Taking a break - Baby Doll redux
Dec. 5th, 2005 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bethlakshmiTaking a break at work... damn it's cold in here.
Good practice - minus the sucky draining car battery after practice thing.
Auditions where held beforehand. Jez and I got there super early, by planning ahead for the snow travel, we circumvented fate, and came way early instead of 10 minutes late. So I met two of the 3 auditionees. Both seemed quite nice, and quite cute... so that was neat.
We were pretty slow on starting... it was 6:30 before anyone went on. I was as bad as anyone - I was stretching, kibbitzing, getting filled in by Mina on costuming for Frosty, and before I knew it Scratch was saying "it's 6:30... let's get a move on". Which was silly of me. I could have gone on... I had all the peices ready to do my solo, I guess I should have just demarcated my space, and started at 6:00 or 6:15.
The way serendipity worked, I ended up as first and last to go... well... second. We did solos first, and someone went before me. Scratch and Mina seemed to like it, and the major points for discussion were things I was also debating and wrestling with... so good to know I'm on the right page. That would be:
- white bra with pink ruffles and white undies are cute, but with the red dress they look dorky afterwards. Switch to red with black ruffle undies, and red (w. black ruffles??? do I have the time???) bra.
- red dress is good (needs ironing big time... this dress lives to wrinkle)
- get flesh-toned hose, cut waistband elastic & wear instead of undies, stockings must not have faux-panty/girdle - they must be stocking-like throughout.
- get flesh or pink pastie coverage, so that I am definitely legal no matter what (this is a reverse strip)
And a few dance notes, not necessarily stuff I saw coming:
- boots - show zip-up, it's the interesting part
- after arising from bed, play with blanket and do some reveals, with the "oo! cold!" face.
- make sure hands are clean for closing dress and bra. Harder to do this while attaching closure rather than the typical undoing of closure. This principle holds, I think, for why your boyfriend can always undo your bra strap, but it takes him a half hour with an owner's manual to figure out how to close it again. :P
Got to see Santa Baby, which will be down right adorable once all the dancers actually know what they are doing. They are like a combination of a Victoria Secret catalogue and some adorable sitcom where beautiful women always get along, all the time.
Right now it's a mix of "ohmigod I'm so cute!" and "what's next?" which is never so good. I have a theory (o' the day) that when you do a dance form that relies on high charisma, it is much, much harder to cover up the fact that you forgot a move. Something about the fact that you are activity outputting the I'm cute/sexy/adorable/charming/turned on vibe - but that maybe that consumes the same part of your brain that you access when you have totally forgotten a move? Maybe. Or if you are focusing your energy on facial expression, then if you "OMIGOD! WHAT DO I DO NEXT?" comes flying on top of your mind, it gets automatically transmitted to the face? Or maybe just 'bigger you are, harder you fall'?? It's always more visible when the most charismatic person fucks up.
Morgan showcased her new canes. Belly dancer that I am, I was picturing canes, like walking canes with a hook on one end... and thinking "hand balancing on them? Hot damn! I can barely get those suckers to balance on my head!" But no... this is a nice, solid hardware construction that raises her hands about a foot and half, two feet off the ground, which lets her be even more flexible, since the floor's not getting in her way. Neat. I keep wanting to wrap it in tinsel or make the two handholds into little Christmas trees. Or wrap it like a present. :)
Then we were on to Frosty. It shaped up quick. Mina wisely did a quick talk through with us... which helped load the whole thing into RAM. We ran it a bunch, and rehabbed a few more sections. The strength of this peice is its simplicity. The group moves are way simple and based on 4's throughout. There's lots of very symmetric blocking, and show casing, and repeats. It's a very good pick for something we will have 4 weeks total to learn. (2.5 down, 1.5 to go) The song has it's pluses and it's minuses. It's a very up tempo rendition with a driving beat on 16ths. So the immediate impulse is to try to move for every count of 16 (1 e and a 2 e and a ...) but even the basic 4 on which those 16ths are built is pretty peppy. So... caving in to the driving beat is sheer madness. We've beaten the madness back and do things on 8ths or on 4s, thankfully. I think we finally drove out all the demons of madness this time.
I'm beginning to agree that while group numbers are a pain to do in a month's time, they have a big payoff. There's simple, simple things you can do as a group of 3 or more people that when done as a group, multiply exponentially in goodness. When the Santa Baby gang was dancing and they all synced up with now ??? moments happening, it was rocking. I *think* I could feel the same thing when we synced up. It didn't actually matter that we were doing pretty simple stuff, being in sync and being more than 1 person gave it an advantage.
I'm still in favor of solos, too, since I can get my rocks off technically and be totally in control of it. But... I'm starting to agree that more simple/sync'ed up group peices would be a real win. As long as we manage the complexity appropriately. As with any team sport - you can afford to be as complex as your weakest link. I don't matter if person A and person B do a complex move cleanly. If person C looks like shit, the whole number looks like shit.
