Club Performance - Latin Show - 4/28/07

Greetings!

In the "That was Fast!" department, Google video nearly gave me whiplash with the speed at which they have turned around the video :-)



Here's the write-up:

Angela was kind enough to pass along this juggling show opportunity to us.

Show was part of the ALAS - "Fiesta Tropical" night. It had a Latin theme with performances by several bands, and some dancing troupes as well. I am SOOOO glad we didn't go on right after the dancers! They were awesome . . . but I do appear to be getting ahead of myself.

Let's drop back one day and go with Friday, the night before the show . . .

Chris Comstock and I met up at 7:30pm to rehearse for the show. Prior in the week I had picked out the three songs I thought we could use, and a general outline idea as to what we could present.

Chris had been working on some basketball juggling stuff, so I thought it would be a lot of fun to come up with some sort of basketball routine. We brainstormed different things we could do, and honestly, I was rather surprised at how quickly and smoothly it went together. Chris came up with some really cool tricks and before too long, we had a show worked out. Well . . . if you count closing down McA at Midnight not being too long ;-) We decided to meet up again at 10:30am to warm up for the show before heading over to check in with the event coordinator.

Had a good warm-up and got over to the event setup around 11am. While waiting for the coordinator to show up, I did some juggling to the vast quantity of Latin music that Crizzly had provided (ok, I just set it on Shakira, but it was really good stuff). Had some really really nice runs with 7 balls. Plus had a couple goes at 8, including a near qual of 99999991 (from now on known as "Nines-and-a-One" [or Ni-ni-nines-n-a-one... --Crizzly]). Ran through the routine on stage and it went pretty well, other than when we dropped one of the basketballs, they travelled a looooooong ways away . .. heh heh (which would be fixed later). With that, we decided to meet back up at 5:15 to do some more rehearsing before the actual show (event started at 6pm - showtime was 7:30).

Had another good practice session and we headed off to the event. There were some technical issues with the mics, so I was actually glad that this was a "just juggle to music" kind of show. I doubt the "comedy juggling"spoken stuff would have gone over all that well. We were told we would go on after "the band". Who also happened to be set up where we had intended on doing our basketball routine. Since there was a lot of open space in front of the raised platform, it was easy enough to just do the routine there. Besides . . . it made tracking down errant basketballs that much more easy :-) While we were supposed to go on at 7:30, we actually wound up going on around 8pm. We just needed a minute of set-up time, and then we were off and running!

I went first, with a 3, 4, 5 beanbag routine. Let me say, it's soooooooo much different actually juggling, in the light, not wearing glow glasses, not wired up, and with beanbags! Different in this case means easier . . . heh heh. Did have one drop (and a bit of a stupid one, but hey, they happen) but for the most part, it went really well. Next was the Basketball Routine. It went very very well! Actually a fair amount smoother than many of the practices. The steals worked out great, and the replacements that Chris came up with were winners too :-) It's tough to get the passing going again when you have to start over, but it worked out well enough. Third portion used our R&J show favorite end song. No drops on the 3 club stuff (Yay!). I really need to work on my collects for 4. So, we'll call that two stupid drops there. I am getting better at knowing the song enough to stop at the right points. The passing went pretty well, and we managed to end with a good run of 7 (despite Chris' best efforts to make me work ;-) I think we were both pretty spent towards the end of the show.

So, all in all, it went great! Chris and I both had a ton of fun, not only dong the performance, but coming up with the show as well. I certainly think the routine is a keeper and will be used at more events :-)

Ok, that's my long-winded write-up for the event. Hope you enjoy the video, and yes, I'm still on track for getting the DVD finished on time.

Dave