One of the local residents put on a dance performance tonight.  It was called "Star and Stone" and I guess the best label for it is performance art.  She called it "dance theater" which would be accurate, too.  There was dancing, of a sort.  Not dancing like ballet, with controlled, graceful movements, but something more tribal and animalistic.  As she danced, she narrated little vignettes, stories that sorta but not really tied together into a narrative.

I'm struggling to describe the performance, which is a surprise, because I see so many plays and ballets and operas each year.  But this isn't like the "classical" performances I usually see.  It reminds me of Maureen's performance in the musical Rent, a sort of random staging with loosely connected stories and a recurring theme throughout, with gestural movement that works into a frenzy at the high point -

But was it good?  I have no idea.  I have no comparative basis for judgement, save for whether or not I was amused.  And I was...puzzled, most of the time.  Trying to understand what was going on, and why this story (of a stone in her gut that was growing?) had to be shared and how much was metaphorical or literal - it confused me, and in the end I just wasn't sure why the story was being shared.  I didn't get it, and I didn't really care for it.

I don't know whether that makes me a critic or a philistine, but when I sorted through the images and the words, that was my end result: I don't like whatever this is.