BUSKERFEST 4: TORONTO AERIAL BALLET

So I am continuing the coverage of Collette and mine's summer. Hmm, it was a busy one. This post is going back to Buskerfest. A very busy day indeed as you can see by the videos I've already posted. I could easily cull another video out of the day and perhaps I will, perhaps I won't, these things are left up to the Fates, the tides of the ocean, the will of the transcendental spirits ... and when I roll my ass out of bed.

This video features a performance by the Toronto Aerial Ballet. This is your basic cirque de soleil style troupe with its own spin on things. This group combined canned music, backscreen video projection, live music, dance and an aerial performance. Apparently there is some kind of story/commentary behind it, I'll let you be the judge.

This was the last performance we saw that day and you can probably tell from the video. My angle was not the greatest. I should have found some high angle but I just had to sit. I had been on my feet all day including about 30 minutes perched on the edges of a wooden planter to get shots over the heads of the crowd. So we got to the aerial dance site early and plopped our butts down in front of the stage.

The angle I got put a stage light right in the lens most of the time but when I focused on the aerial performers, I think it looks pretty good. There was a fair amount of variety in the show with rings, ropes, ribbons and fabric used like an aerial cocoon.

Besides the aerial performers, there was dancing as well. You will see a bit of a female doing a solo dance but this has been edited; really, "modern" dance is something beyond my ken, I get the point of free movement but there is only so much rolling around on the stage I can take. Except . . .

... two women rolling around stage is something else all together. That's all we need to say about that, just watch the video.

So this video was shot with the XL1. It is longer than a lot of the videos I've posted, a simple performance vid cut down from around twenty minutes. Again, not the perfect angle but you get what you paid for don't you. If you haven't, check out the Jump Jet video from Cirque Orange in a previous post. Two drastically different "aerial" performances.

Toronto Aerial Dance from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.