Dangerous & Exciting things: Fire, Karnival, and Russian Roulette

April is flying by, my friends. Feels like the First Friday show just happened, but the month is almost over.

I've been taking a break from fine art and general painting, for the most part -- my post-art-show decompression activities have included practices, rehearsals and/or meetings nearly every night of the week in preparation for upcoming performances and shows. By day I'm a brunch slinging, cappucino crafting barista... then I spend countless hours concocting and calculating the perfect balance of visual psychedelic geometric dreamscapes in oils and acrylics... by night I'm a fire twirling, feather teasing alter-ego of myself on stage and in my "spare time" (what's that, again?)  I'm customizing said alter-egos showstopping threads from old tired garments and thrift store scores... all while planning a 45 minute, prime night & time fire variety show for a festival of a few thousand attendees.

Scorch Fire Show, PEX Summer Festival 2010 - performing the opening number, "Shiva." 

Photo by Oscar P.

It's that time of year again and planning for the summer's festivities, including the now legendary PEX Summer Festival has begun. Though it started with a disorganized dream, four years later we find ourselves for the first time keeping the exact same show name and administrative team - the Russian Roulette Variety Show, featuring the hottest, most talented troupes and performers from Philadelphia (and beyond) showcasing their newest work every year at PEX Summer Fest in the coveted Friday night spot. I am proud to announce that The Russian Roulette Variety Show is now accepting submissions for performers as well, which you can do by filling out the form here.

 A shot from behind the "stage" - Scorch Fire Show,  PEX Summer Festival 2010. Jexime Icon performing her fire fan solo in front of the Shiva fire sculpture (built for the show by Vinny Gasper, funded by a grant from PEX.)

 Photo by Emily Watson.

 Scorch Fire Show, PEX Summer Festival 2010 - performing the opening number, "Shiva." 

Photo by Emily Watson.  

R.R.V.S., please be advised, is a variety show - meaning there is no performance genre too weird (or too normal either, I suppose) to be considered. But performers be advised - if you haven't already begun working on the piece you are thinking of submitting, you may be out of luck. Giving that the festival is only a few months away, we are looking for troupes and performers that already have their shit together, to put it bluntly. Along with filling out the application form, you are required to submit a video to us of your current progress for your specific performance for the show. (Even if it's rough, even if you don't have it 100% figured out, we need to see it. Apparently some folks don't understand this concept.) Chances are if you haven't started working on this already, it might not be "done" in time for PEX. If this is your situation, don't fret - this is not the first, nor the last show from Russian Roulette. If you really want to put in the effort, chances are you will be able to be part of this magnificent and magnanimous show.



Why are we implementing such specific guidelines and demanding requirements for Russian Roulette? It's very simple - for one, of course, we want our show to be the best it can be. Keeping the acts interesting, different... the choreography polished, the music varied, making sure the entire show flows in a way that will keep our audience eagerly awaiting the next act. No awkward pauses between acts, no boring 7 minute solo acts with the same prop, NO intermission (people just get up and leave) and of course, no one catching on fire. (Very important.) Most of us involved on the administrative team have been doing a similar show for the past few years, and we've made the mistakes we needed to make to learn from them... this "disorganized dream" that wasn't even my own, when it began, has come a long way. (When I first got involved and the summer festival was in it's infancy - I was very very new to fire, to performing, to PEX, to everything - but, felt drawn to do it still, knowing that I had a very different but useful range of experience under my belt and in my heart I could make these shows better than they would otherwise be.)

Here is a great video by Hedy Sirico from 2010's PEX Summer Fest 

performance of Scorch Fire Show.

Anyway, myself and the rest of the R.R.V.S. admin team are busting our asses right now (we don't get paid for this, remember) to put on another fabulous show this summer. I absolutely consider this another part of my "art", it just happens to be within a different genre.

  

Lux Arati performing at PEX Summer Festival in 2011 as part of The Russian Roulette Variety Show. 

Lux Arati performing at PEX Summer Festival in 2011 as part of The Russian Roulette Variety Show. (Not sure who took these photos - apologies for not giving due credit. If this is yours please contact me ASAP and I will get on that.)

This weekend - Saturday night - I will be performing with both of my groups, Lux Arati and The Penny Treats at Karnival. The Penny Treats are performing an old number that we've reworked (think- red feather fans...) and Lux Arati is debuting something brand new, totally mind-blowing and maybe still in-progress. I like to think of this show as a dress rehearsal for PEX Summer Fest and R.R.V.S. -- although I hope it will still be as kick-ass as it should be. For once, I picked the track we're performing to - "All Alone" by Gorillaz. It happened to be on a mix CD in my car, one of the only CD's it felt like playing for awhile, and I must have listened to it on repeat for a week before playing it for my girls. It's a little electronic, a little hip hop, and a little booty shakin' action, little bit of BOUNCE-WIGGLE-BOUNCE... all that... plus bellydancing with fire fans? Holy shitballs. This is gonna be quite a spectacle. Watch out... literally, because some of the moves are pretty complicated and if we drop our flaming fans on you, it may burn a little. Might sting a bit.

