I'm sitting in my motel room in Golden, bantering with my tour roommate Amber Funk Barton and getting the summary of this evening's dance workshop. We (605 Collective) arrived in Golden yesterday evening after a long drive up from Vancouver. This is the first stop on a tour that will take us to Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Nanaimo, Toronto, Burnaby, Summerside (PE), and Halifax. The first portion of our tour is through the Made in BC networks of presenters. A friend suggested that I write about the tour, so here I am!
One thing I love about touring is seeing all the different venues - how they are built, what best practices the crew have in place, and learning their stories. The Golden Civic Centre has an amazing story, but I will write about that later this week once I have collected a few good photos. The company is in Golden until Saturday morning doing outreach events with the community before our performance on Friday night.
The show we are touring is New Animal and you can watch a trailer on YouTube HERE. It explores the inner animalistic traits in humans, has lots energetic movements, and is just fun to watch. If you are in the Vancouver area, we will be at the Shadbolt Arts Centre November 20-23.
Part of my preshow/running duties include purchasing, massaging, and washing lemons that are used during the show. The dancers tear them from each other's mouths and then basically have a lemon husk food fight. This morning our first outreach activity was a photoshoot with lemons, to imitate some film and photo content that was created with the dancers for New Animal. Jeff Harrison, the Technical Director, and I got to participate as well:
For this tour I am in a Production Coordinator/Company Manager role, with some ASM duties as well. My involvement in planning the tour began in August, and took up most of my time in September. Tour planning continues, since we will be on the road until early December, and schedules for the later venues are only now getting finalized. Some of the tour-planning things I do for the company are booking flights, booking car rentals, planning cargo transport, confirming outreach activities, confirming/booking hotels, and creating all the tour schedules. There's lots of excel spreadsheets. It's fun! (Honestly, it is.)
One thing I didn't anticipate in coming to Golden was the fact that many restaurants and shops shut down during October, in the slow season. Last night we walked over to a restaurant only to find that it is closed this week. (And only this week!) We found another option, but the city is pretty quiet when it's not tourist or ski season.
Today Jeff and I did the lighting hang and focus. Tomorrow morning I get a little bit of a sleep-in because the Civic Centre is booked for a community meeting, and then we finish with projector setup and lighting levels. The dancers have two outreach activities tomorrow: a mid-day outdoors "animal" photo shoot at the campground, and another evening dance workshop.
If you're in Golden, come by the Civic Centre and say hello!
Let me know in the comments what you want me to write about in future, or if you will be in one of our upcoming tour spots!
All the Best from the Road,
HQ
