...Facing the Music

Much of life is happenstance but there are the odd synchronicity of moments which this Wombat finds quite delightful.

Shane with Image Archive

Recently working on a dance video and shooting some stills for it, my attention went to the faces of the dancers rather than the general class or movement shot. 

There seemed to be in the dancer's concentration the essence of the theatrical or performing experience. 

Facing the Music. 



Although the "Music" we face in “Wombat Droppings” is of an entirely different and more nation altering order.

Ballet Theatre Australia

The synchronicity was an acquaintance contacting to alert me that there was to be a “get-together” of those who were either taught by or worked with the legendary Betty Pounder in theatre productions she choreographed for JC Williamson's theatres over many years.

Betty Pounder

On going to the FB site where the details were, I saw there were many images from a variety of productions and thought, well, I could probably add a few, too.

Pounder Class

"Funny Girl"

"Fiddler-on-the-Roof"

My Fair Lady

Robin Bailey

My Fair Lady

Fiddler on the Roof

Hayes Gordon-"Tevye"

Jill Perryman- "Funny girl"

MFL

Pounder Class

Some 260 images later I was a little surprised by the extent of my early productivity and very gratified by the responses of those seeing the images and who commented and seemed to appreciate the effort of scanning all these now quite vintage negs, prints and transparency’s.

As I replied to one comment, It‘s only when there is a filter of time in the works that you finally see them in the context of their own experience and see value.

It was interesting looking back to my beginnings of "facing the music" photographically and appreciating its visual development, too.

Wombat Droppings or Foetid News from Oz Politics.

Joe “Cereal–Toyota-Holden-SPC-Killer” Hockey is clamping down on debate by suing Fairfax Media over a story about his fundraising efforts on behalf of the NSW Liberal party. Having nothing to hide except free speech, Hockey doesn't want any public distraction whilst  going about perpetrating possibly the biggest defrauding of Oz politics when he hands down in conjunction with the Business Council of Australia’s and “The-Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” (IPA), his single budget.

Unprecedented in the selective leaking, spin, lying, dissimulation, obfuscations and kite-flying over the past month this “Ugly American” mandated rabble (Liarbril Party) is about to fundamentally alter and cement into the national ethos for once and for all their conceptually dessicated idea of this country. The shambles they dishonestly but successfully projected in persuading the electorate to believe that all was Labor's fault, is now to be tipped over all of us in its full and total vileness.

No longer just a projection their foetid values will be fully manifest as they are about to swamp this land with legislation so that every vile notion of free market capitalism can be given free rein without restraint.

The Reign of the Reactionary Aspirational Bogan is here.

Gone, will be any pretence of the notion of fair play and egalitarianism.

Gone, will be universal healthcare.

Gone, will be access to education for all.
Gone, will be the effectiveness of our only public broadcaster.

These unimaginative Liarbrils have for years have been chipping away at these pillars which have made Australia a noted leader and by drawing closer to the right–wing of American “Tea-Party” politics they now see their opportunity to smash any of the remaining social contracts in preference for the “Free-Market"  insanity that in the main caused the Global Financial Crisis.

They will relentlessly bullshit the public through the right-wing, main-stream media and swamp the ABC with mendacious IPA clones (similar to the unbalanced coverage of Mandy “Il Patrone” Vanstone’s 10 minute free kick t’other night on “7.30” with Sarah “Rapportfurerin” Ferguson) and those other paragons of truth and civility, “Blot-on-the-Landscape”, Alan ”Bondi” and “London Toilet Fame” Jones and other similar shock-jock low-lives.

“We all have to do the Heavy Lifting,” says the man who has doubled the deficit by himself in six months, whilst single-handedly obliterating much of the country’s manufacturing.

“The Age of Entitlement is Over,” says the man whose party it seems is the biggest, most dishonest, slush-fund, paper-bag-wielding bunch of spivs we have ever seen whilst preparing at the same time to rip payments away from young people with disabilities…a man who thinks wind-farms are unattractive and coal mines, cool.

We are entering the abyss of a new Dark Age.

John Donne wrote,

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

 If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:

any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;

it tolls for thee."

The Liarbrils and their moronic IPA lickspittles have yet to get up to speed with this C17th social lesson.

It strikes me that when a Government rules for a plutocracy and not the people then its promulgations have validity only for the plutocracy and can be ignored by the people.

Cheers Possums,

Shane