33 posts tagged “mad king thomas”
(Pardon me for stealing my title from Trent Reznor's first tweet of today: "trent_reznor: HAPPY!" which I just find so hilarious and adorable.)
First, it started off with great news! Mad King Thomas was chosen for the best dance performance in the Twin Cities! By voters! People who vote! I don't know who they are, as I didn't know the awards were to be given, but whoever you are: what an excellent start to the day! Thank you!
Best Dance Performance in the Past 12 Months
Mad King ThomasIt's good to worry a bit when you go to a Mad King Thomas show—not about whether the artists might get hurt or what the critics will say, but how close you should get to the action onstage. During a Mad King Thomas program, the fourth wall is broken down with a sledgehammer, and everybody in the audience bears witness, at close range, to the glorious mayhem unleashed by the Sage Award-winning trio of Tara King, Theresa Madaus, and Monica Thomas. In January's Love Me, Love My Questionable Art at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, MKT shared the stage with dancers Sally Rousse, Hijack, and Galen Treuer. The evening's high jinks ran the gamut from high art to low, from twisted family stories to a doughnut auction—plus a post-feminist fashion show for good measure. King, Madaus, and Thomas owe their aesthetic to performance art icons like Karen Finley and Dancenoise, but they certainly have their own voices, and right now these women are using them to roar.
YES AWESOME HOORAY DELIGHT
Then...THEN I was in contact improv class and I got to start off with a warm up with KVL and EDL and we all giggled and it turns out I like giggling in the morning. And then some other fantastic dancing and flying and rolling around and sweating (augh, I love the pure, clean sweat of an early morning, post-shower work-out). We did handstands and cartwheels and I accidentally did a backbend but I feel GREAT! And then I meant to take the bus to work, but I accidentally just biked the whole way because the weather is unbelievably perfect!
Also, for yesterday's day of happiness, I saw my first daffodil AND it was Mad King Thomas' anniversary of being official! Even though I didn't see my other two, it was a good day to celebrate and be happy about.
More than usual. It must be the effects of putting on a show. We are working so. hard. on it.
We've been in the press a bit (is it weird to talk about this?? I'm pretty sure it's horribly awkward, but I'm so excited! I feel like clipping out the previews and sending them to my mom for her to put on the fridge):
- The Onion's Decider has us highlighted...We got a full-color ad in this week's Onion (free!) and they are giving away 2 tickets to the show. Email twincitiespromo@theonion.com with "love me" in your subject line, and they'll enter you in the drawing. It's our first giveaway! Which we admittedly have nothing to do with!
- MetroMix twin cities not only highlighted us but actually rewrote some of our press release and seems to have seen (and liked?!) our previous work. Who are you, mysterious MetroMix twin cities writer?! I love you. Call me sometime.
The show opens Wednesday and after an exhaustive five-hour meeting wherein we determined exactly where each prop goes for all 70 minutes of show (there are only like...80 props all told), I am feeling less frustrated and overwhelmed, more terrified of the things that could go wrong at the actual show (No one will come! I'll fart really loudly during my solo!).
If you are a person who lives in the Cities, please come! I think it's a pretty good show.
Back to your regularly scheduled silence...more on Thursday, no doubt.
Here is a wee movie we made with Kevin Obsatz and Justin Jones. It's pretty fun? Definitely silly.
Edit: I feel like I should explain that this is just MKT in a ballroom, improvising while the cameras roll. It's not choreographed or even thought out, really. It's just us being silly in a silly place.
Here is a promo shot for the upcoming Mad King Thomas show at the Bryant Lake Bowl, called Love Me, Love My Questionable Art.
January 7, 11, 14, 2009
7 p.m.
$8-12
I will write more on the show later, but you should click through to Megan Mayer's flickr page because there are scads of pictures of us being ridiculous in our heart costumes!
I leave on Saturday morning. I know that on a Wednesday morning,
slouched over a keyboard, Saturday seems as far as death, but today,
for me, Saturday is terrifyingly close.
I'm in just a little tiny panic. Just a little one about what to pack, how to carry it, why the eff do I not own the perfect, respectable, roomy backpack? Is this the craziest idea I've ever had? Do I really have to go back to REI? Is my performance in Melbourne really going to happen? Etc. You know. It's hard to pack up life for a month and not worry. There is a lot to wrap up...at work, at home, in Mad King Thomas land. Consequently I've been a bit of a wreck lately, in that annoying way where you don't realize how grouchy you are until you yell at Paul when he offers to bake your favorite cake in a (clearly futile) attempt to cheer you up.
I underestimated this trip just a touch. My last (and so far, only) long sojourn, when I studied in Mongolia, was significantly different. You have to panic about things like bringing enough Immodium AD. I had to have my gallbladder removed before I went (no joke). I had to get an AIDS test that no one ever asked to see, about six different immunizations, a visa, traveler's checks. I had to pick out the ten CDs that I was interested in listening to for the next five months. A phrasebook. I had to learn Cyrillic. I was in school.
This time...my visa took about five minutes and is entirely
digital. Uh...they have pharmacies. I have no currently malfunctioning
organs (at least as far as I know). They speak English. But even in
the five years since I went to Mongolia, things have changed. I've got
an iPod. Traveler's checks are a non-entity. I have to pay to check
my luggage. I have a job that I have to come back to, so I have to get
sleeping pills to force my body into nocturnal obedience. Oh, the
American economy is crashing. You know. Stuff like that.
