It was YB's birthday on Tuesday and, to celebrate, we went to Luna Park on Saturday. As it is her last year in her twenties, she decided it was fitting to go to an amusement park and act like kids, going on silly rides and stuff. I'm not one for rides but Luna Park is such a good opportunity for pictures.

The highlight of the trip was Coney Island; DB pondered that we were old skool... but how can you beat silly mirrors and slippery slides. As we entered the building I raced ahead to take happy snaps of the girls on the various rides and a random guy came up to me, thinking the girls were some kind of celebrities or something, and asked me if I was a professional photographer. No I'm not and no the girls were just having fun. DB and I decided to try out the big kids slide, which is crazy high, as we were about to slide down we questioned what the hell we were doing up there but, after the first go we were immediately back up the stairs for a second go. Fun. Later a group of us tried the Wheel of Joy, where you sat on top of a spinning cone and tried to stay on the longest. I slid off fairly early but DB was challenging for a win when she stacked it and did a full forward roll over her tiara and got a couple of bruises. Awesome!

None of the other rides at Luna Park quite matched Coney Island, except maybe the Dodge 'ems, which is classic. YB decided it was more fun to try to avoid being bumped, which only just made her even more of an appealing target! We also tried some of the games. The first was a sort-of race where you tried to roll balls into holes, each hole makes your chariot fish go a certain distance. Three Bangarra dancers had a go and we got third-last, second-last and last positions. We have shamed our company. Later on JS and I tried the Clowns; I initially thought that high scores are good and felt dejected half way through when I was only on four when we found out that we should actually aim to get a LOW score. Consequently I did pretty well and got a Cat In The Hat, which I gave to JPB. He loved it...

This is the other thing that has been taking up my spare time. It's fucking awesome. I got the PS3 a few weeks ago now and, besides a few old PS2 games that required a PS3 system upgrade to be playable, I haven't really had a true PS3 game until the weekend when I finally decided to fork out the dosh (and, even with the 15% discount, is still a heck of alot of bread). It looked awesome in the shop and, fuck, it looks awesome at home. 'cept that I don't have a high def TV. Which is now high on the wish list!

It's gritty and violent. Racing around improbable circuits, the immediate highlight of the experience is actually stacking it, which happens quite often to begin with. Engines explode, wheels fly off in all directions, and your driver violently slams into the rock face or plunges down the mountain to his or her doom, all in dramatic slow motion. It's wrong but it's oh so cool!

Anyway, I'm still pretty crap at it, JPB is doing better than me but I managed to win a race around the top of a devilish mesa before JPB. I guess by the time I get back from Melbourne he'll be awesome at it.

I haven't previously had much time for the behemoth "Social Networking" site that is MySpace. What's the point when you have your own blog site??? MySpace seemed so limited in it's ability to be customised, unlike a drupal site like this one that is endless in it's scope. A profile box, a list of favourite music and film and stuff, a bunch of friends... it was easy to be quite cynical about it.

Until I found out about div overlays. It's brutal, like hammering a nail with a sledgehammer, but it frees you up to get quite creative. Although in executing it you can run the risk of creating a page that doesn't look anything like a MySpace page, which could confuse your average MySpacer. Retaining some kind of resemblance to a plain ol' MySpace page is still necessary.

So I've gone and customised my MySpace page, which is why I've neglected this site for a while, and now it looks pretty. I used a design that I had previously planned to implement on this site, the mirrorballs, except that considering I haven't been clubbing for a while now it doesn't seem all that appropriate. I may change it to a dance sort of picture perhaps... Anyway, the possibilities with div overlays are endless! I've also done a couple of others: Science of Sleep (the prototype...) and True Stories. The last one I only finished on the weekend and it's real pretty; not hard to do when there's already a design format to follow, I basically didn't stray too far from the existing publicity material. There's been the usual cross-browser problems (don't get me started talking about Mac Internet Explorer 5.x, I don't think it knows what to do with a negative margin, I'm just hoping nobody actually uses that browser anymore especially since MacOSX comes with Safari) but on the whole, I'm happy with it.

Take a look, add yourself as a friend, go nuts in the comment box! Come to the show! And don't forget to drop by mine as well...

