Cues & Tattoos 2010

April 20th, 2010

As I write this, I am at 34,000 feet, listening to Tori Amos, and staring out my window at miles and miles of mountain ranges. I’m on my way home from Denver, where I attended the Association of Writing Programs conference. This is basically a convention where writers go to network, buy more books than they can afford, stalk well-known poets, size each other up (“Oh, you got your MFA from [insert name of university]? Well, my book’s coming out from [insert name of small press]”) and pitch their manuscripts to anyone that looks like s/he might be famous and/or influential. I worked the table for Wave Books (the awesome poetry press where I intern). I also saw a lot of gorgeous books—print media is not dead!—went to a couple of readings, got some sort of altitude-related malaise, and had many drinks with William, my poet-friend Most Likely to Get His Book Published First.

But I digress. The reason I bring up AWP is that I have learned something this weekend—two conventions in two weeks is one convention too many. I had barely recovered from Cues and Tattoos two weekends ago before getting on a plane Denverbound. Am I exhausted? Yes. Was C&T worth it? Yes. I took some great workshops, saw a great show, participated in a great show, and got to spend some time with my favorite Orlandoids, Tammy and Mary of Yip Podcast.

The weekend kicked off on Friday with the Instructor’s Showcase. There were a lot of amazing performances—it was especially exciting to see local performers Infusion Tribal and Medea—and, seeing Fat Chance Belly Dance perform for the second time in my life, I almost cried (just like the first time). My FCBD crush of this year is Anita—the tall, gorgeous yoga instructor with chessboard tattoo on her back—but all of those women are just so amazing to watch. We also got to take a workshop with Fat Chance on floorwork. It was pretty fantastic—Carolena is so knowledgeable about anatomy and dance mechanics and she gave us several levels of floorwork to practice, from mermaid turns to laybacks. I also made an interesting discovery about my own body mechanics—I have outwardly-rotated hips, which is why some floorwork requiring the hips to rotate inward is extremely difficult for me. But it also means I’ve got great turnout!—too bad I’m not a ballerina.

Another workshop I took was with Jolie of Read My Hips, a Chicago-based fusion company. I took her workshop at C&T last year as well and loved it—if you ever get a chance to study with her, I highly recommend it. She’s a fantastic dancer—great technique, very personable—and she led a wonderful workshop. I came away with some new solo fusion combinations, and even some group improv combos. In fact, the class inspired me to begin choreography of a slow solo—I’m interested in playing with different types of dynamics and especially exploring the “slinky” end of my range of movement. I am really drawn to Jolie’s sassy, technical style—lots of attitude and personality (you can see her performing here.)

The ladies from Troupe Hipnotica did a great job organizing this HUGE event—a festival as major as this one involved a ton of behind-the-scenes work but the whole weekend was organized and ran smoothly. Awesome vending, awesome workshops, and two shows—can’t wait to do it again next year.

SK