I'm trying to organize MKT performances through sheer force of will
(maybe when it's all over, I'll detail for you exactly what happened
and what I had to do to get it to happen--assuming it DOES happen).
And I have to figure out how to make a dance film.
But I have a blog now, so I won't have to send
out brutally long emails to everyone I know. And I'll be able to share
pictures way way faster.
The second part of the good news is that I get to say: It doesn't matter if my tires are a little flat, it doesn't matter if I need a new belt, etc. None of these things matter until July! Utter respite from stupid daily concerns!
Plus I will have a great excuse to wear dramatic sun hats for an
entire month. And I get to have a balmy winter solstice. And see
little penguins. And other great stuff. We're going to see Australian
Rules Football and rugby, and we're riding roller coasters, and living
on a boat, and couch surfing, and ... It's going to rule.
Ultimately it's going to be a Truly Excellent Adventure.
- The depths of Midwest food culture are infinite: I stumbled upon a generic box of ice cream with the flavor "Blue Moon". The box did not hint at any particular flavor, so of course, I bought it. It is blue and it tastes like Fruity Pebbles. It's exclusive to the upper Midwest and has its own Wikipedia article. I would like to eat Blue Moon ice cream while drinking Blue Moon beer and playing Blue Moon the card game, during a blue moon, perhaps in Blue Moon, Kentucky. Yes, I would like this very much.
- My plants are living! But not yet harvestable.
- Mad King Thomas has a show this coming weekend. It's called, "Welcome to the Shattering World." We're doing a dance that we haven't put any jokes into (it might still be funny) and I am terrified of it. Whee?
- I am taking a solo version of "Welcome to the Shattering World" to Australia and I think I may have even potentially maybe possibly procured a venue in which to perform it. I'm also twisting my wee sister's arm to film it in all sorts of ridiculously scenic places (Australia seems to have lots of them).
- A tragedy has arisen in my daily life: It's hot enough to sleep with the fan on, but Caesar won't sleep at my feet if the fan is on. WHATEVER SHALL I DO?!
- I am so stressed and so busy that I am painfully productive. It is crazy. I don't even know what to do with myself! It's freaky. Freaky down to the core.
- How about everybody tells me what their favorite science-themed songs are? Or mentioning science, outer space, growing things, etc.
How many pair of shoes do you have? Out of those pairs, how many do you wear more than a few times a year?
Submitted by fightinggale.
This, my friends, is a sad story.
Once, I had hardly any shoes. I would wear whatever shoes I had until they fell apart or (more likely) my feet outgrew them. I had some Chuck Taylor imposters in middle school with Taz on them that I thought were basically the best shoes in the world.
Then, I found this book:
In the two weeks I had it from the library, I realized that a) shoes are art, and b) shoes are crazy and amazing.
Thus I became enamored of ways to shod my feet. My feet stopped growing so I have no reason to get rid of old shoes. (Somehow this means that I keep shoes that are in tatters or completely broken.)
I'm not proud of this freakish part of my personality. I'm disgusted by it but also sort of helpless. After all, some shoes are pure genius which I can take home and put on my feet. That said, do I really need a pair of neon green flats and neon pink heels? My brain says no, but my eyes say yes.
But I guess this little weakness provides choreographic fodder:
Okay.
I am SO PROUD of myself. PAINFULLY PROUD.
I finally got around to figuring out how to take a DVD and put it on Teh 'Tubez. Do you know what this means?! THIS MEANS MAD KING THOMAS VIDEOS EVERYWHERE! It has been a stain on my internet rating that I couldn't figure out how to get this on to a website. But I finally did it.
I've only done one so far, but here it is in all of its awkward glory! It's the least flattering costume ever seen on this
A bit of context: This was last May and was sort of a study for the much larger (and much better) Premium White Morsels, from whence all those lovely black and white pictures came. It was a Capture!rama piece, just like what we did last night, which means that we made the film with a live! studio! audience! and all the edits are in-camera. The whole thing was a little wild and woolly around the edges, but here it is. Mad King Thomas in living color and also moving around!
- Mad King Thomas show tomorrow night! Capture!rama at the Bryant Lake Bowl, 8 p.m. and only $6. We're premiering a little snippet of a big new project. Capture!ama is always relaxed so come down and see great local artists experimenting with film and dance.
- Picked up Square-Foot Gardening so I can plan out my plot at the community garden. I might get some seeds in the ground this week, but more likely I will go to the ginormous Friends Plant Sale and buy some purple tomatoes and stuff and THEN plant some seeds (and some plants).
- I'm going to be in Australia in about six weeks. HOLY CRAP. This causes nothing short of glee and panic. Is anyone here a couchsurfing.com veteran?
- Maybe things are a bit manic at the moment. Behind in work, behind in soap-making, behind in dance-making, the house is a WRECK, my inbox has three times as many emails as I want it to, I haven't booked the campground in Uluru, my family thinks I'm dead, etc. But I guess this is sort of how I like to live my life. I guess? It's getting hard to stay all frugal when I'm never home for breakfast, lunch OR dinner. Where the eff is my stimulus payment?!
- Ain't nothin' gonna break-a my stride! Ain't nothin' gonna slooooow me down. OH NO. I got to keep on movin'.
