Total. Utter. Pandemonium. And I love it. My latest show with my ensemble, OperaDans, opens tonight. It’s sold out. We will do the same show on Saturday. It is almost sold out. I’m happy.
The past few weeks have been… astonishing. I’ve done a lot of things I’ve never done before. Which has been terrifying. For example, I’ll be doing a lot more dancing in this show than I did in our first show, Sweet Solitude. Despite the fact that I am a flamenco dance teacher, I have never really seen myself as a dancer. I’m a good MOVER, but when I’m faced with three young, nubile, highly trained dancers, I can’t help but feel like a giant turd trying to polka.
In The Snow Queen, the boy, Kai gets lured away from his hot, young, fresh, flexible girlfriend, Gerda. By me. A greying pre-cougar who does a mean Snake when Push-it comes on, but never quite mastered the Running Man. And I have four choreographies in the show: one solo, two with the boy, and one with the girl. Three in which I’m also singing. I’ve always said I like to challenge myself. But at times I think I overdo it. Like now. I keep begging Zaddik, my choreographer, to tell me if I look crap. She insists I look good. And she must be telling the truth because I’m sure not paying her well enough to lie.
Moving on, before I have a panic-attack, In the past 4 weeks I’ve memorized my music, made and put up posters, had three vocal and language coaching sessions, learned to tango (badly), learned to point my toes and not walk like an ape (still working on it), purchased a 22 sq metre chunk of fake grass for the “spring” section of the set, collected 10 bags of fall leaves to decorate the “autumn” section, helped to construct nearly 500 paper flowers for the rest of the set, used four different rehearsal spaces, gotten used to working with a whole cast of dancers (ok, only three), coached the dancers and a professional actor on their acting skills (good grief, ME?!), applied for funding (and got SOME!), sold 250 tickets, managed a full staff of about 13 people, recorded a demo for the show (this was supposed to be a full recording but tragedy struck when the mic stand fell down breaking both mics. Crap.), learned how to position lighting on a stage, learned how to give lighting cues, and last but certainly not least, I managed not to kill anyone in the process. This is clearly my greatest achievement.
Today, besides the last minute prop preparations and things, the main objective is to groom myself: scrub the last three months’ of scaly skin off my heels, cut and paint my curling toenails, bikini wax away the dreadlocks, do my hair. I also have to warm up the old vocal cords, look over my music to make sure the words are really in my head, think over my dance steps, and try to relax into the evening. Check www.operadans.com for photos etc. of the show. Adam will be tweeting live throughout from 8 pm GMT+1. Or find operadans on Facebook. Lots of photos and videos there.
Gotta go. I forgot to schedule eating into the day.
