I wrote this from a place called Tang gu in Tianjin administrative unit. It's the second autonomous region we've been to in the space of a week. The other was to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia for the Mongolia Folk Arts Festival.

The journeys to both places have taken under an hour from Beijing, to Hohhot by plane, and to Tang gu by fast train. Both have been fraught with comical experiences, which I will concentrate upon for a change from the usual Agony Column that has come to characterize our artistic experience here.

In the time leading up to now, we saw the World Cup final in Sanlitun at 2am till the old people came out for their morning rituals of fishing and Tai chi practice.

That day we also witnessed the unbelievable act of a white man snatching and running off with a phone from a Chinese girl he had deluded into thinking he was her ticket out of China.

The episode featured him turning down on her behalf a request for her to dance with us, shortly after she was nestling in his chest. Next thing, he is sprinting out into the rain with her phone.

She chased in vain, only to come back, frazzled hair, wet dress and all, to reclaim her shoes where she had left them at the restaurant's doorstep, before trying to sort out the bill knight in shining armor had gallantly left her with.

As unfortunate as the incident was, we were glad it wasn't a black culprit, for the Chinese and foreign community would have looked on us more uncivilly than they already do, with being expelled from that restaurant's performance not being far off on the guilt-by-association  theory.

We thought the octopus-predicted World Cup final later that night would make happy memories for us, only to be rudely shaken from groggy sleep with news of the Al-Shabaab bomb blasts in Kampala.

Although we had by then barely slept four hours, adrenalin rushed us out to buy Skype credit to call home and assure ourselves no one we directly knew had been harmed.

Always tragedies about the lives lost, but spare some thought for the emotional state of the survivors whose will be paranoid of all things unknown for the rest of their lives.
The next big thing on the agenda was our salary, which came two days later at 2am on 15th, the day we left for Hohhot.

It came with an expected cut for the show we refused to do after Shandong and the inter-Boss miscommunication, which caused chaos when we asked our original Bosses for a refund from the money they made off us then.

Of course they refused, even icing it with one Dolby surround-sound quarrelling on the part of Reverend XP. But ceteris paribus aluta continua, if standing ground last time is what inspired our Boss to not wait for sunrise before issuing salary this time, the opportunity to redeem the 100 yuan (30k) deducted will present itself sometime.

We left after the first of our thrice-a-week performances at the Tianlun Dynasty Hotel in Wangfujing where, because the Hohhot performance had more benefits, this time "the client" who normally insists on doing 20 minutes was magically not known to our Boss, allowing us to do one 8-minute show at 6:40pm where we are supposed to do two 10-minute shows starting at 7pm.

We would not be available the next day so replacements had to be drafted in. There was a bit of circus when we were asked/ordered to give our costumes, music and even use less drums than was planned for the Hohhot show but we refused flat-out, for health reasons (the costumes), and artistic-stereotype reasons ( the assumption that all blacks would know the choreography to any music used by other African performers).

Even Reverend XP's infamous diatribes delivered in person when we went to get our passports from her shop would not move us on the subject. Thus we left, again with storm clouds gathering, and they broke the next day with the performance of our killer replacements.

More next time. Stay blessed blog comments powered by Disqus

< Prev		Next >