A recent trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico not only gave me a chance to visit Bandelier National Monument and ponder overpriced bad service, it also included a visit to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.  

While there, I had a disposable video camera to play with.

The CVS (a US pharmacy chain) disposable costs about US$30 and then another US$12-13 to develop, but it did motivate me to film without my usual over-analyzing and artistic angst. Once I show you one or two good clips from it, I’m going to start using the video mode on my regular digital camera, for better quality.

I’ve never had a video camera, so I made all of the usual newbie mistakes: panning/moving the camera too fast so that the resulting video induces vomiting, simply forgetting that I had the thing in my purse, and then not getting around to getting the clips off of the camera and onto my computer.

With great fanfare, I’d like to announce that in addition to filming a little video clip of me on Family Travel with a laptop camera, I actually drove over to my local CVS pharmacy yesterday and got the contents of the camera onto a DVD. I popped the DVD into my laptop and voila – a whole lot of “OMG, I forgot I filmed that!”

But back to the Cultural Center….I’ll write about it in more detail in another post, but this particular clip is of Zuni/Omaha tribal dancer Fabian Fontenelle accompanied by his wife, award-winning singer Shelley Morningsong. 

They are performing in the Center’s courtyard as part of a series of dance, food and music demonstrations during Balloon Fiesta Week (although there are demonstrations year-round, call the Center at 1-866-855-7902 for more details.)

This is “Faithful Feet,” from Ms. Morningsong’s album “Out of the Ashes,” which won the 2007 Native American Music Award for Best Debut Artist.  You can also listen to her and other artists on Native Radio.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 5:36 am and is filed under Sheila projects, US travel, world music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.