Gaslight Faeries - August/October
At the beginning of this year we started planning and working out our next show,
which was to materialise as
The
Gaslight Faeries. We were originally going to have it in April but shit piled
up and we were all busy with work and other commitments so it ended up being in
August instead. We had managed to get use of the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall in
Glasgow, which is currently being restored and is full of ye olde music hall character.
We had to pick music that fitted with the time period the music hall was active
1890s to 1930s which made it a tough job. We were allowed to get away with stuff if
it 'sounded' as if it was from the period so that was a bit of a relief or we would have
been struggling to find stuff we actually liked never mind it being historically
accurate.
We decided to try and tie-up the show with a theme of different dance styles from
around the world, like we were a rag-tag bunch of gypsy travellers.
Laura had seen me as the Dragon-Lady, a western stereotype of Asian women in
films around that period - they were always sleekit murderous temptresses, and seeing as I had managed to finally buy a sword from overseas the other year (thanks
ketene :)) I decided that I should probably give it a debut. I found
a couple of oriental/eastern sounding drum tracks and spliced them together with
cutting edge technology - go me.
I practiced loads, bought Belladonna's sword dvd to learn interesting moves and
incorporated floorwork into my routine. I’m not insanely flexible so I knew I
couldn’t do crazy backbends or anything like that with the time I had to rehearse,
however I decided to compensate for this by making the dance slow and (hopefully
reasonably) controlled instead. Hopefully ill be able to post a video of it sometime in
the future. Anyway I got around to feeling fairly confident about performing it and
was encouraged by Ali and Laura's comments who vetted it before the show.
Bit of an interlude from the show here but - most people who have seen me do solos
will realise that I don’t practice or choreograph much before I perform. This of course
has led to some utter shit (ie Sherri hafla and countless others). I also get bored of
dancing to the same tracks easily so always tend to choose something new if there is a
hafla coming up. I don’ t know why I have always taken this attitude as it only leads to
me feeling Ive let myself and my troupe down with the shoddy quality of my dancing.
In the future however im going to crack down and make sure I rehearse adequately
before any performances as I would if it was a troupe routine.
Anyway back to the show. Laura had a Mati Hari story to tell which wrangled
together a conspiring French waiter Antoine and a WW1 officer. Ali was encouraged
to embody Loie Fuller, a famous dancer back in the day with a version of her skirt
dance, but performed with fan veils. Amanada had a cute jewellery box ballerina gone
bad routine which was great fun. Of course we had some group dances featuring all of
us and invited some guests to break up the troupe-based numbers.
It was a good show and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, however after two runs of it I
do feel there were obvious weak spots and things that I would veto in our democratic
troupe meetings if we did another one :P
The Panopticon night ended up packed. We had no idea as many people would turn
out as they did. We had tried to reserve seats for people who had paid through the
website but the system we tried to use was flawed and we had so many people come
in off the street. It was busting at the seams with people standing and we had health
& safety and fire restrictions from the venue owners to comply with, this left a few
disappointed people who had turned up later on and couldn’t get in.
After the show we had so many positive comments and because so many friends
missed it we decided to run it again in October. We couldn’t use the Panopticon again
unfortunately as they had reached their insurance limit for number of events that year,
so we searched for weeks trying to find a venue which was both affordable to us and
that would have a god ambience and suit the show contents. We eventually got the
QMU which is great for size and it had a proper stage and lighting which was a nice
change.
The show went off without any hitches or tech difficulties and with the exception
of a rogue pastie I think it was pretty awesome. I felt particularly good as pretty
much most of the troupe’s family members and friends were there to see it. Even my
cousins came along which I was equally surprised and grateful about :) Ali’ s hubby
got to finally see her perform a moving and gorgeous fan veil dance which had some
of us welling up with emotion.
You can see some photos of the show here -
http://sarasvatitribal.co.uk/gf2.htmIncluding this awesome picture of me