November Recap: Shine Bright & Don't Die

Hello Kat Klub!! It's time for another monthly update! This one is a little late, but I needed to think more about how I wanted to word everything because there was a lot to reflect on.   I'm titling this "Shine Bright & Don't Die" so we can all learn from my mistakes. 

So my major event this month was ILLUMINATE...

Illuminate is a yearly festival run by the Utah Arts Alliance that takes place in SLC. It centers around lights as a part of art and performance. We didn't attend last year (though to be honest I don't think much was going on last year), but Weeb Streets made an appearance in some capacity for several years prior. This year, things were a little different because we had our biggest group of performers yet across both days! Very exciting stuff.  

This was an extremely difficult event due to the fact that I felt that we (Weeb Streets) didn't have enough time to prepare coming right off of Urban Arts Festival (which was its own challenge). In addition, I was dealing with a lot of pain from injuries that never got to heal due to my muscles being constantly overexerted by my day job (I am currently working on getting out of it.) I also struggle with just general chronic back pain, so this was on top of that. As such, I was pretty useless most of the event. I couldn't lift a lot to help set up, I had to cut most of the choreography from my solo set in order to save my strength for group sets, and I was just sitting recovering during most of my breaks.   

Now, this would have been fine had I not committed myself to the camera setup. I got WAY too excited after not having such a big event in 2 years and wanted to be fancy. On the positive side, the footage looks great! On the negative side, I was not able to have as much of an active role in running it like I planned. It was honestly all thanks to KeAndria and Nathan on Friday that everything ran smoothly, even into Saturday because they were able to troubleshoot some of the initial issues that I didn't have time to deal with. Next year, I will DEFINTELY have to be better at delegating tasks, especially since I have a more administrative role in Weeb Streets and need to be more just generally more available. I am trying to get better in general at asking for help when I need it in my personal life, and this definitely carries over to my work.   Let this  be a cautionary tale to all other performers and artists with my same issue!  Burnout and stress are not good at all, especially when your body needs to recover from other things. 

I have still yet to share all my videos from Illuminate, but you can watch the highlights cut right here!!

I also worked a lot on my upcoming album! I'm still not announcing too much publicly, but I am still aiming for an early 2022 release. Four whole songs are mostly finished! I'm super excited to slowly release more details starting next year. :3

Thank you for reading and sharing my artistic journey with me. I can't wait to share what December has in store!   

As a bonus, here are some more mildly cursed stills from  Illuminate.