Right now, Jim and I are in Bellingham, Washington, where we played a showcase last night for the Arts Northwest conference. These conventions are like a combination trade show/academic conference for the performing arts, where managers, performers, and presenters can all meet and essentially do the business of putting together concert tours and performing arts series; twice a day, for three hours, managers have booths in a large conference room where they display their rosters and publicity material, and presenters walk around the room, making decisions as to whom they will have on their series next season. There are also workshops given throughout the day dealing with all aspects of management on the one hand, and mounting a concert or entertainment series on the other. 

An integral part of these conferences is the "showcase", where selected performers play a sample of their work, in a theatre or concert hall, for the presenters who are in attendance, and this is what Jim and I did on Friday... for 12 minutes! That's all the time the performers are given here to "show their stuff", and it was made very clear that we all had to adhere to the prescribed time limit. Actually, Jim and I are pretty sympathetic to this position; there's nothing worse than attending a showcase that has run two hours late because the performers are all over time, and so we were very careful to structure our presentation so as to give a good cross-section of what we do, while at the same time, not going over our limit, though really, 12 minutes is too short (15 minutes is the norm). 

However, we didn't factor audience reaction into the equation. We had decided to programme cut versions of the Rhapsody in Blue and the Chasins Blue Danube paraphrase, but since this doesn't show a complete representation of what we do (it's all a bit too glitzy), we decided to incorporate the theme of the last movement of the Mozart Sonata, and the 6th variation from the Brahms Haydn Variations. Jim, who did the general introduction, said something to the effect that our programmes include most musical styles, "for instance the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos... here is the opening of the last movement", and then we played it... all 15 seconds, and the same with the Brahms excerpt. Well, when we finished the Mozart, there was a moment of silence and the audience burst into applause, and good-natured laughter at how abruptly it ended. At this point Jim said, laughing, "Hey, it's only a twelve minute showcase"; after that the whole place was on our side, and the interaction throughout the showcase was great. The problem was that this added time to our presentation, so as we got to the last part of the Gershwin, the lights started to go dim, and when we didn't stop (30 seconds from the end), the whole stage went black! 

Well, we just kept playing in the dark. I expected a long pole with a hook on the end to yank us off the stage, but as we got to the last two lines, the audience started applauding wildly, even before we finished. When it ended, a spotlight came on, the M.C. came out, and called us back to an enthusiastic reception. As we walked off, we heard him say to the audience that if we played on their series, turning the lights out was not a requirement on our tech sheet. That again got laughter and applause, and I turned to Jim while walking off and said that we couldn't have scripted it better! We'll see what the general reaction was when we go to the contact room later today, but already we've had terrific feedback.