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Thursday, July 16, 2009 C9

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Music Jam in the Park

Make a plan to get your Tour de France fix in Washington.

Before country music became pop with a Southern accent, the likes of Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris ruled the stage. Cline enchanted with simple melodies and heartfelt love songs; Harris married the New York folk scene with country’s harmonies. Nine local acts including Loralyn Coles, Janine Wilson and Dead Men’s Hollowpay tribute to these two in a show put on by the Washington Area Music Association. The concert is free; seating is first come, first served.

7:30 p.m. Friday. Carter Barron Amphitheatre, 16th Street and Colorado Avenue NW. 202-426-0486.

— Julia Beizer

OutdoorsWaterlily Festival

Nightlife Agenda

The Going Out Gurus highlight the week’s best DJs, bands, dance nights and parties

BY JASPER JUINEN — GETTY IMAGES

C

ycling fans who want to watch the Tour de France know the frustrations of trying to find it in a bar:

“Do you have the Tour de France?” “Maybe. What channel is it on?” “Versus.” “Okay.” (Bartender fiddles with remote control.) “Do

you know what channel that is?” Sigh. But luckily, Lance Armstrong fans, the folks of the

Arlington. 703-243-0145.

Washington Area Bicylist Association feel your pain. The

WABA happy hour and Tour de France viewing party

features the sprinter-friendly Stage 12 of the race on a dozen large flat screens. There will be drink specials, including $10 pitchers of Miller Lite and $12 pitchers of Sierra Nevada. And you can win WABA merchandise, bottles of wine and other prizes by answering trivia questions during commercials. There’s a $5 cover charge at the door, which benefits the WABA, but if you become a member on the spot, you get a free drink.

5 to 7 p.m. today. Rhodeside Grill, 1836 Wilson Blvd.,

For all the hype about rooftop happy hours and pool parties this summer, we still wish there were more events

Row, 2015 Massachusetts Ave. NW. 202-265-1600.

at the Hilton on Embassy Row, which offers great views of Dupont Circle, Rock Creek Park and Northwest Washington from its poolside patio. Tonight, you can join the International Club of D.C. for its monthly happy hour. (The club has members from many different countries, but anyone can join for embassy tours, dance lessons and other outings.) Tonight’s party includes sunset views and drink specials like $7 frozen margaritas. Founder Sanjaya Hettihewa describes the soundtrack as “from the Gipsy Kings to European dance hits,” which fits the vibe we’ve encountered at previous events. Admission is $5 if you RSVP to Internationalclubdc.com, or $7 at the door.

6:30-9:30 p.m. today. Hilton Washington Embassy

Before there was Afrobeat, juju music was Nigeria’s main musical export and King Sunny Adé its most well-known ambassador. Adé expanded on a form of indigenous party music by introducing Western elements like pedal steel guitar and synthesizers, and as a pioneer of world music, he widened the passageway for other emissaries of African sounds, such as Salif Keita, Youssou

N’Dour and Oliver Mtukudzi. Through his four decades of recording, he has been wildly prolific; his output passed the triple-digit mark around the turn of the 21st century. The swooping tones of the talking drum lead his rhythm section, and when it gets cooking, the party rocks on for hours.

$25. 8 p.m Friday, 9:30 club, 815 V. St. NW.

202-265-0930. Ave. NW. 202-364-0404.

Lovvers doesn’t linger. On the U.K. band’s debut EP, “Think,” the quartet bashes its way through seven songs in under 13 minutes. It’s a punk pace with the attitude to match. Don’t look to Lovvers for any sort of lyrical catharsis. Song titles such as “No Romantics,” “Wasted Youth” and “Teenage Shutdown” tell you exactly what to expect — snarling, confrontational, loud and fast. The only exception is “No Fun” — it completely betrays its title and makes you want to bounce into whomever or whatever is next to you.

$8. 9 p.m. Friday. Comet Ping Pong, 5037 Connecticut

— Rhome Anderson, David Malitz and Fritz Hahn

CONNECT WITH THE GOING OUT GURUS

Got Plans? 1 p.m. today

Chime in with your ideas during today’s live discussion — we’ll talk about Fringe Festival, new movies, great warm-weather hangouts and any other going-out questions on your mind.

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Unlike the Tidal Basin’s cherry trees, divas that get multiple predictions for their peak bloom dates, D.C.’s waterlily and lotus blossoms are flexible. The dinner-plate-size fuchsia-tipped flowers are just as compelling for shutterbugs and lovebirds looking for an exotically beautiful stroll, but they bloom from late May through August. The Park Service’s annual fest is a fine time to ogle them; there’ll be a photo contest, “lantern”-making crafts for kids, gardening workshops and art supplies for you to do your own drawing. But the best viewing time is in the cool just past dawn: The park opens extra early at 6:30 a.m. on July 25 and Aug. 8 and 22.

