Back to Business

It's been a week since the California State Fair run ended and we're *finally* feeling fully rested. It's always both exciting and a little sad when a show reaches its end. We met so many wonderful people during the run, and really pushed our limits with the heat and the sheer physicality of the shows. It's good to be home, where the delicious rain lets us know that fall is on its way, but I do miss the excitement and energy and adventure that the fair offered.

Here are some awesome photos, taken by the amazing folks from Fairytale Productions, who had a face painting booth near our stage (and wandered by several times a day in princess costumes, which made me giddily happy).

We did a luau fire show for a 40th wedding anniversary this past weekend and were astonished at how very *slow* our regular luau music felt compared to the frenetic craziness that was our state fair set! But after that performance, I have to say that my own style and showmanship has developed quite a lot over the last few weeks. I don't know how much it might show, but my control and awareness during the show has certainly attained a new level, which feels really wonderful.

Also, I've got a million new show ideas, and now that my body's had a bit of a break, I'm diving in headfirst. We got the opportunity to go to Teatro Zinzanni this weekend with some friends, and now we're considering putting together a gypsy fire show. I'm also working on some cool ideas with aerial tissu, black light and LED dancing all combined with video projection.. my imagination will run away with me, if I let it!

Looking forward to seeing what surprises the fall season brings.. :)

California State Fair

We've made it to the halfway point of the State Fair! Yay!

Our show has been rockin', and the audiences are really a lot of fun. The only major drawback is the heat - yesterday it was up to 104 and we were melting on that hot, hot stage. When it gets that hot, we have to be extra careful and aware since accidents are all lining up to happen. Fire tools are igniting early, as soon as they get anywhere near a fire source, the bright sun makes it hard to see lingering flames, and the heat makes us feel heavy, sleepy and a little clumsy. We're drinking gallons and gallons of water and sweating it all right out again, so overall I imagine this is good for us in the long run, even if it's not a whole lot of fun in the meantime.

The weather report says today will be cooler, and Monday through Friday looks to be way down in the 80s. We are keeping our fingers crossed. :) At least the evenings have been beautiful - we have a longer break between our last two shows and have taken to wandering around the fair at dusk, seeing the other shows and taking silly pictures and looking at all the animals. Our favorites: newborn piglets, the garden of gigantic proportions, and Frank Olivier's Twisted Cabaret show.

The Sacramento media has found us, and we've gotten to do a couple of TV spots, with one more scheduled on Monday morning. Here's a link to our favorite one!

State Fair Diaries

We made it through Day 2 of the California State Fair! :) 2 days down, 16 more to go. Here's hoping we don't melt into little puddles or burn ourselves crispy in the process!

We're doing 3 or 4 shows every day - at 4, 6, and 9 pm on weekdays and 2, 4, 6 and 9 on the weekends. Our shows are a half hour long, so that means 2 full hours of fire on the weekends - exciting, and also exhausting!

Friday it was *really* hot. We got in and found our site, after much wandering around carrying gallons and gallons of fuel. We are sharing a trailer with the African Acrobats, in the Weird, Wild and Wacky zone right in the center of the fair. There's also an awesome magician and a bird show right in our area, so there's a lot going on and things were pretty crazy the first day. Also, did I mention it was HOT?

Our stage is really awesome. It's... well.. wacky, with a funky corrugated-metal-and-mirrors look. It is also a nice reflecting mirror, so the Sacramento summer sun can get us from 3 sides instead of just one, while we help by twirling huge fireballs around. The first day we sweated and panted through our daytime shows, rocked the nighttime show, and then dragged home and collapsed.

Saturday was much better - the weather was cooler, the audiences were bigger, and we weren't feeling so off-balance - we knew where the stage was, where the water was, and where to find air conditioning and iced coffee. Also, after just two days we've performed this show seven times, and it just gets tighter and sillier every time. At the end of the first day we knew all the things we needed to change. At the end of the second day, we know all the things we want to develop. By the end of today we're going to be Vegas, Baby.. and by Labor Day, the WORLD. Muahahahahaaa..

I'm looking forward to the opportunity to create and try out a lot of new choreography, as will inevitably happen when we get sick of doing the same show over and over. I'm doing fire hula hoop for this show, which is fairly new to me, and I'm enjoying it a whole lot (last night a little girl came up to me after the show and told me the hula hoop was her favorite part! I must be doing it right!).

If anyone wants to come out and see us, I really recommend coming to the 9:00 show - it's dark so the fire shows up, it's not so hot, and we seem to regularly ROCK that show!

I will post some pictures soon, and stay tuned for more wacky adventures to come. :)

San Mateo County Fair

We do a lot of private parties, and people are often asking me where they can see us perform in public.. well, tonight is the night - the first of many!

We'll be performing tonight at the San Mateo County Fair at 9:00 PM on the Carnival Borough Stage. If you can't catch us tonight, we'll also be there tomorrow (Sunday), as well as Wednesday and Thursday the 19th & 20th.

San Mateo County Fair

Then, starting on Friday we'll be at the California State Fair in Sacramento. We'll be doing 3-4 shows a day, every day from 8/20 - 9/7 in the "Weird Wild and Wacky" area.. shows will be at 4, 6, and 8 pm with a 2:00 show added on weekends and holidays.

California State Fair

Please come on out and play with us!

