Selasa, 07 Agustus 2012

Before Hiring a Hula Dancer - Read This!

Performance Space for your Hula Dancers

When clients ask me how much space our hula dancers will need to perform, I'll respond by telling them that large spaces are the best. Try to imagine that each of the hula dancers will need enough space to be able to extend her arms fully without touching anyone or anything. Typically, I suggest allowing each hula dancer a 5 foot radius to work their magic. It's also important to know that from time to time, hula dancers may shift positions and move toward the front of the performance area, and away from it.

Audience participation is tons of fun, but you'll need to also consider that more space will be needed to bring your guests up to learn from the hula dancers (or to just shake their stuff). While on stage, our hula dancers try to keep the audience participants close to each other in order to maximize performance space.

If you're considering having a fire dancer with your hula dancers, such as a fire knife or fire poi dance, try and keep your audience members at least 10 feet away from the fire dancer. Even though most performers are professionals who've done it a million times, accidents can happen.

Proximity of Performance to the Hula Dancers changing area

When you consider that on average, our hula dancers change costumes 5 times per hula show, you can imagine how important it is to have a performance area close to the changing area. Usually after each number, the hula dancers will quickly move off stage to change costumes, and the clock starts ticking.

Although our hula dancers often rotate numbers (so there is always a fresh hula dancer ready in costume), the hula show will always run more fluidly when hula dancers don't have to worry about sprinting from one area to the next (hula dancing is already a workout). In addition, having stairs or an elevator tends to complicates things even more. Ideally, a changing room within 50 feet works well.

What's your Point of View?

I've had many hula shows where guests were just floating through, without a real, designated, audience area. To maximize viewing of the hula dancers and performers, while keeping audience members from having to stand on their "tippie-toes", you should consider having a stage or at least spreading the audience chairs out in a way that allows all audience members a decent view of the performance area. I've found that the crescent-chair configuration works well.

Hula dancing is an absolutely beautiful thing. If you provide your hula dancers with a great performance space, they'll pay you back ten-fold with an awesome hula show.

Have a great show and Aloha!