Too "ethnic" to be modern dance and too "modern" to be ethnic dance.

2011: We had found the perfect theater for Devotion: the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley, CA.
Location: check, Date: check, Performers: check. Light and sound tech: check. Looking good.
Our theme was The Home.

For the past three years I had tried to stay on a tight budget. This included all of the artists and staff offering to work at reduced rates and staying with me or with friends. Sound and light equipment at the previous two theaters had been under par, and that meant rewiring and redoing all sorts of things to get it anywhere near right.

This time I decided to go wild; whatever you want was my motto. I wanted to see how much this show was really going to cost, if we were going to continue with it in the future. A bit of a risky escapade for a Capricorn, but there's another side to me that likes to roll the dice and see if I can double my money. After all was said and done I was $14,000.00 in the hole, a big black hole. The show was amazing, the artists were top notch, the back stage crew hit every nail on the head. The tickets soldout...and we still came in $14,000.00 in debt. And that's with the $5000.00 or so that the tickets brought in. So, my experiment yielded that we needed a budget of $19,000.00 per year to float this boat

So, do you see this equation?
$19,000needed to produce a show in the Bay Area
-$5000 possible in ticket sales
=$14,000 has to come from some other non-revenue source

This makes my brain hurt. As a business person, it makes no sense. Any self-respecting business would flag and tank with this sort of scenario, but it is de rigueur for the Bay Area.  I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to get the money. First, I took a year off from production; after talking with Colleena and Megha we decided that we'd have to take a year to plan the next show. The art of the show we can plan in a few months, but this sort of budget fiasco needed some serious thinking. Plus we all had very full travel schedules, we needed a break. I let the other cast members know that we were looking at 2013, and we secured the date and location for the next Devotion.

Then I dipped my toe into the murky waters of grants...and pulled it out again quickly. Grants for the arts are a mystery to me. We are too "ethnic" to be modern dance and too "modern" to be ethnic dance. We don't exist as far as the granting establishment is concerned. All of the dance support organizations that I spoke to said that the fact that I had established a profit-making business of DVDs and dance supplies was preferable to non-profit status. But that money is my livelihood. I don't have a spare $14,000 to throw down a black hole every year. Weird.

Enter Jennifer Nolan of Tamarind Tribal in Milwaukee. We have been friends and business associates for many years. She has hosted both General Skills/Teacher Training for ATS® and brought the whole FatChanceBellyDance® troupe out for shows, twice. She's smart and sweet and easy to work with. Jennifer mentioned KickStarter as a funding option. At first I thought it sounded shady, but as she encouraged me to look into it I saw that it is indeed and very savvy idea: crowd-funding.

So we set to work on the campaign. Deanna Freeman from Devyani hopped on board and we took off into the world of self-sufficiency. And, if you have been following the Devotion KickStarter from the beginning you know that we proposed $20,000 and received just over $30,000 in 30 days. Wow. That's all of you showing your support with donations from $10 to $2500. I can't begin to describe how grateful I am for that. We had to pay around $6000 in fees, but that still left us with $24,000 to work with. We've already ear-marked all of the $24,000 but hopefully the ticket and merchandise sales will kick us back up to break even. Break even, not show a profit. Amazing, no?

Well, as I have learned to chant, "It is what it is." We are four days from show time, the guest artists begin arriving tomorrow at 2pm. We'll get to the theater tomorrow at 2pm so start hanging the lights and calibrating the sound; full-cast rehearsal starts at 4pm. On Wed we'll all rehearse our separate pieces and convene at the theater for another all cast run through 4-8pm. And then...dress rehearsal at 1pm on the day of the show...and then...SHOW TIME.

Check out this page for all things Devotion, including DVDs from past years and some limited edition merchandise that continues to fuel this year's endeavor. I thank you all again.

as promised

Good morning!

As promised, I am at the keyboard again, bright and shiny. So now, let me tell you about producing Devotion...

The first few years of Devotion were a quickly thrown together show, nothing stupendous. Chaotic at the last minute as all shows are, but it worked. I was lucky enough to meet Patrick Coffield on a trip in New Mexico and he has been my sound and light tech from the first show. We just click. He is a Buddhist Cowboy and he keeps me sane by various means of humor and seriousness.

2008: The first theater, Climate, was a tiny flophouse of a venue. It was raw, but it had an underground feel so it made sense. When Colleena and I initially conceived of the idea of Devotion we thought we'd create a buzz for San Francisco by having the show in a small (50 seat) blackbox theater on multiple weekends; a Friday night show, Sat matinee and evening show and a Sun matinee, repeated on two weekends. The arts community in San Francisco is notorious for turning it's nose up at anything mainstream, so you have to make your event look like a struggle. That wasn't hard to do.

