Two days ago I returned from Orlando -- capping off a deliriously fabulous remount of Blood on the Veil at the John & Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center, where we'd produced the show two years ago.That show went off without a hitch. I'd flown in on Thursday afternoon and -- even though I was completely unknown in the Orlando area, but the lovely Liz Langley of NPR gave the show a boost on her show -- an audience of some-odd 30 people showed up Friday night to see one sweaty lady dance a monologue for 75 minutes.
But this time we knew from the beginning it would be different.
Last year in San Francisco I added a new section discussing the different styles of bellydance and the wide variety of props we use. That segment ends with a rip-roaring cane dance which sends the audience into intermission with a smile.
When we mounted the show again here in NYC, I brought in three additional dancers and an emcee. Two dancers would open the show with their respective solos, and then join me at the end of Act 1 for the cane dance and "Parade of Props." Then the third -- a Master Teacher who had been dancing for 25 years or more -- would open the second act.
During the months' long run, we had a stunning variety of Master Teachers, including the legendary Morocco -- who is the dance historian I quote in the show -- and internationally known dancers such as Nourhan Sharif, Rayhana, Jehan, Shoshana, Dalia Carella, Layla Mary, Aszmara, and Altagracia Bruno.
And nearly each show had some bizarre catastrophe usually involving theater drama which were resolved in unexpected-to-miraculous ways -- like the dressing rooms were inexplicably locked (I jimmied them with an old credit card I'd forgotten to throw out), or the CD player had been stolen from the booth by the prior theater group (an audience member happened to have a portable CD player!). And on and on.
The one with the CD player was especially strange. It was the night Morocco was set to perform and she arrived with her music only on CD. A few other minor things had gone wrong that evening and we had just resolved them, and when that happened, I had that moment of internal collapse, somewhere between "I give up" and "somehow this will work out."
I went out to buy the wine for concession and passed my mother who was just arriving. "Is everything OK?" she asked. "I can't even..." I shook my head.
When I returned, Morocco brandished the portable CD player with a grin. "It's OK!" she beamed, "We got it!!"
My tech Alex plugged it in, we did our quick sound and light check and we were good to go!!
And show after show this sort of thing would happen ... it was as though the lesson I needed to learn was that no matter what, this show would go on!!!
With that in mind, I contacted my Florida sponsor, Rita Van Trump, and asked if she'd like to put together the show in this new format -- with local dancers joining me for for the very first time.
This meant a bunch of people I had never met in my life, who had probably not seen the show two years before, and had no idea who I was would commit to learning a complex cane dance as well as the comedic bits for the Parade of Props.
"So, can we do this?" I asked?
"Oh yes we can!" was her resounding reply.
Continued in Part 2....
No comments:
Post a Comment