Columbia Alternacirque!

Posted By Natalie Brown on August 4, 2009

For the first time in a month, I was able to attend Monday Cirque rehearsals. I’ve been taking the Artist as Entrepreneur classes offered by the SC Arts Commission since mid-July. We had a break this week, so I checked in with the company while I can (I go back to class next week for the rest of the month).

I showed up an hour and a half early to work with Catherine on a new duet we’ve been creating. Catherine and I both went through Suhaila Salimpour’s level 1 intensive and got certified in May. Armed with some new vocabulary, technique, layering and a rediscovered emphasis on zil playing, we wanted to push ourselves to create something technically difficult with an onslaught of zil patterns. We’re throwing the kitchen sink at this thing: floorwork, formation changes, level 2 layering, spins. It may not seem like much to the layman, but we’re discovering that it’s a strangely life- and philosophy-altering challenge. When you suddenly make huge leaps in your artistic life, you start looking around at the rest of your life wondering what you can change for the better. This happens a lot in the circus and with our students, but that’s the subject of another blog post, I think.

Here’s a mini documentary produced by Suhaila about the workshop intensive we attended. You can see me sweating and working my rear end off in the background. Cat is interviewed, as is our awesome DC friend Asharah, who will be traveling down to perform with us at Art Bar in a few weeks.

Cat and I are now 16 counts from the end, though we have a lot of work to do to clean up the choreography (especially some of the difficult syncopated zil patterns we’re trying). We want to perform the piece at the next Art Bar show in a few weeks, and if I can confirm it, we may try to roadtrip it to a bellydance gala show out of state the week before to give it a test run in front of our peers. We have to wait for half the East Coast bellydance scene to return from Pennsic before we can chase down the event sponsor and see if it’s possible.

Wynn and Amanda D, two very hardworking and promising apprentices to Delirium, showed up early to discuss a trio they’re creating with Amanda Button (who we call “Button,” since we have three Amanda’s on the roster). They also sat on the sidelines and watched Cat’s and my rehearsal. At 8, the rest of the company wandered in and set up shop.

We’re still working on cleaning some of the Bollycirque pieces, though we’ve been working on them for three months and the company’s getting tired of the tedium and repetition. Maria and the rest of Delirium have been running the rehearsals in my absence, and I’ve heard they’re even tougher than I am. We’re hoping that the constant drilling will help train the six apprentice dancers in the company to handle choreography and performing better. They’re heading for their third performance now, and they’re getting much more comfortable and confident.

We also auditioned a new dancer for the first time in a long time. Sloka is grad student at USC who started studying Bharatanatyam classical Indian dance style when she was five-years-old and living in Gujarat. We had coffee earlier in the week, and I invited her to bring out an audition piece to our rehearsal so we could take a look. Turns out Sloka is AMAZING, and a very sweet woman. Her pieces were beautiful and precise, and we invited her aboard. I’m really excited about having authentic classical Indian dance in our Bollycirque show (and beyond). I love exposing our audience to as many phenomenal performing art forms as possible.

As Bollycirque is winding down, we’re looking ahead to the last show in the season. We’ve decided to restage “Dreams,” a somewhat dark and surreal show that we attempted to stage last year, only to have it rained out for three straight months. It looks like a couple of key pieces will be returning, including a revamped “Pink Elephants” as the opener, my infamous “Bird Musicbox” piece to “Nannou” by Aphex Twin, and the fire duet finale (which we may expand into a bigger group spectacle). Aside from that, the rest of the company is already buzzing and teaming up to create pieces. Our fire crew shares information with each other, and trains together on Sunday nights in backyards and open fields, but they’ve always been primarily soloists. For the first time, they’re pulling several extra practices a week and working on larger-scale group pieces. I’m really excited about the prospect, and the fact that they themselves are getting excited and ramping up their organization, blocking and choreography. There are several other pieces already in the planning stages. I’m planning on staying up late and sending out a few pieces of music with the times blocked off tonight to start listening and planning. There’s a chance we may also have a rudimentary version of the new trailer stage available by September, though I wouldn’t quote me on that yet. We’re a much better company than we were a year ago. There are more of us, we’re tighter, we’ve become a very close family and we’re much better trained. I’m excited to see what the collective effort achieves.

If you’re curious about “Dreams,” here’s our promo from our staging last year (pay no attention to the dates, as those apply to 2008):

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