Rixosous

Three Good Things

As you all know, last summer I quit my day job to try to make a go of doing dance, writing, and random freelance jobs full-time.  It's not quite a living yet, though I'm getting closer, but not having a day job and the resulting restrictions on time off means that I'm free to take exciting gigs as they come along.  "Exciting" can actually get really exciting.  I thought after my big New Zealand/Australia celebration-of-freedom trip last summer that I would be out of luck on interesting travel due to extreme poverty.  But that doesn't seem to be quite the case.

Here are the three most exciting gigs I have coming up this year, one of which has been announced for months and two of which I've been keeping quiet until the details were confirmed:

Philcon, improvised

Philcon is rapidly approaching, and I'm still dithering about the shape of my weekend. 

Part of it is fairly fixed:

I will arrive early Friday after picking up a mysterious package and one or two passengers in New Jersey.  I am feeling lame, so I will probably wear jeans and a slightly risqué t-shirt rather than bringing a costume.

I will spend all Friday afternoon and much of the evening running Program Ops, presumably once again in the Slightly Mauve room.  Since the schedules went out on Monday, I will probably spend lots of time troubleshooting program issues along with the usual check-in routine.

At some point I will escape and go hit parties and maybe some filking.  I am not on any program this year, so once I escape my time is my own.  If Principal Speaker Peter S. Beagle is on any evening programming I will escape long enough to go to that.  I often ignore programming and guests, but Beagle is a special case.

I will crash in a corner of Program Ops on the airbed I have thoughtfully supplied myself with.  Saturday morning will be more of the same.

Early Saturday afternoon, I will head to Gettysburg, where I will run an 1860s-era ball all dressed up in my hoop skirt.  I will be put up in style at the Gettysburg hotel and will be well paid for the whole experience.

Sunday morning, there will be brunch in Gettysburg.  I will not need to dress up but might have to look respectable, so I will bring a dress or something.

At that point I will have decisions to make:

1. return to Philcon and see The Last Unicorn (film) with Peter S. Beagle commenting?

1a. end up in Brooklyn at Catherynne Valente's no-doubt overcrowded book release party?

1b. end up in Manhattan at the no-doubt overcrowded Steampunk event?

1c. avoid NYC like a sensible person and go home and get a good night's sleep

2. drive in the opposite direction to see a friend of mine in the last performance of a musical in which he stars, resulting in getting home at, optimistically, midnight after six more hours of driving?*

3. become screamingly anti-social and go straight home from Gettysburg

What do you think?

 

* Note: this is insane.  That does not always stop me.

Halloween weekend's dancing

Halloween is pretty much a busman's holiday for me, since I dress up funny all the time.  But I hopped up to Boston this past weekend for a bit of costumed dancing Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at, respectively, the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers' Black Cat Speakeasy and Mostly Waltz Boston's Halloween afternoon dance.

Saturday night at the Speakeasy I decided to get into the spirit of historical fancy dress and thus wore the green tango dress and gloves that I made/dyed to surprise S.J. Tucker with a tango at her performance of "Alligator in the House" at Lunacon a few years ago. It was comfortable and easy to dance in and very much in the fancy dress mode: a dress and gloves of the appropriate color and a stuffed animal accessory.  That's me at left, with my alligator.

Home

Trip diary and many, many pictures to be retro-posted.

First, an Adventure

Before I start my life as a starving artist, I'm going to use my substantial accumulated back vacation pay to have one little Adventure.  A travel Adventure.  I'm going to Australia and New Zealand for three weeks, with the trip centered around this year's World Science Fiction Convention and a visit to my old friend Emily, whom I haven't seen since she moved to New Zealand twelve years ago.  I'll also be hitting the NZ natcon, Au Contraire, which is very conveniently located in Wellington, where Emily lives.

My style of Adventure is to:

Stratford, Ho!

I'm doing my annual wander to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario this week and will be once again trying to blog each show as I go.  I don't know quite what I'm seeing, because I've only bought one ticket out of the nine shows of interest.  The rest will be rush tickets, which I've had great luck with the past couple of years.

Other than that, I'll be sitting by the river, reading and relaxing, hitting my favorite used bookstore and Callan's Books for mysteries, and generally having a lovely, quiet, non-stressful time.

But today is a long day's journey across New York state, hopefully with less excitement than two years ago at the crossing.

