Ingenuity Festival Thursday 7/19
Weather magic: The 6:30 gale that nearly upended the tents and cancelled the outdoor events barely dented the drumming shamans at the Samba for 1000 Drums at CSU Plaza. Led by Brazil's amazing Marcus Santos, players and audience headed under the Rhodes Tower overhang, and jamming continued during the half-hour downpour, with capoiera dancers kicking and whirling.
Top flight: The incredible Lisa K. Lock transfixing the audience in the 10-minute Gravity Well Movement: Lock's ultraslow movements hanging over parallel bars with her impossibly long limbs turned her into an insectoid space alien.
Most fun chillin': Playing Mindball hooked up to electrodes, making a tiny ball move toward my opponent by cooling down my alpha waves.

16 [R]evolutions @ Ingenuity 7/19
What rocked: New York City's Troika Ranch showed a winning combination of computer-generated backgrounds, dramatic lighting, motion capture, and live dance in their exploration of the animal versus the civilized. Of the 2 man/2 woman quartet, dancer Lucia Tong was always the focus, thanks to her expressive face and strangely Neanderthal postures.
Caveats: With the intermissionless show at nearly 70 minutes, choreographer Dawn Stoppiello seemed to run out of ideas -- 16 movements were about 4 too many.

Ingenuity Festival Saturday 7/21
Global beats: All of the musical acts I heard at Ingenuity had rhythm at their hearts, from AfroBrazil to Nation Beat. But it was the Israeli-Arabic-fusion Racqi and the Cavemen that captivated, featuring oud and tambour and an impromptu drum workshop.
One note performance: Die Audio Gruppe's Audio Geishas, featuring electronic sounds from movement-sensor poses, was cool -- but only for about 10 minutes.
Most thought-provoking: Michael Lehto's Hidden Costs, showing how much energy it takes bringing factory-farmed veggies to the table, will forever send me to local farmer's markets.
Visual art fave: Melissa Daubert's whimsical puppet sculptures, including a furry dog-snake, in Circus of Shadows.

The Fire Inside: Karamu @ Ingenuity 7/22
What works: With a captivating smile, Tiny Katrice Monee Headd is both sweet and tart as Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni. Susan Watson Turner's script works best when the 5-member cast is portraying family, or swaying to Jamal-Akil Marshall's ever-present drum.
Scissors, please: Some of the poetry choices seem repetitive, and the dialogue between Giovanni and James Baldwin (the otherwise solid Jerome Anderson) is dull, off-putting, and interminable.
Oww!: Kennedy's again proves to be Cleveland's most torturous theatre venue: the sightlines are crappy and the hard, uncomfortable chairs deserve to be burned on a ceremonial pyre.
Details: The show moves to CSU's more accommodating Factory Theatre thru 8/5; http://www.karamu.com.

Ingenuity Festival Wrapup Sunday 7/22
Space Palace: I came for the NASA/MorrisonDance collaboration Walking on Other Worlds, a film of Sarah Morrison in a complicated harness moving in front of space footage, but it was the "making of" sequel that really shone. In the "science is more fascinating than art" category, the interview with astronauts about their 2-hour in-flight workouts riveted, and the 3-D slide show about NASA projects and satellite distribution was fascinating, too.
Most fun with sounds: I could have played with Jen Lewin's Laser Harps for hours.
Biggest bummer: Trying to get from Public Square to the festival on public transportation: fuggedaboudit. With Tower City now hemmed in with a prison-camp-like cyclone fence and Euclid Avenue torn up for miles like an open grave, our central city has never seemed more moribund. What's wrong with our freakin' city planners?!

From Cool Cleveland contributor Linda Eisenstein LindaATcoolcleveland.com
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