Back At The V & A

As promised, the Aunts took me back to V & A Museum to view the featured exhibits that I missed out earlier in the week. They had been so busy with work and hadn't seen them either, and took the opportunity to do so.

At Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography, it was a tad weird to see this sort of art using techniques of photogram, luminogram, and chemigram, things that I know, but rarely bothered with seeing its end results and artistry. We had our notebooks in hand. Some film students were sketching. The guard said, "No sketching please!" That was a little strange. Sketching is allowed at most exhibitions and museums. A couple of us raised our eyebrows, but complied without protest.

I was very disoriented by Pierre Cordier and Gary Fabian Miller's prints. They made me dizzy. It's all very interesting I suppose, but I'm not sure I've the brain capacity to appreciate it. There was a piece I found striking- Susan Derges' 'Vessel No.3', which comprised of 9 images in this composition. She created photograms of toad spawn. The 9th image reflected an empty jar. I like. Maybe I just like toads.

At Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes, I was absolutely fascinated. I've watched his ballets and enjoyed the music, exubuerance and choreography. I've read about the man, but to see his life curated in a museum is quite another thing. What a great summary of Diaghilev's life and works. You don't need to know ballet to know him. You'll know his associates who designed costumes for him- Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso; you'll be familiar with his social circle of James Joyce, Marcel Proust and TS Eliot. Most of all, you'll have heard Prokofiev and Stravinsky's scores for Diaghilev's ballets.

Over a rather decent izakaya dinner at Zuma, we had a very intense discussion on the almost avant garde Ballet Russes and Stravinsky versus the traditional Bolshoi Ballet and their favored Tchaikovsky. This is something close to our hearts. Our family believes in schooling the girls in culture and the arts. Aside from the various art forms, across generations we received at least 10 years of training in ballet, and did summer stints at the Royal Ballet School. One wonders why none of us took up ballet professionally. Something to do with our fleshy figures I think. We don't have the dancer's lean physique. But the Aunts are slimmer than I. They're taller too. I IS JEALOUS.