Soya Hirano -- May Day Excursion

After shipping my textbooks to Japan, which I longed to do for the past week, I went to Ashmolean Museum by myself. Before entering the museum, I saw a group of people dancing several Morris dances I forgot the dances' accurate names. While watching, I was remembering Brian's presentation yesterday that Morris dance is a type of folk dance, premised on Moorish dance, not William Morris.
As soon as the dance was over, the audience started to take pictures of themselves or their children with the dancers. In such a festive atmosphere, I witnessed a walking tree, which I kept watching until a man came out from inside.

This museum showed me a diversity of art, such as porcelain, painting, and sculpture, from many countries of different historical periods. The statue on the left side is Athena. I will attach some of the world visual arts works at the bottom of this blog entry.

What moved me most in the museum was a live performance of an a cappella group of African (I think the director said "Swahili.") songs. I missed the introduction of the live concert that I did not hear about their biography or find a program. For my past 12-week course in African American literature, I wrote a paper on spirituals, analyzing the music's call and response structure not only within the a cappella group, but also between the singers and listeners including me (spirituals is not racist music that everyone can appreciate its positive ethos, to some extent at least), particular vocalization such as moaning stuff, generally-in-unison singing style, polyrhythm, improvisation(al barbaric-like dances), occasional silences between melodic phrases, themes of progression and hope, etc. I still don't know much about African music, but I liked this live performance.

A few hours afterwards of wandering in the four-stories museum, I was slightly bored. I noticed that four sculptural works are facing the more or less same direction, so ("so"?) I decided to attempt to imitate their dignified profiles, sometimes parodying.
Imitating their dignity was challenging that I had to try more than ten times, not meaning that I have ever succeeded in appearing as such. The angle of my chin could change a mood of my profile, I think, in comparison with the sculptures. At one point, I read a commentary in the museum about sculpture that sculptors are not mere imitators of real people; rather, they have to play out a certain character, such as heroism or dignity, neither of which I have. :p


Below are my few selections from the museum's exhibitions:
Everyone knows a hookah. Maharaja Kirpal Pal of Basohli smoking (circa. 1690) The painter is...Markot, I think.



Original guitars from Spain. I also saw Antonio Stradivari's Messiah, which is supposedly one of the most rare violin in the world.

Below is a coromandel screen of lacquer furniture for a stately home in China around the seventeenth century. Alongside is Orsi's panel, which at a careless first glance looked three-dimensional to me. I think its title is Archangel Michael subduing Satan and weighing the Souls of the Dead (1960).

Below is A Dog lying on a Ledge (about 1650-1680) by an anonymous Genoese artist. The picture of the painting might have been different had I not included the painting's frame. Anyway, I like dogs. And alongside is a picture of blue Egyptian objects, which made me think of Avatar.