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Or rather, doing my best to stay awake with Blackfish. Which I found to be a slightly hard endeavor. But more on that soon.
Blackfish is the musical duo (James Everest and Joel Pickard) that composes and performs the music for Emily Johnson's multimedia dance piece, The Thank-You Bar. When I was first introduced to these guys it was during Johnson's performance and I thought that their musical arrangements (which consisted mostly of looping interesting sounds made from various guitars) were impressive and worked well for the piece. I also found them to be so drone filled and ambient that I knew seeing a show of only this music played by itself, would enduce nap time without fail.
And I was right. Although I was told that the show was going to contain "different" music than what was played for The Thank-You Bar, it sounded pretty similar. The first 15 minutes alone were spent with Everest and Pickard building a sound saturated and complex composition. One that was extremely mellow and repetitive. Which for me, is the equivalent of eating half a block of cheese and downing a bottle of red wine. I didn't stand a chance. My head started to bob, and I got a dirty look or two from an older gentleman sitting next to me. About 20 minutes later, I caught him also in the act of dozing off. Yep, it was going be one of those nights.
I was hoping that at some point the guys were going to break out of their zone. Perhaps give us a little acoustic bluegrass number. They had the instruments for it after all. I was also hoping that maybe we'd get a break to do some clapping, or that one of them would tell a joke or say something fun about Emily Johnson. No such luck. My time with Blackfish was fated to be spent trying not to lean or drool on my neighbor.