Friday, December 24, 2010

indoor winter activities

the title of this post is the name of one of many fabulous shows the local artist collective Meow Wolf produced a few years ago, but it also describes what we people do at this lovely time of year.

A few of my indoor winter activities have included making my first ever gingerbread house.




I also revisited source recordings from my time in Europe this summer, and I made this video of a few highlights from the Bulgarian National Folklore festival I attended in August:

Koprivshtitsa 2010 (копривщица 2010) from Alysha Shaw on Vimeo.



I can't wait to go back and study and perform some projects out there.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

current research interests

(all constantly in flux, and not entirely comprehensive)

  • anonymous public performance/modified invisible theater
  • the new mexico state legislature
  • tarot
  • macedonian/bulgarian dialects
  • eastern european governance
  • anarchy
  • greece
  • post-communism
  • feminist theory in practice
  • postmodern theory in practice
  • utopian experiments
  • permaculture
  • d-i-y alternative energy (gaviotas-style)
  • american history
  • american folk culture
  • kitsch
  • global hipster culture
  • world war two
  • new mexican history
  • atomic history
  • the buckman direct diversion project
  • the santa fe art world
  • tourist culture
  • dichotomies
  • the boundaries between art and life
  • pedagogy
  • public private partnerships
  • the st. michael's corridor
  • hopewell mann
  • gang culture
  • folklore
  • folk dancers
  • "no child left behind"
  • evolution of authoritarianism
  • evolution of corporations
  • evolution of colonialism
  • cultures derived from career
  • socioeconomic stratification
  • evolution of new media/old media/journalism
  • the effects of new media saturation (i.e. cellphones, email, facebook, t.v., internet, etc..) on human development
  • middle of nowhere settlements
  • meditation
  • history of subversion
  • history of satire
  • potential subversive uses of political campaign structure and mechanisms
  • balkan folk music, dance, and history
  • cross-disciplinarity
  • role of audience
  • historical and contemporary roles of culture/art in community
  • belarus
  • roots/rootlessness
  • globalization
  • rural/urban migration
  • non-linguistic communication

    more... to be continued

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

zurnas and tupans and folkdancers...

...in the town square of Koprivshtitsa (копривщица), Bulgaria this past August. I am in that crowd somewhere. I've been inexplicably nostalgic and especially nerdy about Balkan music since performing that Macedonian song on Monday. It's strange. It must be a part of processing and conceiving new ideas. I think I'm trying to figure out how something as specialized and obscure as Balkan music could fit into a social art project. Of course, the broad set of music denoted by the blanket term "Balkan music" usually isn't specialized and obscure to the local people it belongs to-- my favorite music from the Balkans is mostly old, old, old folk music (although there are communist songs, Eastern classical pieces, pop and Arabesque, among others). But it all is non-Western, to say the least, and it's interesting to me that a fair number of Americans have become similarly obsessed with the music and traditions of countries as far away as Albania, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Mali, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tuva, Indonesia, etc. etc. etc.



Tuesday, December 14, 2010

missing the aegean

Since backpacking across Europe this summer, I periodically find myself craving the isolated and anarchic places in the Balkans I was overjoyed to experience. I constantly find myself wishing I could smoke cigarettes indoors. I daydream about the Aegean water and the Greek food and the Turkish music and the Cyrillic alphabet and the people. I'm already planning new journeys in my mind, but I have no idea when I will have the liberty of taking them.

My nostalgia also makes me wonder if being a fragmented, globalized person is a nationality or an allegiance in and of itself. Can one convert to gypsy-ism? Knowing the little I do about Roma from playing some of their music, I'm pretty sure that's impossible, and somewhat naive.

So why don't I just share some photographs instead?

This was taken in the village of Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria at a national folk music and dance festival they host once every 5 years. I'm the dancer in the orange-y red dress towards the right.


A disorganized album with a few of my photos from the Balkans can be found here:



I have an entire memory card full of source recordings from the Bulgarian folk music festival I haven't looked at in months. Whenever I upload them, I'll post a few here.

One of the most sobering aspects of my experience in Bulgaria is the fact that when the next Koprivshtitsa festival rolls around, more Bulgarian dialects and traditional music and dancing will be lost forever. An American musician we met on the train from Istanbul to Sofia put it this way, "Better get good source recordings at Koprivshtitsa, because you are going to hear music that may never be heard again. Someday there will just be the one Bulgarian dance-- the one Bulgarian folk song," which is tragic for an ancient country with incredible diversity in culture, folk art, and dialects.

The locals we met our first night in Sofia were confused about why we Americans were visiting their country. They told us, "we want to go to America-- there is nothing here." When we told them that we came to Bulgaria because of the folk music and dancing, they thought we were crazy. One woman said, "I hate that music," while bad English-language techno ironically played in the background of the club we were in. As the night progressed, the locals persuaded us to sing a Bulgarian song. We sang a three-part arrangement of a folk song called "Melai Doina." The woman who said she hated her own country's folk music started to cry. She told us, "you are more Bulgarian than we are."

And she didn't even see the Japanese Bulgarian Women's Choir perform at Koprivshtitsa.

Globalization is strange. There's infinitely more to be said about that. Throw post-communism into the mix, and it gets weirder and more depressing.