Adelaide Roundup and Salon Tomorrow

Hallo lovely Patreonites - I have returned from trying to do the live performance part of my job in Adelaide with the re-re-re-written CHRONOS. The show by now is such a palimpsest of new-show-on-old-show that the name CHRONOS has aquired an increasingly meta level of self commentary.

Doing this test run with ‘Laser’ Fraser changed the nature and quality of the festival, of course. All the peripheral stuff that makes a festival feel like a festival took a back seat to the basic logistics of seeing if it was possible to do. Which it was. 22.5hrs of Laser-focused attention (pun intended) and then SUDDENLY SHOWTIME was dizzying but doable.

Genuinely, the hardest bit was going from … hm, how to put it. From unseen to seen. I think babies don’t really see their parents; you’re just the earth beneath their tiny fat feet. Certainly your body is - more than anything else - a functional; specifically functional habitat. And then BLAMMO! You’re putting on mascara so the people in the back row can distinguish your eyes and you have to reconsider the function of your body as a thing that is seen as a vessel of communication rather than as a mattress / buffet / love bubble / comfort giver.

I’m not a physical comedian, per-se, in that I don’t fall over with a honking noise (much) but I carry my body and my face and my hands and my eyes in a particular intentional way on stage; aware that they are seen and meaningful. I imagine most comics are the same. Your body, your face, your posture, your eyes, can support or complicate or contradict the words you’re saying with your mouth. And now those things have shifted under me, and I’m scrambling a bit to translate myself into the new format.

Anyway, of five shows, two were amazing and delightful, two were immensely hard work, and one was essentially neutral. I definitely didn’t sell enough tickets to come out on top, but I feel like I’ve achieved the thing I set out to achieve, which was get the show and me back on our feet. To see if the thing could be done, and jolly well do it.

So onwards and upwards. MICF, SCF, PCF, London, Edinburgh, elsewhere in the U.K. Stay tuned here and on my Twitter for tour dates and updates, given that all travel and performance commitments these days seem written in sand.

Salon details for tomorrow are as follows:

Topic: Tea With Alice Salon 52 (A Whole Year’s Worth of Salons!)

Time: Mar 8, 2022 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Mar 9, 2022 12:00 PM (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne)

I’ll send through the link to the relevant levels tomorrow. NEXT week will be an all levels open Salon Q&A style dealio. Was planning on doing it this week, but I have food poisoning, so I’ll leave it at the small group, which is more manageable.

Salon Things

• Any topics you want to open up, let me know in the comments here or via DM, or of course you can bring them up during the chat!
• If you are shy, feel free to keep your camera off and be the audience in the dark at the back of the room. I won’t call on you.
• Tea is compulsory, but we have a very broad definition of what tea is, that includes many things ‘normal’ people would call “not tea”, “absolutely nothing like tea” and “are you just pretending to drink from an invisible cup?”

Xx

A