3 posts tagged “gigs”

Aragh.  Urgh.  Okay.  Here's a typical conversation between me and my brain, these post-Showcase days:

Me: I want to perform!  Why am I not performing? I could so perform right this second!  Grr!  Argh!

And then the lovely, talented, and extremely motivated Marsha forwarded me along to a fellow over at yon Supper Club, asking me to perform tonight and tomorrow night.

So I went for it, right?  Well, actually...

Me: Whoa, tonight?  Tonight's not good.  Neither is tomorrow.  No.  Tomorrow is not good, either.  I don't have a costume--that is, the Showcase costume is a little fall-y apart-y  And I have a new costume that I haven't quite (cough!) tried out on the trapeze yet...and the new stuff isn't smooth, yet I don't want to go back to just the old stuff.  And that toe hang is SO not there yet.  Oh, geez, and I don't even have the right length music anymore.  No.  Tonight is not good...

Ah, now I see: this is what they call eating your words.

I realize two important things: one, these gigs come up very last-second (there was another one last weekend, which I genuinely couldn't do because I was scheduled to be at work).  And two, I work very well on a deadline, and there is no deadline in sight.  Left to my own devices, I could probably putter around my act indefinitely and tweak this and fix that and add this and find a better costume...and never actually be "ready" to perform my act, much less at the drop of a hat.  In fact, this would be the easiest thing in the world to do.  (And now I think I have some insight into these perplexing people at Circus Center, who are immensely talented and should really be performing somewhere...but aren't.)

It would be very easy--the kind of comfortable trap that I would fall into and never kick myself out of.  Because the world outside Circus Center is harsh and uninviting, and that's the world I have to go into if my act is ever to see the light of day, much less (looking at the big picture) the lights of a real, flesh-and-blood circus.

So!  I'm making my own damn deadline: my act will be ready to roll out at a moment's notice by August 31st.  That is the first day of the fall semester at Circus Center; it is also a full two months, plus change, after the Showcase: even given that I'm missing a week for my cousin's wedding, this should be ample time for me to get my ducks in a row.  If I don't have a new costume by then, or that stupid, stupid toe hang isn't where it belongs, that's just too bad.  I will at least have a contingency plan: the point is that I will be ready.

I will also work on my spontaneity/willingness to drop things in favor of going out and performing.  Also organization: I'm not entirely sure where my makeup bag is right now, and that would probably be handy.

I heartily invite you, friends, to hold me to it.  If, come mid-August, I'm making noises about it being "too soon" and I'm "not ready," you are free to scold me, or heckle me, or draw me pictures of your profound disappointment.  I.e.,

Why? **

Let's do this.

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*Yesterday, during my lesson with Marina, she cheerfully announced that I should also think about finding a place for a heel hang in my act.  My heels are, if anything, more sketchy than my toes, which means I get to go through this whole process of "it's so close but it's not quite there" for another skill.  And after that?  Yep: it'll be neck hang.
**This is surely my greatest work of art to date.  Like I even needed to tell you that.

Now that it's June, I find that telling myself, "I'll figure that out in June" is no longer as comforting as once it was.  June looked pleasantly remote even from last week--certainly mid-June and the Showcase seemed months away...

Now I find that today I'm meeting with Helene, co-director #1 so that she can cast her professional eye over my act.  And on Saturday I'm meeting with Stefan Haves, co-director #2 and the former assistant director to Kooza (yes, that Kooza), so he can cast his professional eye over it, and hopefully slap some transitions on either end.  There are two shows in the coming weekends.  Then it's showtime.

Between now and then I have to get the third and final iteration of my costume in the mail, which will fit properly or else I will be forced to perform naked.  I should probably re-tape Trappy (it looks super dirty, I think because the leather is still getting broken in and it's...I don't know...shedding black stickiness onto the bar.  Or something.)  I have to wrangle some practice time during tech week.  I have to volunteer myself for the Pratfalls show, as well as the Showcase shows that I'm not in.  On that note, I have to find out from Helene if I'm really in the shows that I think I'm in.  I have to learn very small parts for two additional acts--they need a lot of warm bodies on the stage at once, and I volunteered to be among them.  One of them is a waltz, so evidently I will be learning how to waltz sometime in the next few weeks.

