Cloud Kollektiv @ Double Lucky

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

I was lucky enough to be at the final Cloud Sessions night tonight.. the Cloud Kollektiv playing the new Double Lucky club in Leederville.

Cloud Kollektiv are Trilby Temperley (electronic beats and samples), David Scharpf (jazz keyboards) and Bal Singh (Indian sarengi and tabla). David was absent tonight, holidaying in his native Austria, but was ably replaced by John.. someone?!

Cloud Kollektiv gigs are always supplemented by a wealth of diverse and impressive guest talent, and tonight was even better than usual. Cloud Session regular Paul Hines provided his cool and thoughtful classical guitar riffs, throwing splashes of rich melody into the mix. Someone whose name I didn't catch played an electric double bass (I think). There were gorgeous improvised jazz vocals from Cle Wootton, freestyling from MC Joe Black, and the prophet-like and thought provoking spoken word from LA beatnik poet Jeremy Balius.

It's a pretty unique mix, and yeah all of those people perform at the same time, but it works amazingly well, all coming together into an unstoppable rich flow of lush sound.

Elvis Costello said trying to describe music in words is like trying to dance to architecture. I know a few dancers that would be totally up for dancing to architecture, but nonetheless, I feel I am illustrating his point.

It was an awesome show. I managed to drag a lot of people down this time, and they were all blown away, it was wicked. Cloud is an act that really responds to a great audience, and so they were in fine form in front of the fullest house they've had so far at Double Lucky. Can't wait for the next one.

www.cloudkollektiv.com

Also, I got to catch up with Jasmine and Trent from She Selexx, Trilby's other band, and since there were a few Visible Dancers there, we did a little more plotting. Always good.

Look! A picture of me on my own blog. Don't get used to it.

heat sink.

Friday, June 27th, 2008

A heat sink is part of a device that draws heat away from more sensitive components in order to protect them from heat damage.

I am a hate sink.

AIVDT

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Okay so AIVDT stands for Anything Is Valid Dance Theatre, and they are a group of pretty much the brightest creative minds that are graduating from WAAPA in 2008 (in my opinion, anyway!).. led by Serena Chalker and Quindell Orton. It's a collective that uses improvised performance in public spaces to expose new audiences to contemporary dance. Clearly their objectives are pretty well in line with Visible Dance's, so we're forming an alliance.

AIVDT's new website, provided by Visible Dance, has just gone online at www.aivdt.com. Built with my usual anything-is-valid approach to HTML... >_> So anyway, I'm google-pimping it off this site to get it going. Hence this blog.

Aftermath

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

It's so strange living this side of the Visible Dance launch. It's just been so much work for such a long tme getting to this new level of development. I'm adjusting to getting back into the website work again while still keeping the company humming along. Life is becoming strangely civilised.

The launch went great, we are all really happy with how it went off. We got our message across, the performance was a great experience for the audience. Anyway, you can read about it and see the photos on www.visibledance.com.

The feedback and buzz we're getting is sooo positive, its awesome. I feel like we just said something out loud that everyone's been wanting to say but couldn't find the words.

The new team is great, after our reshuffle. The company is stronger and more motivated than ever, it's actually a great relief, very exciting to have things working so well. There are several brand new creative projects in the works now which are all really exciting and different.

Because I'm insane, I'm also returning to a couple of photography projects that have been on the backburner for months. All dance management and no play makes Jeremy... well.. something bad.

It's uneasy being a non-dancer running a dance company. I love it, but I feel like there's going to be a level of cynicism about my role. Still. This thing we're doing.. desperately needs doing, no-one else is capable, and it's going to be such a huge benefit to the very people I worry about pissing off, so.. meh. No good deed goes unpunished.

Check out The Transients:
www.myspace.com/thetransientsmusic