I was at the Lord Roberts for a bit of a Lamb Burger when I checked my phone. There's a message from my sister up in Darwin asking me if I was going to be on Dancing With The Stars next week. Almost immediately it dawned on me: DB and WB, the poster children are going to be on DWTS. When the rehearsal director pulled the couple aside just before lunch we all joked that they were in trouble (that they had to go to the Principal's office because they were naughty children, or something like that) and, because they were the poster children, they were simply required to do another publicity thing for True Stories. Nothing special.

I thought that maybe I just missed the announcement that they had this gig, I try not to think too much about work things during lunch, I rang to confirm. Maybe WB was to do Moth with DB; boy there would have been hell to pay if that was the case. But, no, they're going to be doing new choreography, which is far more appropriate considering that we're opening in Melbourne pretty soon.

Anyway, it's pretty exciting for them. And the rest of us have been fielding enquiries from friends and relatives for the last couple of days: "no, we're not all going to be on the show, just the poster children". But we'll all be down at the local pub eagerly watching twist and tangle into the various headstands, lifts and one-arm-cartwheels-on-partner's-bended-leg movements.

Oh, and why on Earth is Tim not in the final??? Him and Nat are easily the best couple in the entire series, there is no justice in the world.

Does anyone know why the harbour has just exploded? I love random fireworks. We had just finished work and were sitting in the office checking emails and stuff when suddenly it sounded like the pier was being bombarded. Racing outside we found the sky ablaze, which lasted for the next half an hour.

Sydney loves a good fireworks display and, besides New Years, this was pretty special. We just don't know what for? It would have been nice to have had some warning so I could have brought decent equipment to work to take pictures.

Well THAT was a fantastic Easter Weekend, wasn't it? I mean, it started out slow (experimenting with customising MySpace pages over Good Friday) but there's nothing like a seventeen hour party to get the festivities going. Actually, after that effort I was pretty much a wreck for the rest of the party season but I had a good time. And its only now that I feel like I've recovered. Easter Tuesday and I'm sweating out all the fun of the weekend and ohmigod I spent the morning standing on my head way to get over it all.

The last couple of weeks I've been suffering from a persistent cold. From uncontrollable sneezing to aches and fatigue, it was hard to get over it after doing full days of rehearsals and by pre-Easter Monday I just had to take the sickie that I should have taken at the start of the whole ordeal. Wasn't really inspired to blog about anything. But thank God I was feeling much better by the weekend, and I guess the alcohol did its thing and killed off the bugs. JPB still has a nagging cough that keeps you up all night though...

I haven't written much about the love of my life lately but everything is going well. It's just a bit too personal to talk too much about us. But he's been absolutely adorable and we've been having a great time. Well past the eighteen month point and still going strong.

Puppet Up! @ The State Theatre

It was slightly eerie to walk along Market Street to The State during Earth Hour. Sure the CBD away from George Street is always quite dead on weekend nights but on this particular night the city streets were, well... dead-er, would you believe. Even the glittering entrance of the State seemed less radiant. Maybe it was just because I've got this cold that's been lingering on for over a week now, everything already seemed slightly muted without CBD businesses flicking off their lights.

It's not really feasible to turn off all the lights at the State. The show must go on, and all of that and, besides, the puppets freak out in the darkness so one of them made a statement of apology and switched off the lights for five seconds, which as it turns out was as much as the puppet could take before they ended up in hysterics.

When you combine puppets with adult themes, you're pretty much set up for laughs. And I barely stopped laughing for the entire show. After a snappy lead-in song with the puppets and a quick introduction by host Patrick explaining what would happen (think theatre sports but with puppets), the scenes came through thick and fast. Uncovered, the puppeteers performed in front of a camera with the footage projected onto screens on both sides of the stage and to see them create the scene is an experience in itself. You just have to be impressed by their ability to take just about any suggestion from the audience and make up something funny on the spot, over and over again, night after night, I'd rather have it choreographed thank you very much.

Too many highlights to mention all of them and, besides, they probably won't ever happen again, such is the joy of improvisational theatre. The puppet singing an apology for saying another puppuet's face looked like a vagina, the Zimbabwean yodellers and knife-throwers, the milking of the cow, Tom Cruise snogging L Ron Hubbard... we could have had the Opera about Tourette's Syndrome but they had that one the night before and the cast don't do repeats...

Umm... actually, they do:

Chunky Move - Glow

It's unnerving to have the choreographer of the show that you're seeing sit next to you. Especially when the people accompanying you usually make it quite clear and quickly whether or not they liked the show and they are not aware that the creator of the show is sitting within earshot. Such outspokenness is a good quality to have, don't get me wrong, because if a dance work is shite then, well, you can't really blame someone for saying so.

