flexagon | The moon does fall to earth; it just keeps missing the horizon.

Today was all dramatic because I found out in the morning that STREB vs. Gravity (ahem, that link has a two-minute video; go watch it) was/is in Boston this weekend; then I found out that they were all sold out, and that this was the last stop for the tour. It would be hard for me to explain to you how much I wanted to see this -- but as an acrobatic mechanical engineer, I just did. After asking much advice, getting depressed, posting on ebay, craiglist etc, I went to ICA Boston with a sign saying "Need 1 Ticket" in 72-point font. I was way early, and in fact wandered around a lot of the exhibits without paying while waiting for ticketholders to show up. One of the ushers saw my sign and said "aww! You always see people do that for Red Sox games. It's great to think that anyone would do that for Streb" -- and that was funny to me because I would never do such a dorky thing for a baseball game.

She told me to go down to the lobby since that's where anyone with too many tickets would be trying to return them. I did, and in about 2 minutes I had bought a ticket and a guy begged my sign off me so he could use it next. Squee! I was so giddy! I had really been expecting to stand there for half an hour and go home in tears.

As for Streb vs. gravity? Gravity won, but barely. Also, whoever said that violence is not the answer forgot to talk to Elizabeth Streb, whose dancers' basic move is to land flat on the floor with an audible smack. It sometimes got a little graceless.

I liked some pieces better than others -- strongly disliked one where two people were tied together and just jerked each other around, loved the giant wheel, loved the human tetherball thing, loved the one where they did the entire piece lying on the floor but projected a view from an overhead camera so that they were upright on the projected view. They got to do a lot of silly, funny, wonderful things with that one. As for the giant wheel, when they lowered the screen to reveal it, they also lifted the curtains on the glass back of the theater, and did that final act with the lights of Boston blazing in the background. Gorgeous.

Oh, and the final thing I noticed is how much more I appreciate basing these days; they do an act with people on a giant half-wheel that's rocking back and forth, and much of my attention was on the serious, attentive girl who stayed inside the half-wheel controlling it for the entire act. She was amazing and beautiful. Would I have known that before I knew what basing was? I'm still not entirely comfortable being the observer who's starting to have a clue, who even thinks occasionally about things like "quality of motion" that I still want to protest mean nothing to me.