Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada

August 22 a day that lives on in infamy… Well at least for me as it was the very first day of performances for my new Hot Dog Show. September 7, 17 days and 51 shows later I’m pleased to report that I’ve survived the experience. Went for dinner with the rest of the cast from the PNE Street Stars Program after finishing up today and then drove home and dragged all of the props into the basement. Thought I’d snap a quick picture of the gack that made up the last two and a half weeks before shifting gears and getting ready to head to Ketchikan to join the Golden Princess on Wednesday… No rest for the wicked…

So… How was it this new show? I’m pleased to report that things panned out more or less exactly how I anticipated before the run began. I knew that the first few days were going to beat me up pretty badly as I just struggled to get from the beginning of the show to the end of the show remembering to properly execute the mechanics involved in each routine, but bit by bit the show began to flow. I’m enormously thankful to all of the members of this year’s Street Stars Program as they all came by multiple times to give me notes and suggestions, and I owe a lot of the growth of the show to their feedback.

I was also thrilled to get video of the show at various stages of development over the course of the Fair, and if there’s anything purely technical (it is after Tuesday and Tuesdays are usually dedicated to technical issues) about this post it would be to strongly recommend that you video your show as it’s developing so you can check back to gauge your progress and self direct the show and make notes of those things that are working and those things that aren’t. I haven’t had a chance to review the footage fully yet, but I’m thrilled that I was able to collect 3 hours worth of tape of the performances over the 17 days, an hour of which, shot in the last two days of the fair, which will hopefully form the basis of a promotional video for the show.

Now that the run at the PNE is done I’m all excited about retooling a few things to see if I can make them work even better. I’ve also ordered some other props and will continue to push forward as though I’m going to be doing this show again… It was such fun to be living inside a show that’s so different from my juggling show and by the end it really did feel as though I had started to really figure out how the new beast worked… It’ll be good to take a break from it for a bit, but I do hope that I’m able to maintain my enthusiasm for this new project and can continue to enjoy watching it grow and progress…

Nice to feel this pumped about the execution of an idea that’s been floating around in my head for about the last 5 years and lived through a pretty intensive boot camp of getting through it’s initial run! Yippee!