Good practice - minus the sucky draining car battery after practice thing.
Auditions where held beforehand. Jez and I got there super early, by planning ahead for the snow travel, we circumvented fate, and came way early instead of 10 minutes late. So I met two of the 3 auditionees. Both seemed quite nice, and quite cute... so that was neat.
We were pretty slow on starting... it was 6:30 before anyone went on. I was as bad as anyone - I was stretching, kibbitzing, getting filled in by Mina on costuming for Frosty, and before I knew it Scratch was saying "it's 6:30... let's get a move on". Which was silly of me. I could have gone on... I had all the peices ready to do my solo, I guess I should have just demarcated my space, and started at 6:00 or 6:15.
The way serendipity worked, I ended up as first and last to go... well... second. We did solos first, and someone went before me. Scratch and Mina seemed to like it, and the major points for discussion were things I was also debating and wrestling with... so good to know I'm on the right page. That would be:
- white bra with pink ruffles and white undies are cute, but with the red dress they look dorky afterwards. Switch to red with black ruffle undies, and red (w. black ruffles??? do I have the time???) bra.
- red dress is good (needs ironing big time... this dress lives to wrinkle)
- get flesh-toned hose, cut waistband elastic & wear instead of undies, stockings must not have faux-panty/girdle - they must be stocking-like throughout.
- get flesh or pink pastie coverage, so that I am definitely legal no matter what (this is a reverse strip)
And a few dance notes, not necessarily stuff I saw coming:
- boots - show zip-up, it's the interesting part
- after arising from bed, play with blanket and do some reveals, with the "oo! cold!" face.
- make sure hands are clean for closing dress and bra. Harder to do this while attaching closure rather than the typical undoing of closure. This principle holds, I think, for why your boyfriend can always undo your bra strap, but it takes him a half hour with an owner's manual to figure out how to close it again. :P
Got to see Santa Baby, which will be down right adorable once all the dancers actually know what they are doing. They are like a combination of a Victoria Secret catalogue and some adorable sitcom where beautiful women always get along, all the time.
Right now it's a mix of "ohmigod I'm so cute!" and "what's next?" which is never so good. I have a theory (o' the day) that when you do a dance form that relies on high charisma, it is much, much harder to cover up the fact that you forgot a move. Something about the fact that you are activity outputting the I'm cute/sexy/adorable/charming/turned on vibe - but that maybe that consumes the same part of your brain that you access when you have totally forgotten a move? Maybe. Or if you are focusing your energy on facial expression, then if you "OMIGOD! WHAT DO I DO NEXT?" comes flying on top of your mind, it gets automatically transmitted to the face? Or maybe just 'bigger you are, harder you fall'?? It's always more visible when the most charismatic person fucks up.
Morgan showcased her new canes. Belly dancer that I am, I was picturing canes, like walking canes with a hook on one end... and thinking "hand balancing on them? Hot damn! I can barely get those suckers to balance on my head!" But no... this is a nice, solid hardware construction that raises her hands about a foot and half, two feet off the ground, which lets her be even more flexible, since the floor's not getting in her way. Neat. I keep wanting to wrap it in tinsel or make the two handholds into little Christmas trees. Or wrap it like a present. :)
Then we were on to Frosty. It shaped up quick. Mina wisely did a quick talk through with us... which helped load the whole thing into RAM. We ran it a bunch, and rehabbed a few more sections. The strength of this peice is its simplicity. The group moves are way simple and based on 4's throughout. There's lots of very symmetric blocking, and show casing, and repeats. It's a very good pick for something we will have 4 weeks total to learn. (2.5 down, 1.5 to go) The song has it's pluses and it's minuses. It's a very up tempo rendition with a driving beat on 16ths. So the immediate impulse is to try to move for every count of 16 (1 e and a 2 e and a ...) but even the basic 4 on which those 16ths are built is pretty peppy. So... caving in to the driving beat is sheer madness. We've beaten the madness back and do things on 8ths or on 4s, thankfully. I think we finally drove out all the demons of madness this time.
I'm beginning to agree that while group numbers are a pain to do in a month's time, they have a big payoff. There's simple, simple things you can do as a group of 3 or more people that when done as a group, multiply exponentially in goodness. When the Santa Baby gang was dancing and they all synced up with now ??? moments happening, it was rocking. I *think* I could feel the same thing when we synced up. It didn't actually matter that we were doing pretty simple stuff, being in sync and being more than 1 person gave it an advantage.
I'm still in favor of solos, too, since I can get my rocks off technically and be totally in control of it. But... I'm starting to agree that more simple/sync'ed up group peices would be a real win. As long as we manage the complexity appropriately. As with any team sport - you can afford to be as complex as your weakest link. I don't matter if person A and person B do a complex move cleanly. If person C looks like shit, the whole number looks like shit.