Looking at my calendar (which I have been doing nonstop since I realized it was June), I notice that there are not many days where I have written "practice" in and amidst these other things.  My act as it is right this second is pretty much what's going onstage. 

This is fine: I make most of my cues, most of the time, and get pretty much all of my skills all of the time.*  Although I feel like it's not ready, it's ready.  Honestly, I could have shown it back in April and no one would have thrown fruit at me. 

Knowing me, I could nitpick this act forever, and never feel like it was "ready."  And I'll even get to do that...after the Showcase.  I'll be sorry it's over, then, because one of the many things that I was putting off until June was figuring out what comes next.  Eh...yeah...

I'll figure that out at the end of June.

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*Except for that one time on Sunday when I didn't flex my feet enough while sliding from back balance to ankles, and ended up in a slightly perilous handstand with my feet on the bar.  Hoo, was that exciting.

There is so much excitement happening that you should probably sit down and back up from your monitor a little bit, otherwise you will be dazzled and blinded by the exclamation points!

The First Excitement!

I am going to be in the Student Showcase at Circus Center next month!  I will be getting up in front of people who paid to be there!  They even have days of rehearsal beforehand! 

There are six shows, and I will be in three of them.  Most slots for different acts have been split among two or three people in order to get as many people as possible into the show (without it being, like, six hours long).

I have about six weeks between now and then to tone my act.  I've been asked to cut out the swinging middle section, either because the choreography's a bit drab or in the interest of time (I would accept either explanation).  That means having to rethink a bunch of my music cues.  I also have to find a costume of some type.  And I have to devise a grand entrance.  The amazing Helene, who is organizing this madness, told me that the clowns will be helping with stage entrances and exits, so if I could think of anything for them to do... and then I stopped listening, because I was floored by this revelation:

I will be escorted by clowns to and from my trapeze.

How can you not be excited by that?  And then there's---

The Second Excitement:

My parents have very casually offered to buy me a trapeze for my birthday.  A trapeze!  My attempts to warn them that they didn't know what they're getting into (trapezes ain't cheap) fell on deaf and generous ears, so I've spent the past couple of weeks acquainting myself with the thousands and thousands of technical specifications that come with buying a trapeze.  Or that's what it felt like.  How wide do you want the bar?  What diameter should it be?  Solid or hollow?  How long should the ropes be, and what should they be made of? What diameter should they be? Cables in the ropes or no?  And on and on and on.

After soliciting the professional advice of, let's see, everyone at Circus Center, I have at last reached a conclusion.  I will soon be in possession of this beauty.

No, go on.  Click.  Take your time.  Soak it in.

You'll notice that this is really and truly a single-point trapeze, not a static trapeze adapted to single point.  There's nothing wrong with the latter--it's what I've been using since I started--but the ropes have a tendency to twist around each other when they're hooked together.  Suddenly, you stand up and have no space, though there is three feet of twisted rope above you.  This can be fixed with hardware (something like this.  No, that's not brass knuckles...for, um, a person with six fingers) or by cleverly splicing the ropes together, as in this (my) trapeze.

Getting a trapeze is like bringing home a new puppy.  You have to buy it a bed to sleep in and a crate and dog food and so on--but in this case that's a bag to carry it in, and a locker for it to live in at Circus Center, and, um, tape to eat?  And when it comes I expect there will be a little house-training, namely me learning my way around it.  The ropes have cables in them, which means that they are stiffer if you're rolling up into them (as I do), and the whole trapeze has less "bounce."  It'll take a little adjustment, but if all goes according to plan, I'll be squared away with it in plenty of time for the Showcase.

Which I am in.

With my own trapeze.

Let's celebrate with a video!