Odd forms of entertainment.

Here's an odd random fact, gleaned from yesterday's Guardian: it is perfectly legal to be naked in the parks of New York, provided you get a permit which states that it is for entertainment purposes. Only in America! 

And so a group of women have been performing Shakespeare's play The Tempest" in Central Park stark naked. Well, it seems that some of them took their clothes off during the performance but most of them were starkers throughout. The actress who played Prospero put her clothes back on at the end to symbolise getting free of the island. It's produced by a the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp fiction Appreciation Society, known as the Topless bookclub for short. For six years, the group has met to read books and have picnics while exercising the right to enjoy the outdoors topless (which the law in York allows), in an effort to encourage body freedom. 

I just love terms like "body freedom". It goes along with stuff like promoting "the normalisation of the naked female body", another of the group's aims. Each to his own!

Well, I hope their production was successful. I am, however, quite glad I wasn't there to see it. I get a bit purist about productions of Shakespeare. I once saw Macbeth in a German theatre, a very strange production in which the three witches were not old crones but three nubile young things who insisted on being quite phonographic all over the stage. The students I was with were all rather embarrassed by the whole affair. 

Performance art is often odd. We have seen some strange things here in Galicia in the name of what I suppose is Celtic Fringe: witches and wizards prancing around of stilts and setting fire to quite toxic looking brews. Maybe I am just too ignorant to appreciate it. Or maybe they are trying to hard to prove centuries-old tradition! 

Mind you, just because something is centuries old does not necessarily mean it should last forever. I also read about a regional government somewhere to the northwest of Madrid which has outlawed the killing of bulls by spearing them to death during a summer fiesta. This is the Toro de la Vega (loosely translated, the Bull form the Orchards) festival in Tordesillas. Horsemen chase a bull and attack it with spears, while the onlookers presumably cheer them on. Understandably, animal rights activists have been protesting about it for a good while and now they have had their way. 

Some of the fiestas involving animals that go on around here, herding all the wild horses together and stuff like that, are undoubtedly worth seeing. Gratuitous nastiness, however, is a different matter. 

 I can't imagine that spearing an animal from horseback is really a skill you need to acquire in the 21st century anyway!