Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Even more exhausted than last night. Partly because today was a longer day; partly because I was still tired to start with. (Mostly because it was a longer and hotter and dustier day, I think.) On the whole, this Fairie Fest seems like a rather nice event, but you'll have to excuse me for noticing the glitches...

Thrir Venstri Foetr is a dance troupe. Now admittedly there just isn't a whole lot of flatt-ish ground at the event site, but our first set was on a small (not tiny, but definitely small) stage set in a sort of natural amphitheatre -- a steep grassy bowl with the stage at the bottom of it. A small forest of mic stands on the stage, and a soundman running a ... 12-channel? ... board out in the audience. Mains on sticks, and wedge monitors. Nice, but not much dancing room. So I asked the soundman whether I could move the mics off the stage. His big concerns were a) that we not change the physical order (left-to-right) of the microphones, and b) that we didn't have a vocalist who might accidentally touch lip to microphone while standing in wet grass. I plugged the soundhole mic from my 12-string into his snake, and each of us took a stand mic; the dancers had the stage.

Okay, that mostly worked pretty well -- he set our levels pretty damned quickly (must've been using his favourite mixer); the monitors were up on the stage, but we're used to playing unamplified and don't need a lot of monitor, and we could hear ourselves in the mains anyhow. Here's what went wrong other than the initial choice to put a dance troupe in a small bowl: one of our big things as a group -- one of our selling points in fact -- is that we teach some of the dances to the audience. Well, that meant picking dances that could be done safely on the slope in front of the stage, which meant line dances, which meant the soundman got very nervous about people tripping over the snake! And the left main speaker kept turning from the vibration of the dancing, so it was eventually pointed right at the band, making feedback a problem. (That got fixed as soon as the soundman realized that the speaker was moving on its own, not by our hand.)

But then we got to the second set, which used a porch as a stage. Even tinier stage, but we'd planned to put the band up there and there were only four of us today, so hey, we had room to spare. But the dancing area in front was still pretty treacherous. (Fred asked us to keep the tempos slowish to accomodate the poor footing. As it is, the sheepie hurt her ankle.) Two soundmen, but, get this, only one microphone! The act before us had brought their own mics, and if they hadn't been on their way to their cars to go home, they would've let us borrow theirs. There was a little eight-channel powered mixer on the stage behind us. Maug plugged his guitar into that, I plugged my little soundhold condenser mic into it, and silmaril and Breno had to crowd up to the lone mic stand. I managed to fasten the tie-clip for my mic onto my bass recorder with a bit of twine that I found, so I just kept moving the mic from instrument to instrument -- the tie-clip on the recorder, and the soundhole clip moving between the two guitars. When I played tenor recorder, I squeezed in between the other two at the mic stand. (If my coil soundhole pickup -- the one I usually use in my six-string -- hadn't died at Southern Maryland, I would've left the condenser on the recorder and moved the coil pickup from guitar to guitar, or just stuck to six-string.)

Okay, we got through it. I think we even did pretty well. We did get our sound, we were heard, the folks we asked about the balance said it was okay after some early adjustments ... but who provisions a stage at a festival, a stage that several different acts are going to use throughout the day, with one microphone? I'm not sure how visible the dancers were at the second set, but it basically worked out, as far as I could tell.

The other problem was that most of the pathways were too narrow for the number of people attending. Quite intimate and pretty, but not much room to maneuver.

Other than those gripes, the festival was pretty nifty. Lots and lots of people -- mostly women and girls -- wearing fairy wings and all sorts of colourful -- and sometimes fanciful -- outfits. Potentially high cheese-factor, but in this particular setting, where as far as I know the main point/theme of the festival was, "be playfully fantastic and enjoy the colours and cutesiness without embarrassment", it all just seemed right. Made some interesting obervations about gender differences in our culture when it comes to letting that side show ... other than some femmy goth-boys (most of whom made the look work in this setting), almost no men donned fanciful duds. Other than the goths, I think I saw maybe five or ten men wearing anything "out there". Or even, apart from folks in garb, really dressed up. (I'm not counting renaissance or medieval garb -- that's not fanciful or fantastic; it's simply "alternative but still Traditional Male". (Note that I reserve the right to change my mind a few paragraphs later and/or change it again after I've slept.) Likewise I'm not counting any of the men in kilts.) Now those five included a green man in "living bush" mode; a slender fellow wearing gauzy pastel green clothes in fabrics only women wear anywhere else but which he made look completely masculine; one wearing shiny, colourful, flashy stuff ... so the men who dared did it well. The thing is, with one exception, I got the impression all of those men were staff or performers or merchants. Among the random attendees, many of the women made at least a nod to the "fairy/fanciful" meme, but the men wore ordinary "go to a warm-weather outdoor weekend event" duds.

Part of that has to do with the narrow scope of the "male uniform" in our culture (United States) -- the women could simply choose something basically normal but one or two levels dressier than they'd normally wear to a festival, leaning towards anything with a ruffle, gauze, sequins, etc., and accessories carry it the rest of the way. What are most men going to pull out of their closet for that trick? (Perhaps I'm being unfair in not counting med/ren garb, since I suppose that does count as the same idea -- pick something one already has in one's closet that's just a bit further in the fantasy direction than a T-shirt and shorts -- as what I just described some of the women doing, at least for the men who already have such clothes at home.) But I can't shake the idea that there's a deeper level to it than that. Something I should come back to when I'm not about to fall over from exhaustion.

Me, I wore medieval. A tan tunic (above the knee, with a slanted hem, and 3/4 length flared sleeves) and black hose with my usual blue floppy hat. I don't know whether I looked fanciful or faerie to random folks in the audience, but to myself I felt like I was dressed pretty mundanely. Uh, in the sense of "of this world / not fantastic", rather than the more common sense of "not fandom / not rennie / not SCA / not Markland". (For folks who only know me from LJ: I dress male for most performances and for visiting my mother (and that's just about all the times I dress male). It's just that most of the time when I wear male attire, it's a tunic, or a kilt, or poofy-shirt/knee-breeches/vest. Anyhow, I was in "boy mode" as much as I ever get today, mentally as well as sartorially.)

Aaaaaaand I'm losing my focus and rambling, which means that I should've just fallen over on the bed like I told anniemal I was going to do instead of succumbing to the temptation to post "a quick note" about my day before crashing. I'll try to remember to come back here and add relevant URLs sometime later. But for now: Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks! G'night.