#strangelyabroad

[iamstrangely]

So #Norway is basically my favorite #Myst level in real life. In other news, I finally got myself a #DuffleJacket and I’ve been eating “#Kaviar” out of a tube... whatever that is... . . . . #Oslo #StrangelyAbroad #StrangelyOnTheLam #Fashion #Wool #FishFightersHat #woodenboats #TinyIsland #TinyHomes #Cabins #Nordic(k) #Writing (at Oslo, Norway) https://www.instagram.com/p/BoCwDZggSGc/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1wpy72wsb35w0

[iamstrangely]

Well it seems @beltingbowlers have themselves a #cabaretcat #strangelyflamboyant #strangelyabroad

[iamstrangely]

So I got this sticker slapped on me which apparently means I get to sleep in a fancy Chinese hotel for all of four hours... Joy! #strangelyabroad

[iamstrangely]

Travel Update From Finland / Album Release / NaNoWriMo / Dutch Comedy Festival

Hello Halloween Everyone!

 I'm currently sitting at a large, sturdy, dining-room table in Finland. I think this excellent piece of furniture actually used to be the front door of a rather substantial building, although how it ended up as a table is anyone's guess. I just finished making a very satisfying batch of waffles with Aaron after our morning run along the marina. We're carbing up because tonight we're performing our first official "Thrilling Tale of Yesteryear" show at Circus Helsinki for Halloween! >> If you’d like to preorder the album, you can click here! << (The album officially releases on the 20th of November, but physical copies are available if you come to one of my live shows.)

  And now… Here I am… Contemplating a mostly empty page, wondering what to write about.

 Things are starting to coalesce for me after the difficult trip that was the last two months since leaving Edinburgh, as I finally catch up on sleep and start looking toward the future.  Since my last blog post I added a further 160 miles (257 km) of cycling to my total, which brings the final count for this entire enterprise to 1660. I don't even know how I did that, and I'm the one who did it, the best I can express to most people is that I did it one mile at a time.  Neil Gaiman describes writing a novel as being not-unlike building a wall of dry stones; you find a piece that fits and then another and before long you have a wall. >> His 8 rules of writing also recommend, just putting one word after another. << This comparison is actually even more apt, considering what I'm planning on doing next.

  Because goodness knows I don't have enough things on my plate already (12 shows in the next 30 days, less than 70 days till I leave for tour in Australia, etc.) I'm going to take another swing at >> NaNoWriMo. << I know that sounds insane, but frankly I've found that unless I'm pushing myself to the limit, I feel like I'm not working hard enough. And lest any of you are worried about me, I'm planning on taking all of December off.  ( >> Well, after December 3rd that is. Click here for information! << ) In order to facilitate the additional workload of writing 2,000 words per day, (To put that in perspective this blog post contains just a few words shy of  1,700) I'm taking a break from much of my presence on social media, I will still post things occasionally, but I've added all the interactive sites (Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc.) to the blacklist on my StayFocusd. [By the way >> StayFocusd << is a fantastic extension for Chrome that lets you set limits for yourself regarding what websites you can, and cannot browse, and even for how long! ]  I'm still leaving these things accessible on my mobile device though, so if there is some kind of emergency I will still be reachable, just not nearly as quickly while I'm writing. >>You can follow my progress here! <<

 That's it for my housekeeping and whatnot this month. Below you'll find a write-up of my experiences at the Comedy Festival in Holland. As always please come out and see my shows! >> You can click here for info! << Also, you may have noticed the Patreon link is missing from the website, it will be back on >> December 3rd << don't you worry.

 Two weeks ago some of you may have seen that I was live tweeting from the Leeuwarden Cabaret Festival Comedy Competion. The idea of this competition was to allow three comics to perform 20 minute sets and then the audience would vote on the best one who would then proceed to the finals. After the three comics there was an intermission and then I played a 30 minute set before the winner was announced. Most people in the Netherlands speak english fairly well, so my set went over gangbusters, even though certain cultural differences were apparent a few times. Of greater interest to me was the experience of watching stand-up comedy in a language I don't understand.

