Making a Marriage, Part 1 (India Part 3)

This post is part of a month long trip I just took to India. If you’d like to start from the beginning, please click here.

We learn today that everything they are using to build this wedding is rented- the day after it finishes they have 20 hours to disassemble it all or pay a fine. The whole thing is made up of chipped and weathered boards, bamboo poles, spare chunks of wood added on the fly to fill in gaps. All of this is nailed together with hundreds of thousands of nails that will have to be pried up individually.

Drove to site midday, smog so thick you could stare right at the sun. A perfect red circle hanging over the half finished buildings. Apparently labor is so cheap here that businesses or rich folks with some extra cash will just start building something, finish it later when they have more free capital.

Just in case you don’t know, we perform a circus act called Russian Bar. You can see a video of what we do here, or our website here. We’ve been brought to this marriage to work with another Russian Bar trio to do a single, synchronous act.

The days leading up to the event are a whirlwind of activity. Training first thing in the morning, light checks at night once the sun has gone down, everyone battling jet lag and the first rumblings of food poisoning. Many of us fall asleep in the green room in between practice sessions. During dance practice I break a mirror on the stairs, who puts mirrors on stairs? Or tries to confine all these sweet moves to such a small space? Come on people, I’M WORKIN’ HERE!

1/26- Hard rehearsal today, eight cooks in the kitchen. And the kitchen is in the sun, and cooking involves doing russian bar over and over with two different teams with their own techniques and repertoire of tricks until we can get in unison, and then putting all of that on a new music. Two hours of stop and start, at least the sun keeps our bodies warm and ready for action. Luckily the other team is great to work with: efficient, professional and very fun, couldn’t ask for a better group in a situation like this.

The stage is also wet at night, which is terrifying for Russian Bar: no one wants to lose their footing while a girl whose life you’re responsible for is 25 feet in the air. We are nervous but agree to try it, then during the night’s run-through Yves slips down the stairs on an entrance and breaks another mirror. Yikes. Tomorrow, with any luck, the show will start before the condensation does. Fingers crossed, but the two broken mirrors aren’t making us feel lucky.

As the sun sets they spray the entire grounds with some sort of anti-bug spray, a menacing, poisonous fog that blankets the area. The man spraying it has a mask, but seems unconcerned with anyone else’s pulmonary safety and we run from the approaching gas like a horror movie.

Tomorrow looms near. Costume prep in the morning and final preparations for the show, plus the site looks nowhere close to ready, although they assure us it will be done in time.
To be continued…