 Lux Arati fire montage - poster for Karnival, April 28th at the Arts Garage in Philly.

On that note, I REALLY have to work on my costume for tomorrow. Click on this link to get to the Facebook event for Karnival. Here are some of the bangin' posters for the event featuring yours truly. I will post relevant media when I have it available.

(Oooh la la!)

Performance/Art and the Penny Treats!

One of the streetscapes I've been working on. Still in progress, but it's close to being done.

Hello, vast sea of internet readers. (Joke. I kid.) It's been a little too long since I've posted any pictures of my work, but I have a REALLY good reason. And now I have a few, just from finally being able to paint today following a week of chaos.

Want to see my reason? You can, a little later. (I'll post the video at the end of this post, along with a disclaimer and apology to my parents.) This past weekend was one of my favorite burner parties of the year - PEX's Heartburn. Set in a secret warehouse location, the party spans multiple massive floors, and more decorated rooms than I cared to count. DJ's, bands, art (I had a painting in the gallery this time), performances of all kinds, lasers, projections, and hundreds of happy partygoers all dressed up dancing the night away. And it's always a costume party. (It's my favorite way to celebrate a Hallmark holiday that otherwise means nothing in the dead of winter.)

My friend and I were invited to perform our burlesque act that we did as a part of Scorch this summer, for PEX Summer Festival and the Philly Fringe. Unfortunately our act involved fire, which was prohibited inside the venue. Unfortunately the fire part of our act took up about half of the performance, so we didn't think we'd be able to do it. Somehow by last Monday we were convinced that we should, and we should spent as much time as possible between then and that Saturday night coming up with a new second half of the routine. SO - needless to say, I didn't have a lot of free time last week for anything art related. The performance was fantastic, and it will certainly not be the last time you see us perform burlesque. We're adopting the name "The Penny Treats", graphics and logo forthcoming. (Penn Treaty is a park/area of Philly right near where both of us live.)

Anyway, today is literally the first day in a long time that I've had a chance to paint, and I've been itching to work on my commissioned piece and finish a couple other things up. It's not 100% confirmed, but I will probably have my work (some of it at least) hanging up in a local coffee shop called The Lola Bean for the month of March. I responded to an art inquiry and the woman immediately contacted me and said she loved my paintings and to see if I could do something that soon. As it is, the majority of my work is ready to hang from the last show, and although the First Friday opening will probably not be as big of a to do as the one at Grindstone, whatever. Maybe I'll sell something! (Mental note/list: Need more business cards. And flyers this time. And money to pay for that shit. Sigh.)

Here is a somewhat crappy shot of the commissioned painting I'm working on. Sorry - the glare just wouldn't go away, it's the afternoon. Please keep in mind I am still in the very beginning stages - I only just started to actually oil paint on top of the drawings within the last 2 sessions I've spent working on it.

Commissioned piece featuring merkaba, in progress.

It's slowly coming together. Even though I've planned out and gridded out a large part of the space, I want there to be much more and I'm not too sure what exactly that "more" is going to be of. I trust my process enough that I know it will come to me, organically, as the painting progresses, but I think it's because I'm so excited every time I work on this one that I find myself constantly thinking about it, imagining pieces, drawing and re-drawing sketches. I want to include an element of something natural, like vines perhaps, to contrast the sharp edges of the hexagons... and then I thought of including a red feather, because the painting is for my burlesque partner and her fiancé. (Newly engaged, congratulations lovelies!) I also want to somehow incorporate some kind of fractal design that is reminiscent of a plant or vine, but in addition to some kind of actual nature or plant life, not instead of. And the colors - just starting to figure out what is working and what isn't. Colors are often the one thing that I don't plan, but in this case I was given a vague idea of the palette that they wanted - however I didn't include color in most of my sketches so far.

Since there are so many lines, I've taken to using paint markers to draw them out before I paint. I learned (from a mistake) that paint markers and sharpies tend to show through a moderate to thin layer of oil paint, so in this piece I'm using that mistake to my advantage. I can hopefully avoid having to paint lots of thin, precise lines by letting the paint marker show through as much as I want - and so far I'm hoping it will become a subtle accent and not as obvious and bright as in the photograph above.

The first picture up top that I posted is another painting that I've been working on and sort of put on hold for the commissioned piece. It's a tiny streetscape and it's not done yet, but I'm hoping to be able to hang it up in the coffeeshop in March (because it's kind of a boring painting, and I'll make it kind of inexpensive comparatively, and maybe it'll sell.)

