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 Kiva's Excellent English Excursion
Author: Ariana Lightningstorm
Posted: December 4th. 2000
Times Viewed: 13,222
Nearly a year ago I was asking around to find out how to get a performance in England since I had heard from a couple of English friends that England would be a great place for KIVA to play.
My friend Anne Lister (a folk singer from London who has played at Cerridwin's Coffeehouse in Maryland) helped me find a website with a set of festival listings in England by the month. I looked in August, which was when my employers would let me go for 3 weeks. I contacted a whole list of folks and got a response from the Billingham International Folklore Festival. They liked KIVA and invited us to play at their festival!
The community generously donated enough money to pay for about half of our airfare which allowed most of the band members to go. I went almost 2 weeks in advance of the band and Amikaeyla went with me. She and I went to Glastonbury to an international goddess conference and sang on Saturday night there to a VERY appreciative crowd and then went to Avebury to visit the most amazing set of awake and living standing stones. Anne suggested that I go to Avebury because of the feminine energy of the stones and also that when she sang to the stones, the stones sang back! After visiting with the stones, I believe her!
Amikaeyla and I went to Paris to experience the city and also the solar eclipse. Paris is one beautiful city!!! It wasn't even hot on the days we were there. The only other time I was there (also in August) it was really hot and there is almost no air conditioning in Paris. We ate like queens in the most wonderful resturants and I showed her a few of the sights.
The eclipse was amazing. We climbed up the highest hill in Paris (Montmartre) and stood in the street with people from all over the world observing the solar eclipse. We were right behind Sacre Coeur, a beautiful domed church which was built on a Druidic site at the top of the hill.
What was interesting about the eclipse is that where we were standing we could see the clouds coming in over Paris but the clouds didn't reach our vantage point until the very moment of the eclipse. This enabled me to take photos of the actual eclipse because the thick clouds just covered the sun enough to view the eclipse with the naked eye. As soon as the eclipse ended, the clouds disappeared and the sky was beautiful and clear... very strange and amazing.
Amikaeyla's and my next goal was to find several wine bars and taste what Paris had to offer in wines. We were somewhat successful!
After our short stay in Paris Amikaeyla & I went back to catch a ride to Billingham on a bus with the rest of the band (minus the two who went to Scotland first and drove down - Diana S. & Dave). We rode over with the Korean dancer/drummers. They were a female troupe and they were really nice, young and beautiful!
The festival was amazing! We met folks from Korea, New Zealand, the Ukraine, Egypt, Italy, France, Argentina, Latvia and wonderful young volunteers from Billingham and Middlesboro. Billingham is in the northern part of England about an hour's drive south of York. They worked us pretty hard there at the festival. We performed 2 times a day most days.
The sound situation was abysmal in the college but the Forum theater had a wonderful sound person and a great staff and we sounded wonderful—all our microphones worked and the sound man mixed us well even though he was a substitute.
All the bands were wearing their "national costumes" so we decided that America's national costume would be tie-dye. It was pretty unique experience for us non-conformists to be representing the US in a foreign country in an international folklore festival. We were wishing we had Dave's tie-dye peace flag.
The locals really loved us and cheered us a lot on the parades. When we would get back from a performance and go to the evening jam session many of the international performers would chant "U.S.A." when we came into the room.
We met the top performing bands from the countries I previously mentioned as well as their dancers. The Koreans were quite amazing and had many different sets of costumes. The Egyptians were also amazing and their drummer made all of the drummers in KIVA feel like absolute beginners. He spoke no English but the language of the drum was sufficient for us all. He was really fascinated to learn the different styles of rhythm that we used and we were happy to learn from him.
There was another musical genius with the Sicilians. His name was Gratsiano (I may be spelling his name incorrectly because I didn't get his address - others in the band did and I'll be getting it from them.) Gratsiano played accordion in his group. He said his first instrument was the piano and his second was the accordion. What he brought with him when he jammed with us that first night was a beautiful old mandolin. He said it was his grandfather's. We played all sorts of fun songs that he started or we started and we played Aphrodite's Flowers which Gratsiano played along with flawlessly, even with all the twists and turns in the song, musically. He was a fine player and the equal to Jim or Diana McFadden. Later we found out he'd only been playing mandolin for 2 months... everyone groaned and was amazed. He said that he had a fondness for the sound of the instrument so that made him want to learn it. Plus, it was his grandfather's and that was incentive as well.
The Indians were beautiful to watch and listen to and the French country folk who walked on HUGE stilts got Eve and Paul to go up on the stilts one evening after our performances. Often the male dancers from the various countries would have a "dance off" where they would compete to see who could outdo each other.
