Nakamura Yoshiki - Skip Beat, vol. 12-13 (Eng. trans.)

Hrm. I think I may stop keeping up with this series even nominally; shounen tropes just don't seem to work that well with me unless I'm intrinsically interested in the subject. (Yes, it's a shoujo series but the acting power-ups and exaggeration of competition is so shounen.)

( Spoilers out-emote each other )

New York 2008 picture spam

My gallery title lies, but I was too lazy to make a new gallery for my very few Sausalito pictures, which are from back when oracne visited in August.

( Giant Sausalito and NY pictures )

In addition to the Indian dance troupes and Step Afrika, I also got to see Ologundê, some of Bonga & The Vodou Drums of Haiti, and Doug Elkins' Fraulein Maria, courtesy of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Again, I am a big fan of free programming! Sadly, I have very little impression of Ologunde and Bonga, as they performed on a very sunny Sunday afternoon, right about when food coma and laziness from heat hit. My sister and I ended up leaving halfway through because we couldn't find shade.

Doug Elkins' Fraulein Maria is an interesting take on The Sound of Music, in which he choreographs modern dance pieces to all the songs from the movie. What I liked best was how Maria was actually played by three dancers—a young woman who looked a bit like Julie Andrews, a young Asian woman, and a young man (POC). The three dancers would be onstage simultaneously, and I imagined it as Maria arguing with herself or consulting with herself. Liesl was played by a man who didn't have a dancer's physique, and the rest of the children and nuns and etc. were played by dancers irrespective of gender. I very much liked the notion of the casting, and it makes a point as to how iconic the movie is—as long as the costuming is right, it doesn't really matter who's playing whom. Unfortunately, the audience would snicker whenever two men danced together romantically, which I found annoying. I wish the Liesl/Franz scene weren't played for laughs, given the cross-dressing and gender-bending (also, Franz was played by a black guy). I noticed the lesbian couples on stage didn't get laughed at.

Other favorite bits from the show were the hip-hopping Mother Superior and watching dancers give signature moves to all the notes of the scale for "Do Re Mi."

And I saw Wicked (my birthday present from my sister!), which was cool and which I need to write up eventually before I forget everything.

Morinaga Ai - Your and My Secret, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

Uehara Akira is a handsome but painfully shy high school student with a crush on the beautiful but crude Momoi Nanako. The girls don't pay attention to Uehara because he's too retiring, and the guys are all terrified of Momoi and her violent ways. But one day, Uehara walks in on one of Momoi's grandfather's wacky experiments, and they end up body switching. Now that their behavior matches social expectations of gender performance, both suddenly get much more popular.

We end up getting a lot of wacky hijinks as Uehara's (male) best friend Senbongi puts the moves on him-as-Momoi and as Momoi's (female) best friend Shiina gets a crush on Momoi-as-Uehara, especially when Momoi and Uehara can't switch back. Though Momoi seems to be perfectly all right with this—she's no longer punished for stepping out of the bounds of femininity and gets to enjoy a lot of male privilege—Uehara is less certain. For me, this echoed how USian society generally tends to be more okay with women acting as men or wanting to be men than with men acting as women or who want to be women; it's "natural" for women to want to climb up the ladder, so to speak, but "unnatural" or wrong or played for laughs if a man wants to take a step down. Morinaga also shows that Uehara is more prone to homophobia when it comes to himself, while Momoi doesn't seem very flustered by Shiina's attraction to her.

Though the gender issues are incredibly interesting, I keep feeling like Morinaga goes more for set pieces or laughs than for After School Nightmare levels of inner examination. Possibly this is because there are a lot of jokes about Uehara getting to see naked girls while changing for gym or looking at himself in the mirror and etc., complete with nosebleeds. The breast jokes in particular felt gratuitous, especially moments when Shiina touches Uehara's breasts. Let's just say I wasn't very surprised to find that the manga is originally published in a shounen magazine.

I'm also curious to see if the manga and the mangaka will end up challenging the gender binary or not; right now, she doesn't seem to be looking much at trans issues. Plus, if Uehara or Momoi were to decide that they were transgendered, it might end up validating the gender binary without a counterexample. Anyway, all this is speculation.

Not sure if I'll keep reading this; the ogling at the female body is rather off-putting, and I think I'd like it better if there was less zaniness and more conversation.