It started with this irresistible nugget: The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival's auditions are open to be viewed by the public, which means that for very little money, you can see a spectrum of dance that you can't see anywhere else.
This year, Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus hosted.
Since graduating on its very stage nearly nineteen years ago, I haven't been back very often. But today was a gorgeous day to go. Cold, but gorgeous.
The schedule for the auditions was posted outside. Ten bucks bought a day's worth of in-and-out privileges, allowing you to be that kid in a candy store, except the candy is dancing, and you can stuff your soul silly with it.
Perhaps you've been lacking a little Mohiniattam from South India lately? Maybe you'd like to get a feel for how to cut a rug in Peru, Upper Egypt, and Zimbabwe? Then this is the event for you! The dances are international, but the dancers all live here in the Bay Area.
Pretty sweet!
We were drawn in by the first group we saw, a Haitian dance ensemble performing Kongo, the women dressed in a vibrant rainbow of huge, billowing skirts which formed exaggerated arcs as they dancers twirled across the stage. It was a stunning visual.
Too bad there was no photography allowed (of the performers, I surmised), so all I got was this picture of an empty stage.
Between acts, we moved to the mezzanine to get a new perspective, which included a nice, elevated view not only of the stage but of the a ridiculously cute three-year-old, tow-headed, bespectacled boy whose head bobbed up and down to the music and who said (I quote this verbatim), "Those are the bendiest girls!" when I asked him if he'd seen the acrobatic Chinese girls who had performed earlier.
After a couple of exhausting hours of watching dance, we naturally got a little hungry. At lunch, Maxine skillfully built a structure out of sugar packets while her father threatened, with a menacing finger, to knock it over.
Afterward, we stopped by Tara's Organic Ice Cream, just to lower our body temperatures a little more with a bit of literal sweetness. Max and T achieved this with coconut ice cream and caramel sauce while I opted for black sesame.
This was my first trip to Tara's, and, as I'd been warned, it opened up the sweet, frozen, dairy floodgates. I'm already strategizing how soon I can go back.
I caught T trying to lay a little sugar on his offspring, but she was probably still a little miffed about the whole sugar packet deal. Understandably.
Dessert-bellied, we wandered over to the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse where we expected to see bins of art supplies, piles of egg cartons, and shelves of VHS tapes, but we were a little more surprised to find, well, our new best friends:
I think I might give them a ring.
'Bye, sweet Sunday! Come back again soon!
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