Who: Kamakhya Bhairavi (Kali) & Open to Any and All What: Guerilla dance party, take 1, aka, lead-up to something bigger, aka, Tess spamming your f-page like whoa because hi, Saturday, how you doin' When: Saturday night, May 7 2011. Where: Central Park Warnings: TBA.
Kali started by sitting in half-lotus by a pond, meditating upon the last week's events worldwide, the surge of emotion from the populace upon the news of a terror-puppet master's death, the feeling of change and something else, some vengeance satiated.
Time to throw some rocks in the pond and watch where the ripples go, in stages.
It started slowly: down the lattice-work of sidewalks and roadways spreading from Central Park, people's conversations began to stray in subject, quiet lapses into something more primal. People walking to their cars or to the store would find themselves losing their direction, stumbling into a new path, a new way, and not remembering why, or caring. At the edges of the park, mortals' strides swayed, bodies shifting, pitching forward, back, but slowly, as if time slowed down for them to suddenly realize they were actually in a dance and always had been. Within the park and amongst those strolling, a steady beat was heard, and people were drawn to it. As they grew closer, the beat would grow more erratic, the sound of song not on the air but in their heads, time slowing for some, nothing out of the ordinary for others, just a slight vibration and pulse under their feet.
Those who found themselves at the epicenter of the event came willingly, or were pulled there, or simply were devotees DJ Kala, following her everywhere, every event, all the time. This was music that got inside, to the heart, to the gut, made every cell feel alive and like it might die, all at once, like you might implode, explode, be reborn.
This was just a taste, an apertif of after a long winter of static.
The stage was ground level, surrounded by a circle of enormous speakers to emit maximum bass effect - really not so much as a stage as a platform of bamboo reeds on which she stood and danced herself as she spun her music, scratching records and creating unheard of sounds, singing an undulating chorus of myriad vocal styles and languages, Eastern, Western, it didn't matter. So long as people danced, losing themselves in the chaos of their moving, thriving souls.
Central Park was the heart and lungs of New York. Kali was making it beat, literally - and loudly.