Today, through cool breeze and diagonal orange sunshine, I rode my bike down to Greenwood Cemetery for a site-specific performance art piece. My girlfriend, Ellie Famutimi, was the costume manager for the piece, which is how I found out about it.
30 beautiful angels and ten spooky accordion players transported a crowd of hundreds through time and space, leading us around the massive cemetery and evoking images of past, present, and future. They danced, played music (accordion and violin), sang (haunting, precious songs like Somewhere Over The Rainbow and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot), and draped their bodies upon the architecture of the tombs, headstones, hillsides, and trees. I learned a lot about the history of the cemetery and just generally felt magical. Andrew Butler was a suspiciously spooky chaperone of the crowd with a black and white umbrella and dour disposition. But the angels, all dressed in white and ranging in age from 9 to 65, were decorating the countryside like shimmers of light on water, as the stone tombstones and brown tree trunks aged beneath their feet. The accordions played along, St. James's Infirmary, Down By The Riverside.
