video projection, and wheeled white boxes to create a pared down yet entirely otherworldly set that completely captured me. I've never seen anything quite like it, and the set was marvellous enough that it nearly made the show worth seeing. The choreography, though, left a lot to be desired if you were looking for any clear thread of a storyline or relationships between characters during most of the performance.

The least engaging character throughout the entire ballet was the main character of Alice, which is weird, because she was on the stage most of the time, but half that time was spent either slowly wandering or running from one end to the other while other characters were being far more engaging. Engaging, though, is relative, because, even though I am highly familiar with the characters in the story, I was hard pressed to recognize who many of them were during the performance.

For the most part, the choreography between characters did little to flesh out the relationships between them, and so the storyline was often unclear if completely obscured, even for me, a person who owns several volumes of the story in question. Neither I nor the Palinode even figured out who the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle were until after the ballet was over.



The Queen of Hearts and the Dormouse were the only truly stand-out characters, and they were fabulous. The Queen of Hearts was a large and loud and comical mess of a personality, but the marked strength of her character, although the saving grace of the entire ballet as one of the few characters to have clear relationships within the story, also managed to underscore the weakness of the other roles.

The dancers were more than competent, and the sets were fantastic, but the lacklustre treatment of the character of Alice was not a strong enough thread to pull me through the chaos that was Wonderland. The performances and sets, while beautiful to watch as parts separate from the whole, created little sense of a storyline when strung together, and, as the ballet fell further and further into a sense of muddled disconnection, I fought off the urge to leave.

Sex: The Devil's Instrument That Leads To Dancing

I come from Mennonite ancestry on both sides of my family, and it's definitely not a culture known for its fun factor. When I was growing up within a church community, we ate a lot and we sang a lot — I could pick out my alto line in a four-part harmony by the time I was seven — but we had very little in the way of physical expression. Outside of the staunch ethic of hard work — be strong like bull! — physical expression was largely frowned upon.

Sex was fine as a concept within the bond of marriage, but it was so bound up with intellectual issues of morality and social unacceptability that understanding it as an expression of anything other than slutty or parental and, therefore, kind of disgusting, was beyond me until my twenties.

Sports were an acceptable outlet, if you were interested. I was not. The all-capsed rule with three exclamation marks that was posted in the gym at my Mennonite boarding school was AND NO DANCING!!! Want to pick up a quick game of basketball? Fine. Want to wiggle your butt to Pour Some Sugar On Me? You'll hear about the pressure from school donors and the fate of the school.

Dancing was definitely verboten. I was allowed to go to school dances, although I know my mother struggled with letting me go, if only out of angst over tradition rather than concern about the corruption of my soul, but it was not considered generally acceptable among everyone in my church community. I learned not to mention dancing in polite company.

My physically conservative background is why I love this video, and it is why it makes me tear up when I watch it.



I never got to see physical joy from my older relatives when I was growing up. They were all trained into relatively physically sedate lives. We ate heavy food, and we sang Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, and we would go so far as to whoop at a curling bonspiel or a hockey game, but no one ever danced aside from stamping out the rhythm to keep the choir in line.

To this day, when I am at a show or some other kind of music-related event, I feel like the aging aunt with the thin lips that you catch wiggling her elbow to a tune when she thinks no one's looking, because you know why Mennonites don't have sex standing up, don't you? IT MIGHT LEAD TO DANCING.