Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

Many businesses whose front doors are normally closed flung them open during FestivALL. The Capitol Conference Center in the 800 block of Lee Street served up freshly squeezed lemonade and a classical music duet. It was also a chance to appreciate up close the magnifique stairwell, which I have admired through the glass ever since they first started building it. This is master craftsmanship. I hereby propose and thrown down this this is the way finest stairwell in Charleston. Any objectors or second guessers want to take on the contention? Let’s take this inside…

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

We are at the same place as in the post below — on the University of Charleston lawn during last Saturday’s Wine and All That Jazz event of FestivALL. And the same out-of-focus camera. (When life gives you out-of-focus lemons, you make out-of-focus lemonade!).

Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille. Click to enlarge

Here is a trés artistique take on a friendly young woman beside whom I sat during the Wine and All That Jazz event at FestivALL Charleston this past weekend. She was very nice, even as she pulled barbecue strands from her teeth.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

This was one of my favorite FestivALL moments. I know the audience for contemporary dance is small and when it’s not good, it just seems a cadre of frenzied people running around in their underwear. But this piece achieved a kind of sublime and deep pleasure at moments. The dancers began — almost unnoticed, at first, by passersby — wrapped against tree trunks in colored cloth.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

The music, broadcast from the stage under the Davis Park bandstand, was alternately tribal and mystic as the three dancers unfolded their colorful wraps and picked up multi-colored flags. It was at times like witnessing a visualization of colorful electrons and neutrinos bouncing and swirling at the subatomic level of creation. The piece was choreographed by Carli Mareneck and performed by Carli Mareneck and Lauren Wadsworth of Trillium and Stephanie Nerbak-McLaughlin of West Virginia Dance Company.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

I believe that thegazz.com food blog incorrectly relayed the information last month or so that the outdoor dining at Cafe Paris had been shut down. Not so, it seems, as diners were partaking along the sidewalk, Euoropean-style, during FestivALL Charleston. It was a welcome sight, although street dining downtown is hampered by the narrow width of many of the sidewalks.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

How do you say it here? It was as if someone had TP’ed the Brawley Walkway with Technicolor toilet paper during FestivALL on Saturday. That is a compliment, by the way. The effect was colorful and festive, and included artwork created by young people, strung up like multicolored prayer flags on strings along the walls.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

El Gleno Grande, otherwise known as Glenn Singer or “the Horse Guy,” is quite amusing. Here, he performs on the Capitol Street stage during Saturday events at FestivALL Charleston. He could just as easily be amusing an international audience in front of the Centre Pompidou where street performers are numerous on the plaza. That is why it was so delightful to see such a vibrant cultural street life (for once!) in downtown Charleston this past weekend.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

You just cannot have too many belly dancers in one’s town. Here, Glenn Singer (a.k.a. ‘El Gleno Grande‘) chats up two members of the Rom Neve Tribal Belly Dancing Troupe, after they have undulated back and forth across the Capitol Street stage on Saturday, June 23 at FestivALL Charleston 2006.

Click to enlarge. Photo for thegazz.com by Walker DeVille

As I have noted before, domes and curvature in architecture really leap out in contrast to the usual Euclidean grid of cityscapes. This fellow stands in front of one of Charleston’s few curvinesses, architecture-wise: the roundabout swell of the old Stone and Thomas building at the corner of Washington and Dickinson streets. It will be iniguing to see how this part of the building will be treated once re-development plans swing into action, now that the structure has been purchased for a developmnent project.