Off to Stanford

After six years, I am once again getting to make a pilgrimage-like trip to Stanford for a wonderful nine days of dancing: Stanford Dance Weekend followed by Stanford Historical Dance Week and then possibly Stanford Waltz Weekend (either dancing if there's space or just observing).  I'm going primarily as a student, though I'll be giving a pair of seminars that I've been stressing about for a month, one on Regency era dance developments and dancing master feuds and one extremely geeky one on choreographic connections across five centuries of set dances.  But mostly I'll just be learning.  I'm signed up as a lead (well, I signed up as a follow, but volunteered to be switched to improve balance) but will switch roles back and forth as necessary to balance any individual class.

I expect results similar to my last such trip in 2004: a substantial improvement in overall dance skills plus a whole lot of new repertoire.  This is a rare chance for me to do everything from Renaissance to Regency to Swing to Cross-Step Waltz in one trip and to learn from expert instructors from all over the world.  And compared to 2004, I'm a much better dancer and leader already and can probably absorb new information more efficiently.  Now I just have the agony of making choices like: Charleston and collegiate swing or Barriera and Gracca Amorosa?  Waltz dips or cross-step troika?  Blues or Steampunk?  Fusion waltz or fusion foxtrot?  Stretch myself with new material every single period or take some classes where I'm already familiar with it to give myself a break?  Do as much Regency as possible to dance it with other skilled dancers or skip it because I already know most of it?  These are lovely problems to have!

I fly out Friday morning.  I can't wait.

I will have limited time available from the dance week, mostly dinner on various evenings.  If any Rixo readers are in the Bay Area and would like to get together, let me know.  I rather expect there to be Wifi access everywhere, given the location, so I'll be checking email and blogs periodically.  I won't have a car, however, so you'll have to come to Stanford to fetch me.

Air travel karma

I'm starting to wonder if travel to Kalamazoo is just jinxed, after the last two years involved spending hours at O'Hare in 2008 and then being ridiculously delayed and my luggage lost until a couple of hours before I left Michigan last year.

This year I made a point of avoiding O'Hare in my transfers and actually flew out of Philly rather than any of my usual New York-and-Connecticut airports.  This was because while my outbound flight allowed generous time for screw-ups, my return plans were very tight -- I had to finish my presentation in Kalamazoo at noon and be on the dance floor at 8:00 that evening teaching at the Steampunk World's Fair.  That was down in New Jersey, so flying back and forth from Philly meant I'd be much closer to where I needed to be.  The timing would work if everything went perfectly.  And yes, that was enough of a gamble that I arranged a backup teacher in case I didn't make it.

So how did it work?  Well, let's just say the trip out was not quite as planned.

Once More, Kalamazoo

I'll be in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a very fast trip Thursday evening and Friday morning this week to deliver a paper at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies.  I'm part of session 243, Friday morning at 10:00, "Long Ago and Far Away: Intra-European Perspectives on Early Modern Dance" sponsored by Early Dance at Kalamazoo.  My paper is called "Expressions of Medievalism in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Dance Manuals" and is unofficially known as "look what those clowns did to the pavane!"  My co-presenters are Thea Frank speaking about the dance Quanto Dyspayne from 17th century England and Michael Cramer, discussing reconstructing masques.

I'll be heading out immediately after my session, so anyone who wants to hang out with me at the Congress should let me know in advance so we can plan to meet Thursday night.

Boston, again, and help wanted (Holmes fans)

This weekend is the last of my Boston trips for awhile; as soon as I get some publicity materials finished and my costume packed I'm on the road for a Steampunk ball tonight and a waltz afternoon tomorrow, with a meeting with my band interspersed to do some planning.  I'm hoping to squeeze sleep in there somewhere, too.  I'm not running these events -- this weekend is a combination of dancing for fun and event-promotion for a ball which I'm frantically trying to get planned for the end of March.

To that end:

HELP! 

Does anyone who reads Rixo have enough of a passion for Sherlock Holmes to have a general familiarity with the canon and enough writing skill to do some short (one-paragraph) epistles in the style of Doyle/Watson in the next few days?  If I had time to read heavily I could absorb some style by contagion, but (reality check) I don't right now, and it's been years since I've reread the stories, and I'm under omigodcrazy pressure to get a whole bunch of little blurbs written over the next week.  We're not talking pages and pages; more like murder-mystery clues in pastiche form, the length of this post or shorter.

Any takers?  I'm about to lose my mind here, and it occurred to me that this was something that could be delegated long-distance to pretty much anyone with some writing skill.

