It was a late warm summer afternoon, the air was thick with salt and humidity from the ocean air, and the Groovolution core team was sitting on the trunks of their cars attaching giant stilts to their feet racing against the setting sun.
Just a day or two before, the owner of a warehouse – originally planned to be our video shoot location – called and said something went wrong with his plans and now cannot loan us the location for the only two evenings our talented camerawoman would be in town.
Undeterred by the unfortunate news, we knew our only chance to create our very first circus performance promotion video would be to run out and hunt down as many locations as possible that could cater to our themes.
After a full day of searching, our camerawoman arrived and we were ready to film at our first location almost instantly. First spot? An art project consisting of a single sidewalk and many decorated gigantic shipping containers.
This incredibly colorful area inspired us to become colorful ourselves, and therefore should be our first section of the video shoot during the fading daylight of the late afternoon. We hurried to the location, donned our brightly colored feathery plumage, and attached our stilts off the back of our cars in order to be sitting on the tallest object in the area.
In what can only be described as “efficiently expedited” we were towering over and around our camerawoman in minutes, stomping around the gigantic art pieces which seemed dwarfed by our own moving artwork we displayed. As the sunlight faded, and our overwhelming presence was somewhat darkened, we dropped back down to level ground and sped off to our next location.
A coffee shop? Really? What could a coffee shop possibly provide for us to display some incredible circus? Well surprise! It did!
A long alleyway along the side of the coffee shop had small tables for patrons, a little wooden ceiling, and in the middle a single purple light bulb trying in vain to illuminate the gnarled twisted plant escaping from its pot below. – This would be perfect to create a fantasy!
Our stilt walking costume inventory is not only vast, but constantly growing as more clients request new ones and our talented seamstress makes them custom for their event. This prompted us to try and add just one more set of examples for stilt walking in this particular circus video shoot – and this new location in the dusk of the evening did not disappoint.
Quickly setting up the lighting and capitalizing on the purple light in the alleyway, we had a beautiful ice themed display to contradict the hot summer night in Florida. Starting with a shimmering ice princess gliding along the cool tones of the light and finishing strong with a multicolored rainbow 4 legged stilt walking Unicorn, we turned this simple alleyway into a fantasy dreamland for the imagination.
Once the final pieces of stilt walking were filmed, we still had ONE more location! – Our base of operations – Groovolution Dance Studio!
Of course stilt walking can be considered circus – who doesn’t think of towering lumbering artwork beaming down at them when one thinks of the circus – but of course what’s REALLY famous about circus? The Acts!
Flying high and sparkling bright, one of our skilled aerialists soared high in the vaulted ceilings of our dance studio, displaying powerful poses and flexible beauty across both silks and the aerial hoop. These breathtaking feats of strength and grace will certainly be a highlight in the video to come.
Finally, to close out the night, shining in another custom costume from our seamstress, a debut has been added to the circus video – after training for several years, a new circus act has been added to the Groovolution core team – the Cyr wheel! You will be amazed at how smooth yet strong this new monstrous metal ring is controlled seemingly easily by each and every muscle on the body of our performer as if he were the controller of a giant gyroscope! Dance meets strength in this battle against the laws of physics!
Our video shoot ended after several hours of play. The camerawoman turned off her camera at the end of the night with a huge smile on her face, ideas flowing in her head after what she had seen. But that wasn’t the real end – oh no, not at all! For the next day she would be filming our Groovolution belly dance crew – and she would be in for a real treat there!