 All the comics performed in Dutch, a language I don't really understand. (I was raised in a family where dutch was spoken at most holiday functions, so I have a passing familiarity, though I learned during my recent trip to Holland that the dialect my family speaks is known as Friesian, different from the more widely spoken Dutch, and apparently difficult for regular Netherlanders to understand. Much like the Glaswegian accent for Scots.) Standup comedy is an interesting art for because it's generally just a person with a microphone, telling jokes. During the competition I was actually asked to serve as an additional judge, helping to decide upon the "wild card" performer, basically us judges would send one performer (out of the six) onward to the final, who hadn't passed the audience vote. I based most of my choice on watching how the audience reacted, and also through what the performer made me feel. You can still enjoy a performance in a language you don't understand (Opera is a great example of this.), if the work is skillful and the artist is engaging with the audience.  I'm going to break down the three comics for you here, but I'm not going to print their names, as not everything I have to say is positive.

 The first comic came up, and began telling a long story, his whole act seemed to be autobiographical in nature, as I was catching words like "my, mine, my daughter" and so on. The story obviously made the audience uncomfortable and the laughs that happened seemed to be at moments he didn't like and for reasons he wasn't intending. Eventually he sat down to one side of the stage and talked for a while longer. The last five minutes of his act were so difficult to sit through, nobody was breathing, or moving as the man went deeper and deeper into his story. He concluded by standing up and addressing the audience thanking them for something and then left the stage. [I was later informed that his wife had died about a year ago and most of the material was about her death and his coming to terms with it and raising their daughter. His thank-you at the end basically thanked the crowd for being his "therapist" and asked them, 'Same time next week?' in the hopes that they'd send him on to the next round of the competition.]

 Far be it from me to evaluate the worth of anyone else's work. But I will say this, if you're not giving something to an audience I have a hard time supporting what you're doing. Art in my opinion, particularly performance art, should give the audience a way in, it should be something that they can get a handle on. This isn't to say art shouldn't challenge an audience, shouldn't make them look hard at themselves and their world, but it should give as much as it takes. This comic was essentially asking the audience to listen to him work out his own personal problems in a way that didn't give them any kind of catharsis, or release. I feel that an audience is like a boiler with a pressure valve. A skilled performer knows how and when to open the valve to release just enough pressure with the audience springing leaks and damaging them. (It's an imperfect metaphor, but you get the idea.) One final thought on this, I absolutely do think you can talk about heavy subjects in a way that is funny and creates an 'in' for your audience, one need look no farther than >> Tig Notaro's incredible standup album "Live." <<

 The second comic shouldn't really even be called a comic, she was a cabaret artist, and her act was downright incredible. A deliciously crafted 20 minute cabaret set that had everything: humor, catchy songs, sex appeal and even an audience participation bit. I was laughing pretty steadily through the act even though the exact word content of it eluded me. She clearly had the audience enthralled (though I learned that she had quite a few friends and fans in the house that night, clearly the adoration was deserved) singing along and managed to get even the stodgiest audience members laughing.

  The interested thing with a bit like this is that she had a tremendous amount of material that was visual, and was very aware of how she worked with it. Even simple actions like putting on a ukulele or removing her jacket were moments for comedy and audience interaction. She addressed her audience very directly and made a tremendous amount of eye contact when needed and coyly looked away when not. It came as very little surprise to me when she handily won the audience vote to move on to the next round.

 The final comic also had a mixture of stories and songs though his material was not quite as compelling as what preceded him. He was a nice, fresh-faced young man who had a line of jokes at the beginning of his act about how he had the face of a baby and people call him 'Frodo.' I don't have much analysis of his set except to say that he walked into a room that had just been dominated by another performer, acknowledged that domination and then immediately made the room his own. It takes a tremendous amount of confidence and ability to read and play to an audience to accomplish this and he did it very well.

  That's it for this blog post! I hope you folks enjoyed it!

 Cheers!

 -Strangely

​

[iamstrangely]

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If you think you can't for the impossible... #donetheimpossible #strangelyabroad Losing my mind with joy that I get to see my best friend @aaronjshay tomorrow! #brotp #latergram #reykjavictory