Off to the Flurry

This evening I'm off to the Dance Flurry in snowy Saratoga Springs once more!  I'm feeling very well-treated by the Flurry this year.  I have four sessions.  All were in my original schedule; no last-minute add-ons.  None are Waltz 101.  Two of them (Cross-Step Waltz and Victorian Contras & Squares) are in the main hall.  This will be my first time in the main hall.  I'm working with three groups of super musicians and friends: Spare Parts; the Flying Romanos; and the wonderful Mary Lea, Jacqueline Schwab, and Dan Beerbohm.  I'll have the magnificent Jennie Worden as my teaching partner for Cross-Step.  I made the (bottom of the) list of performer highlights on the Flurry webpage, the first time I have ever been part of the advertising.  And I get to repeat my disco line dance session from last year, for which I have procured some frightening black stretch pleather bell-bottom pants by way of setting the atmosphere.

I'm a little nervous about calling the Victorian session in the main hall, but not about teaching waltz in it.  Really, that makes sense.  I know my waltz session will draw hordes of people.  Two years ago when I did it, I had to have people dance in two separate groups since there wasn't room in the (smaller) hall for everyone to dance at once.  So it's good that they're acknowledging this by giving me a bigger space.  But the Victorian session is scarier, since it will draw the modern contra dance crowd who pretty much live in the main hall, and they're used to pretty good calling and dances that are, um, less Victorian.  So that's a more challenging crowd.

I have a new and clever method for teaching going in and out of zigzags in cross-step, which I have tested with my new local students and at a waltz workshop and a private lesson in the last month.  But a big session at the Flurry will be the true test.  I am not truly concerned; the first few experiments worked well.

The fourth session is Renaissance dances; specifically, branles from Arbeau.  No worries there.  The full schedule is up on the Flurry webpage, or you can find my personal detail schedule (minus the nervous rambling) on Kickery.

I have a passenger for the ride up but will be looking for riders to keep me company on the way back.  I will also be picking up a new and larger hoop on the way, but it does not qualify as company, being nonverbal.

I won't be totally offline this weekend -- along with scary bell bottoms for myself, I have bought my laptop new travel gear* -- but I'll be too busy to check in much.  If you're at the Flurry, find me at the end of one of my sessions -- not at the beginning and please, not in the middle -- and say hello.

Along with my own sessions, I'm hoping to finally get the Hambo to stick, find out what the Texas Two-Step is all about, practice Balboa, and continue my survey of Blues Classes With No Common Elements.

* What does it say about me that I have spent ten times as much money this week on buying wearables for my laptop as for myself?

One more weekend...

One more weekend on the road, then things become calm for the holidays with three relatively quiet weekends in a row.  I can't wait.  But this weekend I'm headed up to Boston for two events:

On Saturday night, I will attend the Fezziwig Ball in Salem, which is being held by my good friends in the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers.  They've asked for costume from the lifetime of Dickens, which means 1817-1870.  I suspect they're looking more for 1830s-1860s, but I plan to take advantage of the early part of the range and wear something Empire-waisted.  With luck, this will include wearing new stays, gown, and still-TBD outer garment (since the ball is preceded by a lantern-light parade).  How much of this actually happens...well, let's just say it's going to be a long night in the sewing room.  I've already decided, given the likely temperature and my lack of sewing time, that punting on a bonnet and going with my black sheepskin hat and muff for the parading is probably a good idea.

On Sunday, I'm running an afternoon tea dance in Cambridge for CVD and Eclectic Enterprises' Mostly Victorian Tea Dance series.  (Update 12/20/09: This tea dance is CANCELED due to severe weather conditons.)  I'm likely to not be in costume for this one due to general lameness and the fact that long gowns make it harder to teach and demonstrate steps.   The format is an instruction period followed by social dancing followed by more advanced instruction, food, and more social dancing.  The dances will be a general 19th-century mix of couple dances (waltz, polka, schottische, galop) and set dances (contras, quadrilles).  I will probably focus the teaching on the schottische and polka.  Music will be some mix of recorded and live.

Given that schedule and the fact that I want to spend time Sunday morning with the friend I'm staying with, I won't really have time to socialize outside of these dances during this trip, but I would love to chat with anyone who's coming to either of these events.  I will have much more time for this at the ball than at the tea dance, since I'm not in charge of anything at the ball.

