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| Saturday, November 8, 2008 12:44 PM |
| Night Out |
 by Fëanor |
Thursday night poppy and I had a little night out on the town. We went to an Indian place she likes for dinner - Minar Palace - and then headed over to the Wilma to see a performance by local dance company Ballet X. I'd never been to Minar Palace before, but poppy had, and she'd described her strange experience there to me, so I should have been prepared. But it was still weird to walk into this beautiful, expansive restaurant, stylishly designed and furnished - and then be presented with water in plastic cups, and a couple of paper napkins wrapped around plastic forks and spoons. The salads were served on paper plates (which didn't stand up to the dressing that I poured on the salad), the appetizer on a plastic plate, and my mango lassi in a plastic cup. In short, all the plates, cups, napkins, and utensils were disposable. Apparently they do this to cut costs, and perhaps so they can charge less for the food. We also suspect they simply don't have a dish washing machine of any kind. But... c'mon, man! They've got to have a sink back there, and the salads at least need to be served on something a bit sturdier. The wait staff is also a bit odd; the guy we had at our table came back every 5 minutes or so to offer us more water, when it should have been clear, if he'd just glanced over at us, that we didn't need any more. It's nice that he was attentive, but he was attentive to the point of being a little annoying. When I was handing him my empty salad plate, he also pointed out that I should keep my plastic fork for my meal. Which again was nice, but... you can't give me another one maybe? I mean, plastic forks aren't that expensive.
But anyway, these are all minor gripes, especially when balanced out by how incredibly good the food is. Because it is really incredibly good. Possibly the best Indian food I've ever had. We had samosas as an appetizer, and I got a mango lassi to drink and my usual Indian dish - chicken tikka masala - as my entree. poppy's entree was also a masala, but with chickpeas. We also, of course, got a couple of orders of naan, because you can't go to an Indian restaurant and not get naan. I'm not always a fan of samosas, as they have peas in them, and peas are my enemy, but these were so good it didn't matter, especially with a bit of that tasty red sauce. The little salads were light and good, the mango lassi was smooth and delicious, and the chicken tikka masala was perfect - spicy, but not too spicy. Even the rice was excellent - wonderfully seasoned, with some (again, somehow completely inoffensive) peas mixed in. And the price was really very reasonable, considering how much food we got. So I definitely recommend Minar Palace. Just be prepared for the weird incogruity of the disposible plates, cups, and silverware.
Next up was Ballet X. We'd both seen performances by this company before and enjoyed them, so we were expecting good stuff, but this was really excellent. The first and third pieces were both incredibly tense and powerful and full of unease, while the duet in between was very light and fun, to balance out the night. The first piece was a bit tough to take, as the soundtrack included deliberately irritating vocals. It was basically a woman whooping, screaming, and creepily whispering a bunch of repetitive gibberish. I found it grating and it kept me very much on edge throughout the performance; I kept having to deliberately relax the muscles in my shoulders. But of course, keeping you on edge and tense was the point of the performance, and the dancing was excellent and beautiful. The second piece was the story of a playful relationship between a man and a woman. It was nice and fluffy and good, but not particularly substantive. The real jewel of the evening was the last piece, "Steelworks." This had an interesting soundtrack of machine-like sound effects, pulsing noises, and gasping breath, accompanied by repeating sampled audio of people talking about factories and machines. The dancers seemed sometimes to be exhausted workers toiling in a factory, and other times to be the moving parts of some gigantic machine. It's a tense, fast, disturbing piece, full of fascinating combined movements. I don't really have the dance vocabulary to describe it well, but it reminded me of Metropolis, for reasons that should already be obvious. It also reminded me of Russian propaganda films, especially works like Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov - insofar as it had the same sense of continuous, whirling, mechanistic movement. "Steelworks" is just really amazing and powerful. One particularly disturbing and effective moment I remember is when three dancers had surrounded another and each placed a hand on her, and while she nodded continuously and emphatically, they shook their heads at her just as continuously and emphatically. The sense was very much of a great, soulless mechanism crushing down on individuality. The final moment, wherein a splash of water comes in from off-stage to strike the final dancer on stage, and she's caught in a bright spotlight, made me literally gasp out loud. Really excellent stuff.
So overall, a very good night! |
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| Tagged (?): Dance (Not), Food (Not) | |
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