Showcase a success!

(but also a pain in the butt)

After last year's small turn out, we played to 2 seam-bursting full houses Friday and Saturday night and all ten pieces were well-received. In my own uneducated in the world of dance sort of way, I thought all the pieces were very good, but I think my favorite was Helen's. The music she chose was a jazzy trio for marimba, clarinet and bass which was composed by her brother who is a music professor. And her concept was that each of the three dancers represented the voice of one of the instruments. (Joe also used a similar concept, but his piece was classical, both musically and choreographically.) Also, her piece explored the humor in being sad, so the dancers often pouted exaggeratedly, wiped sniffles on their sleeves, or shrugged their shoulders. Plus whenever there was a roll on the marimba, the dancer would do a movement which mimicked the repetitive sound (like bourree or a shimmy). The first day I watched a run-thru, Helen told me it was good to hear me giggling since she'd intended it to be funny but didn't know if it actually was. Mikelle's piece was a close second for me. And pretty much everything else was a close tie for third.

Now, the pain in the butt part had nothing to do with the choreographers or the dancers. It had to do with the house staff (which was the ED and Devo dept.) They sold out both shows, and had a line of standing room potential patrons waiting for notice of empty seats, but they wouldn't start seating the potential patrons until 7:30 because they thought ticketholders would come at the last minute which meant that we didn't start until 7:41 on Friday and 7:40 on Saturday. I was not a happy camper because I was told it would probably take 5 minutes to seat these peoples, I had given my onstage call at 7:30 but had to keep the dancers in a holding pattern until I could call places at 7:39 or whatever. It just frustrated me because I had no means of communicating with the house except to stand right next to them and even then they weren't able to answer my questions. And if I was standing over by them, then I couldn't be with the dancers to give them updates and warnings. I also think that will adversely effect their audience in the future--if they know we started 10 min. late this time, they'll start arriving later. (And icing on the cake was the fact that no one in front of house bothered to try to get the audience back in after intermission. I literally had to say, "We're starting in 1 minute, please take your seats." and even then, there were still people in the bathroom.) Needless to say, this will come up in production meeting on Tuesday.

This week's project: the Fund for the Arts Kickoff.

Can't. Wait. :P