Before the Fall

(edited 10/25 with some schedule updates)

Lazy August behind me, I'm heading into an insane streak of dance gigs and associated travel.  Weekend by weekend plans from today through mid-December:

• Swing Out New Hampshire (Lindy hop as a student)
• NYC (teaching Regency & Renaissance)
• CT (DJing waltz) and Boston (teaching cross-step waltz and Steeleye Span) and NYC (Steeleye Span)
• CT (teaching quadrilles) and Rhode Island (teaching cross-step waltz)

• NYC (teaching Regency & Renaissance)
• Cape May, NJ (dance weekend: teaching Victorian, leading Victorian ball & 1910s tea dance)
• CT (DJing waltz, teaching Regency, leading Regency ball)
• MA (teaching various couple dances at gender-role-free contra dance camp)

• NYC (teaching 1830s & schottische evolution)
• [possible day job business trip to west coast during weekdays in between]
(not happening, hurrah!)
• MY ^mostly^ FREE WEEKEND AT HOME (unless I go to NJ for a 1910s ball)  (and I've decided to go)
• CT (DJing waltz) and possibly MD if a gig works out (nope, so doing an SCA event on Saturday to show off some dancing, but not leaving CT)
• PA (Philcon, leading a Victorian ball, then back to Philcon)
• MD (Darkovercon, leading a Regency ball there and teaching some 17thc country dance)

• NYC (teaching 1830s & 17thc English dance)
• CT (hosting holiday waltz party and then doing a private dance workshop) and MA (teaching/leading Regency tea dance)
• MA (attending a Victorian ball just for fun Saturday, then running a Victorian tea dance on Sunday)

There's one other gig to schedule either on that last weekend or the weekend before Christmas.  (Scheduled above.)  Then I shall rest.

So is that insane or what?  On the bright side, almost all of these signify extra income and only a few things represent actual unreimbursed expenses.  Overall, I come out ahead.  And if anyone wants to know what I did some weekend this fall, you have a handy reference list above.

I tend to be more disciplined about blogging when my life is otherwise crazy.  Having to budget time carefully seems to help.  So I don't plan to vanish all fall.  But I will be catatonic with exhaustion by Christmas -- I work a full-time day job along with all this weekend work.

I hope everyone's fall plans are equally exciting, though perhaps not equally exhausting!

If This is Tuesday...

I'm off again, this time for a wild string of trips that involves planes, trains, and Boltbus, and will take me through the following places, not counting airport layovers:

Greensboro, North Carolina (family wedding)
Baltimore, Maryland (costuming and dancing)
New York City (just passing through)
Newport, Rhode Island (teaching)
New York City (teaching)

In between all of this there will be approximately eighteen total hours at home, two or three of which will be spent in the office catching up on my day job.  My net access will be rather spotty, but I'll be around now and then.  I have a lot of in-progress posts that I plan to work on offline and finally get up for folks to read.  (We'll see how well that clever plan works...)

I'm actually writing this from the airport, and it's time to go through security. 

Have fun, folks.  Don't wreck the place.  Tea is to the left, fruit juice to the right.

Oh, Canada

I'm heading off to Canada on an extended vacation, or set of vacations: three days at an SCA event (Known World Dance Symposium), then about twenty-four hours in Toronto visiting a friend, followed by a week in Stratford seeing the usual cluster of shows.  I'm aiming for nine, but being spontaneous by not getting tickets in advance, so who knows what will happen.  I also have a brand-new tent which I've never put up.  Hopefully raising it won't be too interesting.

After last year's exciting experience at the border, I've made sure there is not so much as a stray twig anywhere in my car, and I plan to cross at Niagara rather than Lewiston.  It's going to be a rather interesting drive, since I'm getting started several hours later than plan and will be driving through most of the night.

I won't be totally offline, since there's net access everywhere I'm going, but I won't be around too often since it's, y'know, vacation.  Rixo is also likely to turn into all theater, all the time for awhile, though some back-posting may also occur as I finish up stuff I've had sitting around not-quite-finished for, um, a long time.

Everyone should take the opportunity to drink tea while I'm gone.  Try not to wreck the place.  And we're coming up fast on comment #6000, so if you talk up a storm while I'm gone it just might be you!

Have a happy holiday weekend, if you're celebrating Canada Day or Independence Day (U.S.A.)!

Around I Go

I'm going to be wandering around the country this weekend, with a trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan on Thursday & Friday for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, where I am presenting a paper, and then out to Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday to see friends.  Yes, it was actually pretty cheap to combine those trips into one wacky set of flights.  Hopefully the actual execution of my travel plans will be slightly less wacky than last year's exciting experience.

