festival

Lent festival, Maribor

For more than a week, the street festival Lent has been collecting the crowds here in Maribor and although I made a few short visits through the week, I spent a more meaningful amount of time there only today. Leaving the house, I was equiped with a Leica M7 and its smaller companion. The roll of fill still needs to be developed but the few pictures with the digital are already here. The lightness of being able to take quick pictures with an uncomplicated camera cannot be understated in this case. When one deals with lots of action, and especially with children, it is difficult to predict the movements they are going to make, or the direction in which they are going to sprint to. They were such a joy watching that I wanted to reach out to those soap balloons and play with them myself (admirably, I restrained myself). And then walking around looking for those balloon hearts, I felt the thrilled every time I saw one across the field and pounced. 

Masala Festival with Rosario Smowing and Pinkspots & Der Hutklub

In the words of the Pinkspots, "there is going to be too much testosterone on the stage anyways" with the Argentinian group Rosario Smowing which is why their usual accompaniment wasn't there. And true it all was. The brief interlude to the passion was a gentle, cucumber-in-water subtlety. It was meant almost as a lullaby, to create a contrasting effect to the Argentinian blood. How could they have competed? They couldn't have - which is why they went for the opposite - the one that cannot be compared. And it worked - the moment, the two bands came together, the dialogue began - a dialogue across languages, across musical styles, across sound levels and decibels. And it was then that you realized that is not your usual concert. When the audience started conversing with the signers in Spanish, when the singers welcome the seated audience to reposition and dance - and how couldn't they when their feet were already involuntarily moving in the rhythm of the swing. They give each other boost through solos that glamorously focus the attention on the improvisational capacity of the musically inclined - because they are in their moment, their world. For them, the audience is part of the musical instrument, the instrument is their voice, their colleagues are the admirers and admired. This was a concert that reversed the roles of the audience and the performers - because the audience was singing along, and because the performers were doing it for themselves. And this is when I get the goose-bumps - when the connection gets established on the crossroad between the roles - when the juncture is crossed as if jumping on the next train platform to the train moving in opposite diction. Hop on!