Free. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Regular hours 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, 1550 Anacostia Ave. NE. 202-426-6905.

— Anne Kenderdine

Explosive, Exhilarating Cunningham Leaves Audience on ‘Split Sides’

DANCE, From Page C1

ham, who turned 90 in April, can still (al- most) incite a riot, in the tradition of the Ballets Russes — if you consider bellow- ing, cursing dancegoers nearly riotous. In my experience, nothing has come closer. It was back in the ’60s when Cunning- ham, his music director John Cage and resident designer Robert Rauschenberg famously elicited hurled tomatoes and eggs for some of their more earsplitting, visually jolting, structure-defying produc- tions. Cunningham has been in the busi- ness of flouting convention for six dec- ades, first by splitting the atomic unity of music and dance by insisting that they be independent of one another, rather than forcing one to comment on the other. He also introduced aleatory prin- ciples, tossing a coin or, in the case of “Split Sides,” from 2003, which opened the Wolf Trap program, a die to deter- mine which section of a dance would be performed first. (Company archivist David Vaughan presided over the die-rolling Tuesday.) The or- der of other elements in that work — music, costumes, decor, lighting — are also cho- sen by chance.

quired taste — some of them can look a lot alike and some can drag on while vi- sions of shopping lists and getting the cat de-hairballed crowd your thoughts. So it was a great pleasure to see that, for its Wolf Trap debut, the company per- formed two artistically rich, invigorat- ing pieces — and especially that in the case of “Sounddance,” a work dating from the Ford administration can still be so provocative.

“Sounddance” takes its title from a line in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and there- inofter you’re in the unbe- wised again.” Makes perfect sense, no? My take on it is this: In the beginning, a void; in the middle, sound and dance; and after that, we’re back to the unknown again. It’s life, writ small: A cycle of dark and light, nothingness and a muddle and still more unknown.

Cunningham is a fan of

In Merce

Cunningham’s “Sounddance” (right), there are human events great and small.

Cunningham’s knack for assembling a constructive team of artists has been something of a guarantee that the ele- ments they create in separate quarters, bringing them together only at the pre- miere, don’t generally fight each other. In the case of “Split Sides,” the interplay of James Hall’s costumes (two sets of them, with a quick costume-change happening halfway through) with the alternating backdrops by Robert Heishman and Catherine Yass provided the greatest in- terest. The work may be famed for its mu- sical scores, one by alternative British rock band Radiohead and the other by Icelandic minimalists Sigur Rós, but while they created a stir when the bands played live at the premiere, in recorded form (augmented at Wolf Trap by a few live musicians, none from either band), Radiohead’s contribution, especially, sounds untextured and muddy. But Cunningham works can be an ac-

Joyce, who in many ways did to the novel what the chor- eographer did to dance. Both artists used unprecedented working methods and shunned many conventions of their art. As Joyce toyed with language, so Cunningham plays with the body and how it moves. On Joyce’s slippery, murky ground, Cunningham makes a profound state- ment. The curtains part on designer Mark Lancaster’s low, horizontal ex- panse of more curtains stretching across the rear of the stage, gold velvet knotted, gathered and draped in a luxuri- ously tactile backdrop.

It’s an existential cabaret in God’s ga- rage, perhaps: Tudor’s windstorm of sound gets whirling and roaring, and one by one, the 10 dancers in gold tops and gray tights spin out of an opening in the drapes. The floor show is all about us — our animal passions (a woman is carried overhead by three men, two of whom pull her legs apart with detached fascination), the primitive strength we draw from the collective (dancers cling together, pitch- ing forward yet managing to hold one an- other up). There are kaleidoscopic group- ings and regroupings. In creating this

BY ANDREW PROPP

piece,Cunningham was apparently fascinat- ed with the tiny racing life he’d recently seen under a microscope, and in the danc- ing there’s purposeful busyness disguised as chaos.

In the work’s 18 minutes, you see human

events great and small — cell division, team-building; solitude and group sex (the

’70s, natch), and Cunningham as a kind of deity, catalyst or conjurer: Robert Swinston dances the role the choreographer created for himself, as the first to emerge and the last to be sucked back into the velvet seam again, and in between he noodles around lifting, rearranging or otherwise energizing the rest of the dancers.

And all the while, that pummeling Tudor score creates a force field, a many-layered Sensurround of sub-woofers on steroids that made the “Sounddance” experience feel as if you were peering through a knot- hole onto the creation of the world. Leave it to Cunningham to spin marvels out of a muddle. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66