New Project

So ages ago I put up a sign at LCDS looking for a choreographer for my final project for what turned out to be the bass ballet movement. I didn't get any calls from the sign and assumed that it had been taken down long ago- but a couple of weeks ago I got an email about it. Sweet.

Her name is Anna and she's an Aerialist (ropes hanging from the ceiling, think cirque du soleil) so today we met up at the Circus Space. There is a place in London where you can get a degree in Circus stuff, how amazing is that? It is in an old power station next to Hoxton Square and there is this huge room with tons of rigging. We met, talked for a little bit, and then she showed me one of her routines-which was amazing though I did get a little distracted half way through by the flying trapeze practice going on across the room.

Do you know how cool it is to be in a room full of professional circus performers practicing? It's pretty awesome.

So the project plan is to work with a percussionist friend of mine because I think the visual of a marimba player and aerialist sounds super cool. A tall, thin, vertical sense of space rather than horizontal. (Like my last project but turned 90 degrees...) Basically I want to use this project to try being solely a director/producer instead of a performer. Experiment with being the outside eyes rather than being in the middle of things.

There are so many things I don't know how to do yet, here are some that I have thought of already: Where can we perform? Anna was saying that aerialist work is the easiest to set up because it only needs one anchor point on the ceiling and she has all her own ropes and such so as long as there is a high enough, strong enough beam- we should be fine. But what else is going to be on the programme? Making a 10 minute piece would be awesome- but that isn't a whole evenings worth of performing. Also, how do you put on a show away from a school? I've only ever done this once and I've only ever done it with *tons* of help from GSMD. (Help from Lucy; thanks for all your help Lucy!) So anyhow- huge learning curve. This should be fun!