The Aluminum Show

My sweet mom bought tickets for us to go to The Aluminum Show this last Monday. I guess the traveling troupe got caught in Donner Pass in a snowstorm, so the show was moved to Tuesday. Nat is in charge of her roadshow, so she couldn't come on Tuesday night (it was roadshow practice), so we invited my Aunt Marilyn to come along. When I told Ben about the whole Donner Pass thing, he asked if the troupe had to eat each other to survive. Hardee-har-har. :)

I'd never heard of The Aluminum Show before, but when I heard that there was a lot of dancing, I was, of course, game. I love me some dancin'.

Kay. So, I thought maybe there would be a lot of drumming, like on aluminum trash cans or something? That's what I imagined. But the aluminum show has no drumming. Almost the whole show is done with those vent thingeys, like that go from your dryer to the outside of your house. The ones that are expandable and bendy, like a covered slinky.

There was a bit of a storyline - there are these two big slinky animal thingeys, and they have a little baby animal slinky, and the baby gets seperated from his parents. He makes friends with a human, and together, they try to find the parents. Honestly, I didn't think that a storyline was necessary. I think the show would have been better with just several different, cool, aluminum-inspired dance numbers. But I know the story tugged at the heartstrings of the kiddies in the audience.

And it was extremely kid-friendly. I kept thinking about how much Dylan would have loved it. There's a part where the dancers release hundreds of these filled-up aluminum pillow thingeys into the audience, and the audience hits them up into the air, and the music is loud and pumping, and there are strobe lights...it feels like a big party:

And then there's a part where they have one end of the slinkey tube thingeys sealed, and at the other end, they're blowing really powerful air into them, and they're super duper long, so they start to expand, like worms, out into the audience. And the audience is kind of passing the worms over their heads. That was cool:

They also had these gun thingeys that shot huge and small pieces of aluminum into the audience. And lots of puppetry. So yeah, kids loved it. If it comes back next year, I'll really have to take Dylan and Sadie. They would have been enthralled.

My favorite part was these giant slinky creatures that did a hip-hop dance:

These dancers were AMAZING. There was this one girl in particular off of whom I couldn't keep my eyes. She just had a certain way of moving - very intense, very strong. All of the dancers were really awesome, but she was really unique. It made me wonder if I was a boring dancer, or if people looked at me when I danced. I probably was boring - I had a hard time smiling when I danced, because I was always concentrating so hard on the moves. :) I had to really push myself to smile and project.

They did one number with the slinky thingeys and no music, just kind of hitting them and opening them and closing them. It reminded me of what I've heard of that Stomp show:

They danced like snails at one point:

There was one part that reminded me of Carnivale down in Brazil, with crazy headdresses and capes and things:

Anyways. The show was phenomenal. It was so fun to do something different. The music was so wonderful - I would love to own it. It's all fast, with a heavy beat. Perfect music for working out. Or scrubbing my floor. I had to constantly fight the urge to jump up and do some Jersey Shore-inspired fist-pumping.

Thanks so much, Mom!!!