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Sound Symposium, St John’s Newfoundland
Team SPIN arrived in St John’s yesterday, and we spent much of today searching for a local bike for our show tomorrow night. We found a sweet little blue ladies Raleigh cruiser at Bill’s Cycle, and a mechanics stand kindly loaned from Canary Cycle, so we’ve got the goods, and will spend tomorrow wiring her up for show time.   St John’s is so lovely. We are all still a bit lost all the time, but starting to get a hang of the colourful, winding streets (this town is NOT A GRID) and how to get where we need to go. Ate super-delicious fish cakes at The Ship tonight before the evening Sound Symposium show – which was a very fun evening. Highlight for me was Aiyun Huang, a fantastic percussionist who presented Tension Study II: Eagle Claw Wu Tsiano Chen Wins – totally inspiring percussion accompaniment / interpretation / study of women in kung fu movies. Also some great improv performances tonight.
Most hilarious moment of the night (only slightly more hilarious than the live human performance / interpretation of the harbour symphony) was going out to get a drink after the show, and we walked into a bar on Water St which was totally silent. Open, with people in it, but TOTALLY SILENT.  It became hilarious after a moment of standing in the doorway, observing the 5 or 6 people all sitting at the bar texting on their cell phones…no music was playing, no one was talking, it was literally dead quiet, except for me and Brad and Anna who were hoping to, you know, talk and laugh over a pint.  After what felt like a whole minute of continued silence, i cracked up and asked whether we were aloud to talk in here (we wondered whether we had found the Silent Symposium) and then some music went on and people started chatting…and we got our beers and chat and laugh in….
tomorrow we play our show at the LSPU Hall at 8:30, with Daniel Payne at 7:30.