Wow. Yesterday was pretty crazily jam-packed, seeing as how it was Wulapalooza and all. For those non-WU folks, Wulapalooza is Willamette's annual huge music/art/community/all-around-good-time
s festival. So, here goes:
( Daylight activitiesCollapse )Went back to Wula for a bit and found out poi practice was at 8, and we would be performing at 10:15 PM. I went back to my room and got all dressed up in my dark clothes, and brought along the chains I'd got at PetCo the other day. I met up with the poi folk and Katie traded me chains for a finished set of poi balls, and ohhhhh was I a happy Gina. We went through our routine and went to Sparks, where we painted each other with tribal-esque patterns and got ready for the show, which we were doing with chem club and dj club.
It was soooo awesome. Forty or fifty minutes of FIRE and EXPLOSIONS. Dj club had loud, thumping techno going, making my feet thrum on the floor. We started out with Katie, Bill, and Joe fleshing (take a stick with a wick on the end, light the wick, then run it down the skin on your forearm and leave a little trail of fire behind for just an instant), then Sarah and Daniel doing tai-chi with the lit sticks, then Leah and Sara dancing with candles, and then Katie going in with the poi. The rest of us followed in, each doing a different trick as we entered (mine was butterfly, which I only recently got down, and still mess up on), and then we grooved and did our thangs for a bit, before one of the guys entered with four staffs all tied together at once. O_O You could
feel him coming, as the heat was just pouring off those things. Then the other staff guys came out, and one by one each was given a staff and off they went. When the staffs burned out chemistry club blew some shit up, balloons and ethanol cannons and the like, and that was fun.
And then it was the free-for-all, where people just came in and did anything they wanted with whatever implement they had, be it staff, be it poi, be it a SWORD ON FIRE, be it a HULA HOOP with eight or ten wicks on it, be it stilts and a ten-foot-long cable with poi on the end, be it yellow flame or red flame or green.... It was insane, and so much fun, with the music and the crowd and the heat from the other spinners.... I wasn't perfect, once I tangled my poi chains, I hit myself a few times, and my transitions were on the crappy side, but I've only been doing this two months. And there I was spinning fire and swaying my head and lifting my feet and closing my eyes and panting with the effort, with the dance, with the heat, doing butterfly, doing three-beat, doing corkscrew and reverse Mexican, getting down on my knees and bending backwards still doing tricks, getting up again and turning round and round, just
feeling it, and oh my god, it was amazing. I must've lit up four or five times during the night, pouring my heart into every time even when my arms were locking up and freezing. And when I wasn't spinning, I was on the sidelines dancing still, my body moving with the pounding beat in a freeform primal rhythm.
We ended with one guy donning his stilts again, and another guy going out there with him, and both of them breathing fire at once. Pretty damn awesome, if you ask me. We then ran out into the darkness and bowed before the crowd, slipping on the floor slick with alcohol and lighter fluid, and then ran back outside panting and sweaty and proud. "Orgasmic" doesn't even begin to cover it. :-D
For all that, the evening ended pretty quietly. I ended up going over to Ben's to hang out with him and then Chris and Stu. His mom thought I was cute in all my tribal paint, lol; I hope she didn't mind that I ended peeling/scrubbing it all off in their bathroom. :-P We ended up flipping channels, and discovered a sci-fi miniseries called, eloquently, "MAN-THING." ROFLMAO. We switched between that and some really stupid hiking movie with Kirstie Alley, and that made for a bizarre background hum to fall asleep to, let me tell you.... Oh, and Chris sang the best song EVAR. (The lyrics were a little something like, "This guy did something very hard to do/he made me angry/I'LL STAB YOU IN THE EYE WITH A BEEF STICK, MOTHERFUCKER!") I finally got home around 3 and went to bed by 3:30 AM.
All in all, a very good day.
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