Peña Potpourri 2009

You have perhaps heard the rumors.

The subterranean mumblings, hoarse whispers from dark corners.

A flash impression! Now here--now gone.

And all the while, the wheels keep turning--could it be? Dare you believe?

Yes, dear reader--dare: it's true! All true! After the Snowpocalypse of 2009 . . . La Peña Flamenca de Seattle . . . has returned! For another winter show!!

And--actually--it was a lot of fun! But, unfortunately, I don't have any pics or videos yet. Sorry.

Instead of a long ramble, however, about this that and the other thing (as is, we all know, my bent), I thought instead I might share with you some heretofore unpublished (well, unpublished here at least) pics and videos of Peña goings-on this year.

The Peña, of course, is the amateur performance group made up of Rubina and Marcos Carmona's advanced students. Capricious meteorological conditions permitting, we generally put on two major shows per year (i.e. one in the winter and one in the summer). I suspect that pics of the most recent winter show may turn up in a month or two, but in the meantime, here's a "potpourri" of stuff from Winterfest and from the 2009 summer show.

First off, a video (since it has been soooo long since I've posted one of these). This is Markus, Steve and I with an arrangement of Paco de Lucia's canonical rumba flamenca, "Rio Ancho":

This is from a DV Cam in the audience, so the audio levels are a bit low, but you get the idea. This is actually the first "solo" number that the three of us have noodled through, so all in all I think it came off well enough. I had mentioned in a previous post that right up until the opening bars I was unsure as to what degree my peripheral nervous system might abandon me, but cold fingers aside, nervousness turned out not to be a major issue.

Of course, there's a difference between "getting through" a piece and really inflecting it musically--which for my part I'd like to do a bit better--but it is in doing (and performing) that these things improve, no? In any case, it was fun to be "on the spot" for this one (instead of hiding behind the dancers--which is what we usually get to do).

And speaking of dancers, here are some Seattle Winterfest pics (taken by Jal):

And there you have the update--photo, video, and otherwise. And I plan to make good on that promise not to ramble . . . by stopping here.

Think of it as my leaving you a bit of extra time in which, instead of reading my ramblings, you can go play!

~A

Winterfest 2009: An Update on Renegade Limbs

So I'm coming up on three years playing with La Peña Flamenca de Seattle this year and I can't help but notice that there have been certain regular markers of the passage of time along the way. One of these is the Seattle Center Winterfest show--which just happens to have taken place last weekend. In looking back over my archives, it appears I didn't write a blog post about it last year (probably because of my PhD exams), but I did write up a blurb about it for the year before (2007).

Here's a bit of what was on my mind post-show two years ago:

I'm not particularly afraid about getting up in front of people, but my nervous system gets weirded out by public appearances. Tragically, this is what connects my brain to my hands. For this show, at least, "the claw" (my fellow guitar player Markus's moniker for an oh-so worthless set of panic-frozen fingers) didn't keep me from getting the job done--most of my job was chording, really. In any case it's a condition I wouldn't at all mind getting over.

Being an irremediable nerd at heart, I take no small pleasure in documenting the sundry vagaries of performance, anxiety, and the link between the two. As such, I was curious about how things would turn out in a similar performance situation two years later. The reason is this: The question I really wanted an answer to in 2007 was, "is this the kind of thing that gets better, or am I stuck with anarchic limb syndrome forever?"

Well, I can't speak for every performance occasion--I would imagine bigger or more complicated shows to be a different ball game--but as for the Winterfest show (for which we played for a couple hundred people, all the same) the news is good: I didn't feel even so much as an elevated pulse, let alone full on nervous system rebellion.

Granted, my hands were cold through nearly the entire 45 minute set, but this is something I can live with. It is irritating, yes, but not debilitating. Having played a number of full length shows with my little flamenco cuadro, I've actually come to expect that my hands won't warm up for at least three or four songs. Again, a drag, but not fatal.

The subtext here is that in between the 2007 Winterfest show and last weekend, I've played "out" a lot more than once or twice a year. There have been better and worse shows, of course, but so far I've yet to see any catastrophic relapse into neurological mayhem for the kind of performance situations I commonly see.

Of course, this is just me--results may vary, see your doctor, etc.--but for anyone out there who wonders why his or her hands won't cooperate when they're needed the most, and, more importantly, if it ever gets better, here's a vote for "yes, it does get better."

And here's the moral of this story: Get out! Play!

(Which is what I'm going to do right now)

~A