But I still would have found it an awkward situation to be in...

Thankfully Glow wasn't crap. The effect of the technology was beautiful and intriguing; and after only twenty six minutes, it didn't have enough time to get tiresome. Though despite the obvious technical ability of the soloist, her execution of the distorted and fluid movement phrases, the real showcase was her shadow. The visual tracking mechanism employed, that registered her every movement and influenced the projection beamed back onto her writhing floor-bound body, created some startling effect on her shadow that would not normally be possible. At times, her shadow would manipulate the spirograph-like loops of light that were projected onto the floor around her. Other times, the mechanism would remember her movement and leave black imprints on the floor, as if her ghostly shadow was delayed and was slowing catching up to her. Then there were times when her shadow would smear across the floor, disrupting the parallel lines that were drawn across her body. Beautiful, understated effects that have immediately obvious potential as theatrical devices.

Twenty six minutes doesn't give you much time to get bored but it can certainly leave you wanting more. It's a beautiful technology but there's certainly more scope for it to be used better. What little theatricality is shallow and unsatisfying. The speaking-in-tongues sits oddly in a show that seems primarily concerned with visual effect, though halfway through I realised that perhaps there may have been a concurrent audio feedback process happening, where the dancer's screeches were being recorded and manipulated by software, to be incorporated into the soundtrack. THAT would have been intriguing but it wasn't clear that this was happening and, if it was, it wasn't really taken far enough.

As installation art, it was sublime. As a piece of theatre, it fell quite short. The technology is extraordinary. Now it just needs to be used.

UPDATE: click here to see a snippet of Glow. Thanks to Doug Fox for the link. It was good to be reminded of just how visually striking it was to watch. Certainly something not to miss...

Four Years
We had just finished our first quick regional tour around NSW, presenting a program of bits and pieces pulled together from repertoire. Just about half of the company were new dancers and so there wasn't much there to really stretch us, it more like Introduction to the Life of a Touring Professional Dancer. When we got back to Sydney, Moth was one of the first pieces that Stephen worked on for Bush and it featured the auntie/nephew partnership of DB and ST. Not quite Fonteyn/Nureyev, it was still quite enduring, and Moth became a signature duet for both of them and was performed numerous times both in Bush and on its own for one-off corporate gigs and stuff. CK and I were the official understudies but, back then, there wasn't a really concrete idea of the understudy beyond "just in case someone gets injured but it probably won't happen so don't worry about it". Besides, in Bush it really wasn't practical for me to do it anyway, considering I'm in the piece immediately prior to it.

Like all living things, Moth grew over the four years along with the dancers. For four years I kept an eye on it, noticing the changes made to it along the way. But even with the departure of ST from the company last year, there didn't seem to be any chance of me ever performing this duet as Bush has been to just about everywhere in the country (with the glaringly notable exception of Perth).

Four minutes
So there I am, settling into first plie immediately behind DB's right shoulder, waiting for the first of many abrupt strings that are the little flutters of my moth-shadow wings. The stage is small, rough and rickety. We are in the Paddington Town Hall, it had been a hot and humid day and, with the venue having no cooling system, there were large aluminium tubes connected to air-conditioning machines pumping cool air into the hall. A few moments into the dance I overbalance and almost fall over. There are people watching from their tables right next to the tiny stage and their gaze is putting me off.

This is my official Moth debut. Not Sadler's, not the Kennedy Center, not the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. But here. After four years. It was surreal, as if I was lying. "Hah! You've come to see Moth but, instead, all you're getting is this."

It was about halfway through the duet when I get a connection with DB and it starts feeling like a dance. Dance like nobody is watching, and for a moment it was true. But then I almost dance DB off the stage and my hand nearly hits the projection screen and I'm back in the stuffy old venue, on the rickety old stage. I was so conscious of making noise, as every landing from a jump was a loud thud on this stage and with people less than a metre from the front of the stage it was absolutely possible that they could hear my breathing. I am a shadow, I'm supposed to be quiet.

Four minutes later, we were taking our curtain-less calls. Maybe it'll be another four years before I do that again.

BTW, the event was for Yalari, an organisation that gives indigenous kids the support to get through secondary school. Even Robbie Williams had donated something to the silent auction: he's a good sort, isn't he?