We met a young man who we dubbed Cornflake Boy (his name is Stewart) because he served the cornflakes in the morning. I found out later that he is a big Tori Amos fan so he was very amused at being called Cornflake Boy.
Though a couple of meals were edible, most of the stuff we got served was not only English food but English SCHOOL food. It was truly abysmal. The food was even catered! They couldn't use the kitchen facilities at the college we were staying in. Thus, breakfast was white untoasted bread with jam and butter packets, orange drink made with sugar AND nutrasweet, cornflakes and coffee or tea (the coffee was from instant - it seems nearly all the coffee in England is from instant). A word about aspartame... it was in nearly all of the juices and sodas that were sold there aside from the ones that were from the US. It was used with saccharine when the label said "no added sugar". It was used along with sugar in some drinks. It was really, really weird to see how they were drinking this stuff in such quantities. The English like their sweets to be INTENSELY sweet. Even the dark chocolate (when you can find it) was twice as sugary as it is elsewhere. Jim decided that England was the aspartame experiment whereas America was the high fructose corn syrup experiment.
With the long hours and meals that had very little fiber in them, all of us started to get a bit run down. We took to skipping "breakfast" and went into town for our breakfast and lunch meals mostly making it a kind of brunch. Our servers missed us at lunch but understood since EVERYONE was complaining about the food, even our English hosts.
One of our best experiences was at the Billingham Catholic Club... you wouldn't think that it would be... but the reason is that the Catholics are more the Irish crowd and they are also the working class folks. It took a while but they really warmed up to us. I think Jim's comment when he did Star of the County Down about "this is for all of us with Irish blood" went a long way to warm them to us. The Catholic club liked us so much, even with Witchin' Hour and other such songs, that we are now card carrying lifetime members of the club! Imagine that: KIVA a favorite band for the Billingham Catholic Club—who woulda thought? The club is in a pub (almost all of them are) so we went drinking at their pub (at their request) when we had time to during the rest of the week that we were there.
When we practiced at the Forum theater we met a Pagan couple, Mark and Jo. Mark was the lighting guy at the Forum and he was wearing a pentacle so Eve and then I went up to him and chatted with him. His wife, Jo, is the secretary of the Pagan Federation of the UK. They invited us to dinner but, on the same night, we were also invited to go to a folk club by a local folk group that opened for Steeleye Span the next week. The brothers who invited us had seen us at the Catholic Club and liked us enough that they wanted us to go and sing for them. They did all vocal traditional singing in harmony and were really amazing! We performed for them and Mark and Jo came and sang as well. I think we found Mark and Jo a place to hang with the locals once a week. Some of us went to Mark & Jo's place afterwards and had some really amazing mead and chips and stuff. We talked about life in Billingham/Middlesborough and had a really great time.
We also talked about different festivals and I mentioned having gone to the Glastonbury Goddess Festival to which they made faces... it seems that Glastonbury has a reputation for being very New Age and flaky. I told them that it was actually a really amazing and wonderful time and a great festival. We invited them to come out and visit the U.S. sometime and get to the Free Spirit Festival. I hope they are able to come here someday. They put on festivals in England and I'm hoping to someday go to one of theirs. According to Mike & Jo only about a maximum of 50 people show up to most of their festivals. They had a very hard time imagining the size of our festivals.
Another really cool thing that happened was that at the Forum theater we did Go Now (by Amikaeyla) and it was as magical as when we first recorded it for the Live At The Forest Inn album. Dave was channeling so intensely that he was still way out of his body and shaking like a leaf. Several of us helped to ground him. AND the good news is that I have it on minidisk!
We also got KIVA performing the song Red Road (from Tribe of Spirit days) with the Mauri women from New Zealand singing in the audience. They really loved that song and sang whenever members of KIVA passed their group in the halls of the school we were all staying in.
KIVA is hoping to do more of these kinds of performances overseas and will need sponsorship from green companies and individuals and maybe even what is left of the funds that the govt does for music and the arts if it's possible. If anyone has any ideas as to where we could get some funding to do more performing at folklore festivals or other types of festivals around the world or would like to help do some research into getting funding of that sort please let me know!! I have some leads on festivals but it would be impossible to go without getting some funding because they don't pay for airfare.
I hope you all enjoyed this short description of our Excellent English Excursion.
Hugs & Blessings to you all!
Ariana
WebSite: www.kivasong.com
Article Specs
Article ID: 3110
VoxAcct: 172347
Section: music
Age Group: Adult
Days Up: 3,277
Times Read: 13,222
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