SpunOut 2008 Wrap-up

by Colin Christensen

Well, SpunOut was AWESOME! Best ever. And a tribute to Hana, Angus and the many others who help each year to make this THE must-do activity of the year.

SpunOut is a weekend of workshops, sharing, showing, helping with all things related to fire plus an increasing and significant amount of circus and street performance stuff.

On fire related items, the program for the weekend included poi, staff, twin staff, contact staff, clubs, swords, rope dart, devil sticks, hooping, fire eating, body tracing and fire fingers.

As well, there were workshops and activities in making your own practise equipment, ball juggling, club juggling, diabolo, stilting, unicycling, yoga, massage, contact juggling, stage presence, fire safety and first aid, acro-balance and whip cracking. In the background, action with stage makeup, henna, hair braiding and silk screening.

Friday evening involved checking in, doing some stuff to familiarise people with the safe handling of fire and to get confident with it - we don't like people panicking if something doesn't go quite right.

Saturday was into the serious stuff - heaps of workshops, lots of new and old stuff, lots of new people doing stuff they had never done before. Early evening was the safety and first aid talk with pretty well everyone attending, a good sign for the rest of the night.

Then the FIRESHOW! Twenty odd people performed for the other ninety or so who were hanging around the perpetually roaring large fire pit and dancing to Rusty's full-on sound and light show. The sound and lights were also integrated into the performance. Myself and Mark on stilts to added to the ambience. It must have all been quite awesome to the many who had never experienced fire performing before.
Whacky-hit-of-the-night was surely Az riding around on a little kid's bike ON FIRE, in nothing but his white boxers with red hearts, until sense and pain receptors prevailed. Az is...well...Az is Az! Jed performed with his ENORMOUS fire poi to the sound of "Big Balls of Fire". Ben seduced Nat with a slow twin staff routine to "I had the time of my life" - a perfect theme song for the weekend.

Dave from England, Ben and Jed did a hastily improvised set of passing and twirling a fiery staff entirely by contact - no hand grips. Difficult and applauded loudly. Dave also did an upper-half strip while keeping his burning staff, sans hands, in contact with various parts of his body at all times.

Finally, in response to a fireball from Jed's fire whip, all artists streamed onto the large play area and twirled and twisted. The "Mini Burning Man" was burnt to the sounds of "the roof, the roof, the roof is fire, we don't need no water, let the mother fu... burn". A thoroughly funny tribute to Burning Man! (Gaynor, Kat, Dan and others - thanks, it was a hoot. Love the choice of music Rusty.)

The play area was then opened to all until the fuel run out. There were twenty or thirty people at a time, twirling, juggling, fire eating and so forth. Rusty continued blazing away on the decks until half past three when we really did have to think about the workshops starting in a few hours time the next day.

Sunday saw workshops in lots of less fire related stuff, with workshops in unicycling, juggling, stilting and whip cracking, as well as advanced classes in staff and poi. The Circus Shop added there wares to the "shop", thanks Sophie and helper who's name I regret I have lost in my 56 year old mind.

The final "organised" (actually, more random and chaotic) event of the weekend was the SpunOut Olympics, sponsored by Home of Poi. This was a series of games designed in order to give away an extremely generous and unexpectedly valuable bag of goodies from Home of Poi. (Thanks guys, we really only expected a couple of glow balls and some diabolo string - we hope the whole "Olympics" concept gave you the prominence you deserved.)

Then we all set to playing some more, dancing and doofing, packing up, exchanging contact details with new friends or napping. A goodly lot also dimmed the lights at one end of the hall for some much needed body massage. A nights sleep for those remaining, some brekky, cleaning up and then back home.

Below is a 20 minute sampling of what you missed....

This video was created by Colin and Jorja Christensen.
Thank you for capturing the weekend so beautifully.
It can aslo be viewed on Colin's MySpace page
www.myspace.com/colinchristensen

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