SO - now the moment you've all been waiting for! My burlesque show from Heartburn -we are The Penny Treats and the song is a remix of "Do Right"- (the Amy Irving/Jessica Rabbit version, the Gramaphondzie remix, and the Peggy Lee version all smashed together courtesy of Kezner, a DJ friend of mine who's too busy being married and having babies to play music right now. That's okay Kez, I love you anyway.)

Oh right - and before you watch...

DISCLAIMER: Please do not post this on Facebook or anywhere else on the internet without the express permission of myself and Lady J.

APOLOGY: Dear Mom & Dad - in case you haven't heard, I've been incorporating a little burlesque into my performance career. That said, please be aware that you will see some skin at the end of the video. BUT - it's ok, my nipples are covered, and it's tasteful. It could be worse - I could be a stripper - and I promise it will stay in the vein of burlesque and fire, and will not get trashy. Anyway, I'm sorry, but you're probably going to have to get used to it - and as you'll be able to hear, the crowd freakin' loves us! Lots of love, Xtina.

Past and future

The scarab represents renewal, regeneration, and growth. Literally interpreted as the
"divine manifestation of the early morning sun." Also represents spontaneous creation and is
associated with the Egyptian sun god Khepri (resurrection.)

The above is an Egyptian scarab on papyrus (not mine, I found it online to use for an image reference.) I started working on another piece involving a scarab this week, but it's nowhere near photographing yet.

I've been researching various art grants for a few weeks now, and am starting to get the paperwork and applications together in the hope that I may convince someone to give me money to continue doing what I'm doing - making art. I've found a few that I'm currently working on, all for visual art where I will send slides or digital copies of my paintings and answer questions and provide references and whatever else they ask for. Even though I've been doing this for years, I still feel very much like a beginner, like I should be much further along than I am so far.

I was always working, dealing with whatever life issues I happened to have at the moment - there were a few shows here and there, and often times periods of prolific creation were stunted by long months of zero inspiration and little productivity. It took me awhile after Burning Man and quitting my job to allow myself to experiment and really get excited about this whole thing again. That's why going to art school was so amazing - you're encouraged to experiment and given time to develop your body of work. Once I started putting myself mentally "in my studio", I was much more comfortable starting and stopping projects, letting myself become inspired to make work like I used to, with passion fueling my fire and an uncontrollable desire to create, except with out the inevitably harsh crit come Monday morning.

I didn't paint very much during college. At MICA I learned very quickly that if you were going to be painting, you had to be some kind of prodigy art star to impress anyone. "Painting's been done," they said. So to spare the small amount of self esteem I still had left, I did the best thing I could in that environment - experiment.

I took tons of photography, sound and video classes, and a few "painting" classes that I never painted in. I would make videos instead - they were my paintings. I was just painting with another medium. I made costumes too - usually dresses constructed out of strange materials like plastic bags and shower curtains (sometimes poorly, but that wasn't the point.) That project ended up being part of my thesis. I just last year managed to get it up on YouTube - here it is:



The Trouble With Progress, 2005

Watch it sometime if you haven't already. I made the costumes, the video projected behind it, figured out the choreography and edited the video (I had help shooting the event since I was backstage with my models) - and enlisted tons of help from my friends with everything from crab-walking backwards down the runway to composing the soundtrack. And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the background to why I love doing what I have the past few years in the performance genres with Simplafire and Scorch - I get to be part of putting on a show, a spectacle. Somewhere along the line I got the courage to get up in front of an audience (and this makes no sense, I was terribly cripplingly shy as a kid.) AND I WANT TO DO IT AGAIN. (See below : a clip from the debut Scorch performance from PEX Summer Festival this year...)

Scorch Debut Clip from lauren raske on Vimeo.

I've come across a few grant foundations so far that are geared more toward video, media and performing arts. While I'm still going to apply (with enthusiasm) to all the applicable visual art grants I can find, the gears are turning... most of the issues I've run across putting on these shows is lack of commitment from performers and lack of money. I'm almost positive the former would significantly change if we had funding and were able to make it a worthwhile investment for everyone involved. I'm not the best fire spinner out there - and hell like I claim to be - but it's still an amazing talent to the rest of the population and incredible fun. If I could figure out how to apply Part A with Part B - I think that's got a ton of potential to be something really spectacular - and if someone could give us money to do it, even better.

Hopefully this next year will be just as prolific as I am envisioning. It helps to have an almost completely open schedule (and to not have a terrible, oppressive corporate job to kill my soul a little every day), and for the most part I've managed to stay positive and have faith in my decisions. (Reflection of the day c/o Alex: "I'd rather be broke and happy than flush and sad.")

Anyway, this may be my last post before 2011 - and I promise the next one will have new pictures of work in progress and other fun things - so everyone please enjoy the rest of 2010 and have a happy and safe NYE.