480 WORDS / 4 MIN READ / ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 25, 2015 (EDITED)
COMEDY Was happy to learn that Pinóy standup Jo Koy’s sold-out 2012 Comedy Central show Lights Out, which was taped at my old neighborhood’s historic Alex Theater, was available on DVD. Koy first piqued my curiosity when I caught him on Byron Allen’s show Comics Unleashed doing an unabashed impression of my mother picking up objects from the floor by pinching them between her big toe and the toe next to it. FYI, only a few standups consistently make me laugh (okay, only two: Wendy Liebman and George Wallace), but Koy’s show generated some serious guffaws. He has a storytelling style like Richard Pryor, and his appeal crosses all audiences (except perhaps some LBGTQs who might still be mad at him). The DVD’s look-behind-the-scenes clip is good too– Tia Carrere, still hot at her age, Koy’s mother at the mic of her Vegas radio show, even one of Koy’s friends who provided the following joke: Q. What did the fish say just before it died? A. I’m daing! (Compare the slang expression, “I’m toast.”)
Groaaaan, right? Makes me bold enough to volunteer my own joke: Q. What kind of food did Cicero like? A. Japanese, finished with American dessert. We know this because he rhapsodized, “O tenpura, o s’mores!”
DANCE For all you arnistas and eskrimadores out there, I caught a show which featured bellydancer Tamra-Henna Swan and her troupe doing a dance based on a Southern Egyptian stick-fighting system called tahtib. Wielding a wooden staff about shoulder-height, the dance seemed to show only one technique, a downward strike in the midsagittal plane, arcing vertically from over the top of the head, ending with the staff’s tip touching the ground. Except for the footwork, almost exactly like what my teacher Rico Labang called the abaniko.
Supposedly dating back to pharaohnic times, it wouldn’t surprise at all if tahtib turns out to share similarities with Indian lathi or capoeira’s maculelê, or even Robin Hood’s quarterstaff, in addition to the Japanese weapons arts and our own (though it might predate all these except perhaps lathi). Also, I guess the transformation of fight to dance is a common phenomenon worldwide, probably the same transformation that led up to our sakutíng. What’s interesting about tahtib though is how and why a fighting system developed for men evolved into a dance for women (hold on– isn’t sakuting a woman’s dance too? Confirm or deny me, somebody.)
Anyway, if any Pinóy choreographers out there are interested in mining our kali’s abesedaryos and karansas for dance ideas, I’m available (Cf maglalatik in the Part 1 blog).
AND I guess that’s about it. No THEATER or MUSIC curation this outing, but these posts will give you an idea of what to expect from this blog. Consider this my belated holiday card to you all. Thank you for being there as we leap forward together into 2015. Saludos!