It's a V Thing...

First, I have to express how amazing it is to be touring in America. I love being on my home soil… where I am familiar with the language, food, directions, shopping, etc. I love my whole foods, my vegetarian friendly restaurants, my inexpensive clothing stores, my dollar being worth something, flip flop days, tank tops and jeans weather, my cell phone working, passing through my home town, beaches, visiting long lost friends in every state. I love America.

Touring the states has proven to be a far different audience than that of Europe. I commend the Europeans on their openness of their expressions during a concert. To analyze this correctly, I have to take into consideration that in Europe, Rihanna was headlining, people were paying the ticket price to come watch her as the main attraction. Here in the states we are an opening act for Mr. West. We are simply the pre-party, if you choose to partake. The crowd response every night is not always as we’re used to… our fellow Americans are a little more laid back…or hard to impress…or jaded…or simply need to drink more alcohol. (this is not every night, just something we’ve noticed) On top of that, I was used to performing a show that would last over an hour, and now I feel like we’re barely getting started when we walk off stage after our 30 minute set. We go on earlier in the day, sometimes leaving us performing in the daylight at certain outdoor arenas. Kind of weird to perform a glow in the dark show in the day light haha.

As I’m sure many people want to know… “what is Kanye like?!” Well, on a personal level, he’s a sweetheart to all of us, always saying hi greeting with hugs and a smile. He often comes in before and after shows to say good luck or good job. It’s quite nice of him, and he really doesn’t even have to make the effort. As for on the professional level, he took our show, which you can see in some of the pics, where we wear glow in the dark tape and fluorescent colors to a whole new level of a set and costumes. As appreciative as we all were, it was just rough that it all had to happen in 2 days between our Virginia Beach show and Madison Square Gardens show. It just made it that much more stressful dancing on a whole new set and changing some of our timing and choreography right before the infamous Madison Arena. Either way, he’s a perfectionist who means well, but will settle for no one else’s vision but his own. Can’t blame him I guess, it’s his tour.


All that being said, let’s go all the way back to the beginning… Seattle. As with many live performances, we didn’t really get to have a full dress rehearsal on our stage until our opening night. Unfortunately, some of the clothes that were expecting to make it to the show, didn’t, so we had a few temporary show clothes. Either way, it was a first show… we’ll leave it at that. Our next city, Sacramento, was still working out the kinks in costume… as we were with the set down in San Diego and LA.

Luckily, while I was in San Diego, my boyfriend came down and I got to play! He got to see my life on the bus, the coffin-like bunk I live in, the craziness the crowd can be during a show and all the fun in between! I had no memory of what Sea World was like, so we explored the fun animals. Its crazy that I really get paid to do all this…Also, Victor and Tara drove all the way down as well to see the show... thank you!!!

Then I got to perform in my hometown of LA… but we had complications with our set. We use scaffoldings for the “SOS” number and someone in one of the crews accidentally fed our keyboardists wires through the scaffolding that was supposed to be free to move about the stage, but it was tied down thanks to the genius of a stage hand who didn't look around to see what the wires were feeding through. Even worse, we didn’t find this out until we were already on stage attempting to use them for choreography. So we were definitely stuck dancing with only one (instead of two). It was just a bummer because all of our family and friends were in the audience and we spent an entire song free styling choreography to attempt to make things work with the complication given.

From there we did a random one-off show in Orlando for the Grad Bash parties they have there. Again, I got paid to get VIP entrance to the front of all of Universal Studios lines. It was pretty amazing… then we got to perform late at night for the grads. May I personally recommend the Spiderman ride to anyone who likes to have fun... imagine an indoor roller coaster, with 3-D glasses on, and real water/fire thrown at you. Honestly such a great ride! Not to mention the Hulk ride was incredible! Yes, I get paid to critique these rides for you! haha...

After a few days off for fun, we flew back to Denver to meet back up with the Kanye tour group and it all started there. Every night we started changing small things in our show, from the music set list to a few placements on stage and what not. We have performed 6 nights a week for the last four weeks and still don’t have a consistent feel of the show. We’re constantly evolving, which is good, but for a dancer who practices and memorizes things as choreographed, I’m constantly being challenged in front of large audiences.
Many of our shows have been at outdoor venues which restrict our stage space, but have had some great audience turn outs. One night we were just a few hundred short of 22,000 people in the audience. Since it was an outdoor amphitheatre, the awning covers the seats up until the back area, where it’s just grass for the cheap seats in the back. When the people on the grass area stood up, there was nothing behind them, just sky, so it looked like the crowd was never ending from stage. It was amazing. Then, by the time we went on stage, there was a hurricane scare and we were performing watching thunder and lightning behind the back row. It was like we were watching a show while putting on a show!

This tour also happens to land on the month of birthdays! So far, we’ve celebrated Kevin’s on the 3rd, Chris’ on the 5th, Dae Dae’s on the 10th, TJ’s on the 11th… and will be celebrating Rachaels on the 19th, and Julius’ on the 29th. Needless to say, we kind of go all out and get some great service at local clubs to celebrate their birthdays. The stories are great about these birthdays… something better told over an afternoon bqq or something, just not as good to read! Just as a preview... when we went out for Dae Dae (our Drummer's) birthday, we entered a club called "Love" through the back entrance. This entrance conveniently brought us through what we called 'the puke room.' It was essentially a room lined with chairs and buckets for all the overly intoxicated folks in the club. The room smelled like fresh vomit and if guys like going to clubs to stare at this hot chicks in skin tight outfits, I'm sure it's because they never see this aftermath of spandex spitting up in a bucket! Brutal!
Not to mention that this club has four or more levels and everyone seemed to be packed into one frickin' floor staring at Rihanna of course!

We also went out for fun times in Oklahoma City where we found our sound guy, to be left unnamed for his own protection (yet you can see pictured here haha), walking the streets drunk as a skunk. What's wild is that in the whole area near our hotel there are streets lined with bars... but our drunken friend happened to walk into the bar we were all chillin' in... and ironically he didn't call one of us to find out where we were. It made us laugh all night!

I obviously couldn't help myself when we were in Miami... I HAD to go down to South Beach! This was my first time in the southern end of Florida, but it's easy to see that I love that place! The water is clear as ever! The sand was beautifully white... and the food was brilliant! My boyfriend told me he wanted pictures of me in the water and asked me to find some guy who I could con into getting into the water and taking the pictures for me... as you can see, I was successful in this task :) At first I thought my boyfriend was crazy, but I love the way the pics turned out, so I can't complain!
There are also picture records of us going out for Kevmo's (our pianist) birthday at a club in Atlanta called Verve. It was another eventful night out spend dancing on the VIP couches they had for us! Jill, Eric and I ended up at the local Waffle House the earliest in the evening and I couldn't be happier... food=happiness. Below is a picture of Meho, me and Jen at the club (left) and me and Kevmo on the right.















Here are pictures of our new outfits that Kanye got for us... and our new set... ya'll just aren't ready for this! Not to mention our set is large and in charge now, so our dance space has (yet again) been shrunken to a strip of a stage. Check back soon for more updates! :)