If anyone who happens to be reading Rixo wants to meet up in person in either location, now is the time to say so.

I won't be offline much, since both places I'm staying and several of the airports have net access, so talk among yourselves but don't plan any wild, blog-wrecking parties in the comments.  Sedate tea-sipping and genteel conversation leavened with vague innuendo and the odd pun are quite acceptable, however.

Dance Geeks at Play

I was up in Saratoga Springs (NY) this weekend, attending the Society of Dance History Scholars conference at Skidmore College.  Academic conferences sometimes make me wonder if I actually want to get a doctorate.  I can't easily rattle off phrases like "to mediate the intermediality" and "the intersectionality of the intersection" (honest-to-ghod quotes from an actual session) and I'm not sure I want to develop the habit of doing so!  It's all quite different from the other sort of event I'm used to attending that features panel-shaped presentations (science fiction conventions) and even felt quite different from the other two academic conferences I've attended, Kalamazoo and the Dolmetsch conference in England.  I'm sure there were just as many jargon-laden academics at Kalamazoo, but the two times I've attended I've hooked up with other social dance scholars and we've had a grand old time.  And Dolmetsch, of course, is full of social dance historians with whom I instantly have common ground.  SDHS is a bit different: most of the presentations focused on 20th- and 21st-century dance, and most of them focused on meta-analysis rather than on the dances themselves.  There was surprisingly little social/vernacular dance (and what there was leaned toward the not-dead-white-European).

The campus was beautiful, but isolated from the actual downtown in a way that would have made me nervous as a student; I like cities.  I did remember my digital camera, but I didn't feel like taking pictures of pretty campus landscaping or stately Victorian homes in Saratoga, But with my usual evil appreciation for kitsch, the sculpture above left, located at Skidmore, caught my eye.  Yes, that's a giant sculpture of a shopping bag, not an actual shopping bag (click the thumbnails in this post for full-size photos).  The little black thing in the corner is my laptop bag doubling as a size reference, since no one happened to be passing by to conveniently pose next to it.  This makes me think less "art!" and more "some artists have way too much time on their hands!"

Cot: Not!

First, let's be clear: transferring through Chicago O'Hare is a bad idea.  For travel in the U.S., there may be no worse idea.  And I knew when I booked tickets to Kalamazoo transferring at O'Hare both ways that I was asking for trouble.  But everything worked so smoothly on the way out that I was brimming with foolish confidence on Sunday.  Not everything that could have gone wrong did, but it was quite bad enough.  And since my recent plumbing miseries were well-received here, I thought I'd write a few words about the non-joys of my recent travel.

Gal in Kalamazoo

I will be in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Friday and Saturday this week for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, where I'm presenting a particularly geeky paper looking at gender differences in Italian Renaissance dance on Saturday afternoon.  Yes, I know that Renaissance != medieval, but Kalamazoo's definition of medieval is sufficiently elastic to cover Shakespeare and Spenser, not to mention Tolkien, so a little Caroso won't hurt them.

I know my friends Kathleen and Tracie are coming, since we're all doing the same session.  Anyone else?

Restful New England

Unique features advertised by highway rest stops, by state:

Connecticut: Free coffee and snacks

Vermont: Wi-fi

New Hampshire: Liquor store and lottery tickets

San Diego - March 7-9, 2008

I was sent off to San Diego for a business conference from March 7-9 this year.  Usually this conference is on weekdays; I wasn't best pleased at losing a weekend and having to miss a couple of dance events to go.  I took my new digital camera along and managed to figure out how to use it.  It then took me two more weeks to make time to figure out how to get the pictures out of the camera and edited, which is why I'm just now mentioning this trip.

The hotel was the Horton Grand, located in the so-called Gaslamp district, which is in fact an old bars-and-brothels district called the Stingaree.  For tourist purposes, gaslamps apparently sound more romantic than brothels.  The problem is that San Diego never actually had any gaslamps.  That hasn't stopped civic leaders: they simply installed fake ones along the streets.  We had a conference-sponsored walking tour on the Friday night, with a guide full of historical trivia like this, much of it concerning how artificial the downtown district is.  It's not just the gaslamps; many of the historical buildings have been moved around too.  It was getting dark pretty fast as we strolled around, so I don't have many other pictures from this, though I went back and took a few of the same sights on Sunday.  I did get an okay one of the convention center itself, home of San Diego Comicon.  This was when I realized that San Diego reminded me of Yokohama. Buildings like sails! Unfortunately, this completely walls off any ocean view from street level.