That 70s Show

Yesterday I had a pretty unusual show - it was a blacklight / glow light show for kids at a summer camp at Club Sport in Fremont. The summer camp theme was centered around the decades of the 20th century, and for a blacklight show, I was assigned the 1970s.

What fun it was! I got to dance to great songs like "I will survive," "Dancing Queen," and of course, "Greased Lightnin'" from the Grease soundtrack. It was also my very first public hula hooping performance (I recently got a blacklight reactive hoop and so was very excited to try it out). It went really well!

I feel oh-so gutsy, being brave enough to perform a hula hoop routine for the first time ever, in front of a big group of 7-12 year old girls.. ALL of whom could probably hula hoop me right out the door. But they loved it.. and I knew a trick or two that some of them didn't, so they were duly impressed. :)

I also had the opportunity to perform with my new amazing light poi. A friend made these for me recently. They are about 5x as bright as any other light poi I've ever seen, let alone owned, and are programmable (!!!) so I can make them do pretty much whatever I want - colors, strobe rates, brightness, patterns.. there's even a music reactive mode, where they listen to the ambient sound and flash accordingly. Amazing! And they're controlled by a remote control, so my tech guy can make them change on the fly. The kids went crazy!

The third new thing were the Dancing Wings I got at Faerieworlds.. these are amazing. They're a beautiful costume addition, a very easy performance tool, and they were everyone's favorite thing! With light shows I let the kids play with the lights after I'm done dancing, and the kids wouldn't put these down. I got the black light reactive ones in green, and let me tell you, they SCREAM under UV light.

I really need to get some photos of all the new stuff, but black light is notoriously hard to photograph or videotape. If you're local and wanna help, please drop me a line!

Fire Arts Festival

Fire Pixie had the wonderful opportunity to perform at the Fire Arts Festival this year with Copper Lantern Fire Theatre.

Fire Arts happens once a year and people really pull out all the stops: huge metal monsters that shoot fire, all kids of art and beautiful kinetic sculptures everywhere, great people and great energy, and lots of amazing performers! We were honored to be invited to perform this year. :)

Fire Pixie's performance was an acrobatic balancing, fire eating routine which was just a small piece of Copper Lantern's longer show. Our costumes were very much fun - the story line was full of beasts and lizards and fantasy creatures, and we got to be slinky, silly cat creatures. We went crazy with the face paint and crazy cat-eye contact lenses. Performing as a non-human is so fun and silly and liberating!

Also, we LOVE doing big stage shows, and love performing with so many wonderful dancers, fire spinners, and artists. Fire Arts Festival really does a great job of building and fostering the fire community in the Bay Area.

Tissu at the lake

I've been up at the lake the last couple of days and it's been lovely. We strung the tissu between two trees and did lots of photographing.. it's a lovely place to hang out. I haven't been motivated to actually practice any choreography, which is becoming a more pressing problem as faerieworlds is in 2 weeks and I've only got the first 1/5 of the dance choreographed. The bugs, the sun, the breeze, the beauty, the big box of gingersnaps, all seem to distract me though. Also, the lack of music.. and the lack of mirrors. I'm pretty spoiled by my living room performance space I guess.
There was much adventure in rigging. Darrell was the mastermind and had a whole bunch of tools and confusing-looking gear.. several tree-scrapes, rope burns, failed attempts, near-death frights, trips to the hardware store, and hours of precarious ladder-balancing later we managed to string a cable between two trees and hang the tissu from it. It works really, really well! I'm very impressed with Darrell. We were describing the idea to lots of folks before we tried it, and got lots of skepticism and nay-sayers, but the amount of tension on the cable is just perfect - a little bouncy but that actually makes it more comfortable to bounce and drop and stuff, and it feels super safe.

Originally we wanted to hang it at 30 feet but we had only a 16 foot ladder. The first time we tried rigging I climbed all the way up the rope to a 30 foot tree branch and then freaked out and my body seized up and brain stopped working, and I had to BREATHE and slide back down the rope and shake for a while (got a nice rope burn on my shin from that one) and we decided rigging lower down, from the ladder, was the way to go this time. We've got ideas for setting up a belay so we can rig from higher heights but this time it just wasn't gonna happen. Plenty of height for close-up shots though.. the far-away silhouettes will just have to be next time.

We did 2 shoots on Monday - a sunny one and a dusk one. Then Tuesday we did an early morning shoot and a late-night, after dark shoot (at which the swarming bugs were the main event, oh MY), and then one more early morning

on Wednesday. Tissu dancing is one thing.. tissu hanging-and-posing is a bit different, and pretty tough on the ol' arm muscles - most especially at 6:00 am! (try to squeeze your fists hard enough to support your body weight right after you wake up.. combined with morning stiffness and chilliness.. that photo shoot was TOUGH!) The light was just beautiful though, with some mist on the lake and everything really still.. I think we got some really beautiful photos.
It's funny.. I remember going through this phase with fire dancing, when I'd been doing it for just a year or so. All I wanted to do was dress up, experiment with the techie stuff, and take pictures.. fun locations, crazy costumes, interesting lighting, colored flame.. no

w that bit of fancy has been transferred to tissu. I really hope tissu follows the same path as fire dancing, where I've gotten to perform so many amazing places that I don't feel the need to bother with photos anymore. :)

In the meantime.. my next wacky idea is to rig from the Donner Lake Rainbow Bridge. Let me know if you want to be involved! We'll need photographers, grips, and someone to stand there and spin me around so I'm facing the right direction.. ;)