Nesting Is Death.

I'm Ill, so take this with the grain of salt it's posted with, but...

John Rogers, over at Kung Fu Monkey*, is talking about one of his heroes and role models in the stand-up comedy biz. In the process, I saw something that caught my eye as a potential answer to the question "how do ordinary people build a Belly Dance SuperStar tour"?

[...]in the dying embers of the comedy boom , every Chinese restaurant and sports bar had a Comedy Night. This was a natural, if intermediary, step in the evolution of nightclub entertainment. Bar owners had just discovered that stand-ups were cheaper to book than bands, but had not yet sussed that karaoke was even cheaper.
Subsisting well under the HBO-level strata, but mining that rock for all it was worth, were the one-nighter booking agents. They strung together tours of these one-night gigs in the hinterlands in order to make the trips profitable for the comics and affordable for the clubs. There was no way in hell a comic was going to drive to Klamath Falls to do a $200 one-nighter. But if it were the Saturday on an Albany/Corvalis/Eugene/Roseburg/Klamath Falls run for a $1000 plus hotel, well then, that's a week worth travelling for. These agents would also rep you at the regional conventions for college entertainment, folding the two aspects of the trip together for maximum profitability. Name a community college in the Pacific Northwest, and I performed stand-up on one of their cafeteria tables.

...the problems with dancers using such a model are nigh-insurmountable, starting with a lack of venues, overall -- most dancers mine one or two places to dance in, and "nest" there. In the process, we tend to become somewhat passive receptors for new gigs, supporting ourselves with dance instruction and "real" jobs. Which is cool for stable income, but suffers from a number of issues, among which are a lack of places for up-and-coming dancers to work at.
It's just an idea, and I'm not certain how it'd work for troupes. Yet I hear so many complaints about BDSS, and little commentary about how someone could build a counter-BDSS. This might be one way, if someone was so interested. And I'd much rather see this than another person tell me that their goal, as a dancer, is to become a Desert Rose. Being a Desert Rose is great...yet it's not a career. And, from what I'm told, Miles, for all his "cute girl-ness", still looks for talent, for star power -- and I know Jillena does.









* You need to be reading Kung Fu Monkey. For my money, it's the best overall blog out there; somethign for the comic geeks, the television geeks, the comic book geeks, the movie geeks, the political geeks, and for Just Plain Folk.