Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Yet another saturday night wow-factor entertainment show from the Beeb is coming out. It is imaginatively called Tonight’s the Night and hosted by the ubiquitous John Barrowman.
Mass-produced TV entertainment cynicism aside… why is this worth blogging?
Because this one has kick ass fire spinning choreography from Cutting Edge Circus that’s why! Hoorah!
So, who are Cutting Edge Circus? A new fire troupe on the scene?! welllll kind of - a couple of Bristol’s finest Chimaera members remixed, re-shaped, re-branded, and turned into a fully blown circus agency with its own select fire troupe. Hoorah! And I have the honour of being part of that troupe for this project.
That means performing not just on stage to an audience as we’re used to, but also to a whole host of moving cameras and hopefully a good number of TV screen-viewing eyes on top of that 
Showing fire performance to the general public on a large scale - that’s really exciting! I would love to see it develop further as an artform, and getting it out there on Saturday night prime time is certainly a good way to get it noticed - I hope it starts a continuing trend!
Saturday, February 7th, 2009
The fireshow choreography for Flaming Fun is coming along nicely. I worked on it into the early hours last night, I got so sucked into it!! I’m playing with what I’d call a “telegraphing” choreography technique, whereby sychro movement phrases throughout the initial segments of choreography come together later to form parts of an interactive choreography towards the end… maybe you just have to see it, but it makes me smile very geekily.
Tom (my awesome sound engineer) and I have been recording some extra bits and pieces to add to the bouncy latino-ish soundtrack. We spent all evening last Monday recording the awe-inspiring sounds of Bristol Samba’s powerful drumming!! Yes!! (that picture is not them… nevermind, when have my pics ever been relevant?)
The show will start with a call and response drumming section and it was great to see them doing this live - it was all I could to not to let out whoops and cheers onto the recording! We’re also using some of their drumming rhythms to add some extra power to the first and last segments of the show… building to a powerful finish raaaaa!@*£&$£!*
We’ve also recorded one of my housemates doing some beatboxing to add some spice to another track. Nice.
So now it just comes down to finalising the details of the choreography. We have a week from the 16th to the 20th in Brighton to train it all as a group and tweek things that need tweeking. tweek.