Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet

I've already written three posts in the last 24 hours, so I figure I deserve a break. I'll just wander over to BoingBoing, home of all things wacky and wonderful. I mean, what are the odds I'd run into something wacky, wonderful, and Jewish music related? Really, what are the odds. Darn good, it seems. This is only barely on-topic, but I had to share it.


From the SHOWSTudio blub:

"Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet

Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Conway Hall Humanist Centre, London, Tuesday, 6th March, 2007

The Israeli duo who refer to themselves as the Pil and Galia Kollectiv, in particularly reverential Modernist mood, presented 'Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet' on stage at the Conway Hall Humanist Centre, in Holborn last week. Well attended, the programme was a three act, asparagus costumed dance that moved methodically through a series of moves for different numbers of the vegetable cast. The programme makes claim to the ballets basis on 'Marx's Das Capital (as Lali Chetwynd did recently in her vegatable performances - something in the zeitgeist?)".

You can see video's of the the show at the SHOWStudio site and a trailer at the SHOWROOM. The SHOWROOM blurb gives a little extra historical information. Not that it makes anymore sense, now that I've read it though.

"Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet is a live performance piece inspired by rumour and myth. In the late 1970s, while still a student, Waw Pierogi, later of an obscure New Jersey minimal synth band Xex, composed the interdisciplinary Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet. No documentation of the piece exists, but Pil and Galia Kollectiv have become fascinated by this work, alongside another lost work, Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet. Pil and Galia Kollectivs' desire is not to recreate either, but rather they are intrigued by the possibilities of making a new work through the collision of ideas left behind by former art movements and other cultural phenomena. For them unrealised, forgotten and failed revolutions are as much a legacy of modernism as the utopian belief in progress that we have inherited."

There's a longer related article at the YourLocalGuardian newspaper site.

There seems to be a category of art out there defined by pieces that exist only to enable the artists to write clever essays. This is clearly part of that category.