Philippines Tour 2024 – Bootcamp Newsletter

The Space

The house that we arrived at was beyond everybody’s expectations. Having been briefed rigorously throughout the application and interview process about the basic living standards we should be prepared for, and given the nature of some of the smaller print in the volunteer contracts (in which we were reminded repeatedly of the likelihood of being sick, tired, uncomfortable, or stressed during the tour), the team had braced themselves for adventure and adopting a lifestyle with fewer comforts than they were familiar with at home. However, as luck would have it, the first accommodation was an absolute luxury. We were in a fully air-conditioned house; there were three bedrooms between six of us, two showers, three toilets, a fully functioning kitchen, a large communal area, outside under covered space to store our fire props, and we were unbelievably fortunate to be part of a safe, quiet gated community with communal access to a swimming pool, a shaded stage area, and even a basketball court! This was unheard of luxury for a PWB tour, and Gina informed us in shocked disbelief that it was an absolute steal in terms of the price. We could not have been luckier. Granted, there were some plumbing issues with the upstairs toilet and shower, there wasn’t a lot of kitchen equipment or cups, and some of us had suspicious rashes after swimming in the pool. But ultimately, we had everything we needed on our doorstep, a really comfortable space to get to know each other and acclimatise to the hot weather, and the ideal space for creating our shows, particularly as the kids show was basketball themed!

The Process

Jamie and Gina facilitated our first day with lots of talks about the logistics of living and working together, and this included a chat on safer spaces and boundaries, security, tech, and the devising process for the creation of our shows. It was a long day of retaining information for the team’s jetlagged and overstimulated brains, but everyone’s patience was really apparent as we sat sipping cool water and attentively listening to one another. Excitement began to build (as did nerves after being exposed to some very scary images of bugs and reptiles), and little clues about each person’s personalities and skills began to emerge. Communication was clearly a strong point for the team from the moment we began, which established a sense of trust that benefited our living together.

We had 48 hours to devise two 20-minute shows. This is a sentence that will remain absurd no matter how many times it is repeated!

The amount of work that usually goes into a single act is understood by performing artists universally, and our aim was to include a dozen or more skills, including flow, juggling, and acrobatics, into both shows with multiple group and duo choreographies.

Fire

Our fire show came together fairly organically based on the props that we had access to. During an online meeting before the tour began, we had established our arsenal of toys: fire hat, magic fire flowers, palm candles, fans, rope dart, staffs, Levi wands, hula hoops, swords, skipping rope, dragon staff, fire umbrellas, poi, lycopodium torches, and a giant fire star. We had also previously established our music, which was a hip-hop fusion of classical pianists like Bach; it had a very dramatic, rhythmic energy, was lyric less, and appealed to all ages, and the tracks were short enough for us to squeeze this many fire acts into a 20-minute show. Once we had established our shared skills, the choreographies came together in 1-hour sessions with each other, which probably resulted from Sai and Ryn’s extensive experience in group choreography, JMS and Meg’s dance experience, Jamie and Gina’s facilitation skills, and a vast “trick-tionary” across the entire group, not to mention the ability to teach each other. The theme of the show was the aesthetic of black and gold, and the lighting and extinguishing cues were tight to leave no dead time on stage. The team were challenged by the time limits: feeling massively under rehearsed, a couple of us still stitching gold embellishment onto our costumes until the final moments before the dress rehearsal, and then the dress rehearsal itself (which was also our only time to run the show with fire before the first performance) was rained off by a sudden tropical downpour.

The Non-Fire (kids show)

The kids show was more of a challenge to devise (which is comical considering the risks are a lot lower, not being on fire) and somehow required a lot more creative energy. Our exhausted brains sat in the shaded area of our neighbourhood, chewing on pen’s thoughtfully as we squinted at the basketball court in front of us and scribbling ideas onto little squares of paper. We had established that basketball was the national sport, and 85% of people in the Philippines are fans of it. It made a lot of sense as the theme; the loose-fitting costumes were appealing in the humidity, and there were many ideas brewing around balls, hoops, and acro that we could place in the show. The structure itself was based on the structure of an actual basketball match: the concessions, the warm-up, the first quarter, the second quarter, then the halftime, the third quarter, and the final quarter. Each quarter would be punctuated with a “trick shot,” and the whole match would be tied together by a narrator/commentator. With this in mind, Jamie and Gina set up an open space in which the sections of our structure were laid out, and the scraps of paper with our ideas were placed under each heading, which was an incredibly visual and time-efficient technique to decide the bare bones of the show. We had to be ruthless with ourselves, that despite the multitude of creative ideas on the table, we had a 20-minute show and had to be realistic about the time we had to physicalise our ideas. It was an incredibly intense morning of selecting the skills for each section and an afternoon/evening of trying things out for the first time, including two high lifts, pyramids, and walkovers as a group, juggling with basketballs, and inflatable dinosaur “mascots.” The following day we picked our music and began to mark it out to do our first run that afternoon.

Life Lessons

Letting go of perfectionism is a tricky thing to practice; PWB gives people access to skills they don’t usually have, and this was true for our team of artists as well; being under time pressure, relying on improvisation and complicity on stage, embracing our mistakes, and creating effective acts without overthinking are all skills that we will take with us for the rest of our performing careers.

Are we there yet?

Although the consensus was that we didn’t yet feel ready for the stage, the team had somehow achieved the impossible in two days and managed to devise both shows. We had to trust the process and each other that over time we would finesse the details and that we had created something playful that brought a lot of joy to ourselves, which was evident in the smiles of the local kids watching us rehearse in Cebu. It was clear that through embracing our silliness and our inner clowns, we would be able to deliver a show that made people smile and inspired them to try some circus skills.

Again, embracing the unknown and owning the stage with minimal time to prepare is an invaluable skill for performers at any stage of their career.

We had lost a day of bootcamp to our Dumaguete trip, and so that meant sacrificing a day of teacher training. However, as a group of experienced teachers, this didn’t feel like so much of a loss. We all felt confident in our abilities to deliver 15-minute workshops in all the props as well as movement, clowning, acro, dance, and singing, and had faith in each other to bring high-energy skill sharing and games to all ages and levels.