2009: Unfortunately, the very aspect of making the show available for multiple viewings put it in the category of "I'll catch it next time" and it was not well attended. We shortened the run on the following year, but this time the venue itself was the problem (the Climate organization was starting to fall apart) and we really did have to struggle to mount the production due to issues with wiring and structure. I employed a great publicist, Amy Kweskin, to brainstorm some audience building which involved a pre-show meet and greet at a nearby restaurant. Note to self-bad idea to pull the entire company out of pre-show preparations an hour before opening night.

2010: Suffice to say that we tried exhausted the Climate and had to move on. The next year we found ourselves at Shotwell Studios. A great location, just around the corner from the FCBD® Studio on 19th St at South Van Ness. We could park our cars once and just walk to the venue! If you live in SF or have visited, you know what a joy that is (parking protocol in SF is to find a spot and take the ticket so you can stay for more than two hours, as long as they don't tow it's worth the sixty bucks.) Shotwell was just 50 seats as well, but the layout had more "air" and it didn't feel as cramped. Really, if the owner hadn't been insane we could have stayed there. Sadly, said owner managed to personally offend every member of the company just moments before the start of the show. I was amazed at the professionalism of each and every artist; at first they registered confusion at the personalized insult, then a flash of anger and then each and every one of us pulled an invisible dome of calm over ourselves and walked onto the stage as if nothing had happened. At the end of the run, I think it was just one weekend this time; Fri-Sat, we all just walked away without looking back.

That's all for now. I have lots more to tell. See you in a day of two...as promised!

Start to Finish

Whew! That was weird. I just came back from an orbit. I was lost in space, couldn't find my bearings. I knew what had to get done, but had no pathway to get where I needed to start.

In hindsight, 4 trips in March/April/May (5 days at Cues and Tattoos in Seattle, 10 days at GS/TT in Michigan and 8 days in Pura in Barcelona, 5 days at Tribal Fest in Sebastopol) wasn't such a good idea, especially when I'm trying to produce Devotion in June and keep you all posted on the progress after such a phenomenal KickStarter response.

So what happened was...I was talking to my Mom yesterday. We meet every Sunday afternoon when I'm in town. We have tea. I do whatever tasks she has lined up (yesterday was setting up a wireless connection - oh, the ethernet cable goes in the slot marked with a circle, not with an arrow - got it.) And we talk. We talk about all sorts of things. My Mother, Bess, is a retired librarian. She is really smart and interested in everything. She is able to carry on a conversation about almost anything if you give her a little info. She is 88 years old, an avid birdwatcher, walks every day and can take the SamTrans bus anywhere on the planet. Mom is full of enthusiasm and positivity, but can also lob a mean reality check (watch our Warren Buffet, she is not happy with your decision to mine coal in Montana.) But sometimes she just sits and listens.

Since we haven't seen each other much in the past months, there was a lot to catch up on. I found myself on a rant, trying to make sense of the fact that I was orbiting and couldn't land on the path of logic that is the balm for Capricorns. After practically going hoarse from monopolizing the conversation I finally paused long enough for her to say, "What are you going to learn about iMovie when you go to the Apple Store tomorrow?" I replied, "I want them to show me how to take some lecture footage that I've loaded into the program and walk me through the creation of a simple project from start to finish." BING!

After a few more minutes I told her that I had projects waiting at home and had to go. I drove home along Skyline Blvd, a strange semi-rural ridge that separates Daly City from South San Francisco which is shrouded in fog 90% of the time, it's also a great place to think. The phrase start to finish kept running through my mind. When I got home the house was empty because Loretta is house-sitting for a few weeks. As much as I love to come home to her company, the cat, dinner preparations and more chatting, I really needed an evening of total solitude. I sat down at the computer and completed the projects from start to finish. It was as if I had been released from the orbit and had landed back in the land of logic. I woke this morning to a renewed sense of Capricorn. I drank tea, knit for a bit while I watched a knitting video (check out Craftsy.com if the mention of knitting video makes your heart race.) I felt my brain start to focus, reached for my notebook, made a plan for the day and am here with you right now.

So that's it. You are now deputized, in the reading of this blog post, to say to me Start to Finish anytime I fail to post or complain about being too busy. I also added a Follow By Email gadget so you cane be notified when I post, which should be frequently. Please sign up and let me know, via comments, that you are out there. Tomorrow's post will be the journey of the Devotion project that I promised you back in February.

Tribal Nation interviews Carolena about Devotion

Hi All,
Grab a glass of wine or a cup of tea and join me at Tribal Nation to see an interview with Yours Truly about Devotion. Thanks to Keli Medcroft!

FCBD Fundraiser for Devotion!

We can't seem to get the attention of any big name funders, so we are creating our own FCBD Fundraiser items for Devotion! We have yummy Dagoba Chocoalte in four flavors for $5 a bar...
Mints (use the empty tin for bindis when you've enjoyed all the mints!) $5 per tin..

And wine, a fine merlot from NorthWest Cellars, in two different labels for $30 a bottle. (We can't ship this, so you'll have to come and get it at the studio or the Devotion show.)

You can order the mints and chocolate at the FCBD Store...oh, and the girls are not for sale!