Makin’ yer own gig

I actually learnt something in my year’s study of a Bachelor of Music! Something useful that is. It was the art of creating your own gig.

It was called ‘Community Music’ in my BMus. A fancy way of saying jumping in and creating your own fun, not waiting round for someone else to do it. It’s one of those Darwin thangs, I’ve learnt from living in Canberra, from talking with my sister who’s lived in London for over a decade, and my brother who’s lived in Italy for a decade. Seemingly in other places artists generally wait for Someone Else to get things going.

(To get slightly sidetracked, my brother, after a BMus (Hons) here in Darwin, continued studying composition at the Conservatorio di musica di Milano, wrote an opera, gathered up some friends and fellow students and performed it. Apparently DIY gigs, let alone operas, were a completely new concept to everyone else involved. And my sister in London said (after a childhood and early adulthood in Darwin), that in Darwin people make the Arts, in London people consume the Arts.)

The concept and skills for making your own music gig are happily relevant to making your own dance gig up too. A good thing too, because I’m going to set up some ‘Community Dance’ for my students.

Why? Well, I had this conversation with one of my students.

She called herself a beginner. I said ‘No, you’re not a beginner still, you’ve been learning over a year now.’

‘I still feel like I am!’

‘That’s because you haven’t done any performance yet.’ Nothing like a performance to make you feel like a seasoned dancer 😀

So of course that night I dreamed up ideas for giving my students some performance experience, and realised in doing so, that I had actually learnt something useful in my BMus. I learnt how to make yer own gig. I’m thinking a small performance, in a casual setting, something they can manage technically easily of course, in costumes they feel good in to music that inspires them. You know, generally set them up for success. Like you do with any kind of teaching.

Then the next day while lunching at a new cafe in town, (nice coffee for the record) I admired the cafe’s delicious wooden floor, (though it’s sadly not sprung, but hey…) realised the manager was listening and explained sheepishly I was a dancer, and that that makes you slightly obsessed by wooden floors.

The owner invited me to tap dance on it any time I wanted. After pondering it over my coffee I asked, seriously, if she was serious?

She assured me she was.

I explained I can’t tap dance properly, but I do ballet.

Happily it turned out her invitation isn’t dance-style specific!

It does amuse me how in life sometimes opportunities just fall in your lap. But it also amuses me how I’ve finally found something useful to the rest of my life in that year of studying music. (Although come to think of it the really full on musicianship units have helped me as a dancer, though I hated doing it at the time ;-P) I have heaps of ideas for how I can get my students some performance fun experience and the know-how to pull them off.

(For the record I didn’t finish the BMus due to poor health. But I also never really felt like I was a musician. I always felt like I was a dancer masquerading as a muso. No one else seemed to notice I was just pretending, but deep inside, I knew.)

Note: I haven’t forgotten about all the pretty pictures of dancing on the beach that weren’t out takes 😛