Aerial dance photos

It's been a pretty exciting week.. had a great show for a Bat Mitzvah on Sunday, at a cute little restaurant in Redwood City that I'd never heard of before - Angelica's Bistro.  I want to go back there for dinner some time.. the ambiance was fantastic and the food looked great!

Today I did a photo shoot for aerial tissu with a fantastic photographer named Greg Albin.  I've been doing aerial dance for about a year now and am ready to really start getting out there and doing more shows.  If fire dancing is my heart, aerial tissu is my soul these days.  I absolutely love the feeling of flying high above the heads of my audience and taking their (and my!) breath away with drops and flips and graceful poses.  It speaks to me on so many levels.  

Here's my favorite photo from the shoot today... or see the rest over at my Picasa page.  Keep your eyes out for a new section on the web site about aerial dance!   And if you're interested in more info or want to book this gorgeous art form, drop me a line!

Synchronicity

Last night we did a fire show for a 30th birthday party in Walnut Creek (and what a beautiful night it was).  KT and I had a great time - we did our Belly Dance show which is one of our favorites but hasn't been booked a lot lately (people seem to like Belly Dance in the early summer for some reason) so we had a great time with it - and the audience was so much fun too!

The interesting part about this show was the way it all connected in the first place... 

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that we had a great show up in Tahoe for New Year's and then afterwards went out to play with fire just for fun, out on the frozen lake.  There were a lot of folks from nearby cabins gathering around enjoying the free show, and one of them went home and must have dreamed of fire.. because our show planted the idea of having fire dancers at her son's 30th birthday bash.  She got home and went searching for fire dancers on the internet, having no idea who we were, and the first group she found and called.. was Fire Pixie!  The conversation went something like, "Hello, I was just up in tahoe and I saw these fire dancers and got this idea .. " and I answered, "Oh!  That was me!" and everything fell right into place.  :)

Sharing the art of fire is so rewarding in its own right, and it's so rare that we get to just go out and "play" with the fire anymore.. I feel like the something is telling me to do it more often!  

Spartan Daily Multimedia

We did a really fun show for the Fire on the Fountain Homecoming event at San Jose State University at the end of last year. This was our second time doing this event and we *love* the crowds at SJSU - college students are so much fun to perform for, and this event is really well organized and staffed. I really feel fortunate to be a part of it.

I bumped into Carlos Moreno, one of the photographers from this event, on Facebook and he directed me to a multimedia presentation the SJSU students had done for their newspaper web site. It was really well done and so I've reposted it on our site along with the awesome article they wrote about the event..

Check it out!

Pirate Ship Fire Eating

Eating fire at the face & body painting convention with a pirate ship painted on my face.. fun for all ages.  Thanks to Mark Reid for the photo!

Fire eating and body painting

I just went to the Face Painting & Body Art convention in Orlando, FL in early January.. I do body painting as well as fire dancing (bodyart.firepixie.com) and had a really great time. One of the highlights was that I got to teach a fire eating class to a student who flew down from New Jersey to learn fire eating.

We normally do a 3-day class but for people who don't live in the San Francisco area, that can be a huge commitment, so we do offer an "intensive" class for out-of-towners. Mike, my student, seemed to have a great time and he did a fantastic job, getting some really dramatic extinguishes of the torch by the end of the class. He was a fascinating guy - does fire walking and martial arts and we had some great conversation while we played with fire.

It was a fairly surreal experience - we were out by the hotel pool, and kept being interrupted by crazy characters wearing full body paint! It was really fun to be able to combine two of my passions like that.

Mark Reid, a master body painter and instructor at the convention came out and watched for a while.. and told me he'll trade some body painting for some fire eating lessons at some time. Mark is a fantastic artist - I hope he's serious! I want to make that happen!!

Fire or Ice?

This is my favorite image from our New Year's Eve Fire & Ice show.. is she breathing fire... or ice?

We also got a mention in the Tahoe Daily Tribune!  

New Year's Eve

We had a great show on New Year's Eve with Blue Sky Events up in Lake Tahoe.  It was a 6-dancer show with a fire & ice theme, and it was great to work with such a big group of dancers because we could really heat the place up (and brrrr.. that was pretty important during winter up in Tahoe!)

They also had ice sculptors there - evidently world-famous ones - who made all kinds of great stuff.  My favorite were the eskimos.. they carved them so you could put your face through the "parka" from behind and take a picture with you-as-eskimo, which was all kinds of silly fun.

We even finished up in time to celebrate the new year at a cabin next to a nearby frozen lake, over which someone was shooting fantastic homemade fireworks - so of course we had to run out with our fire tools and add to the show.  :)

Thanks to Nick Winterhalter for the photos!