The muses are all home from our Fringe adventure. We have settled back into our normal lives – back to work, family, bills, school. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is becoming a memory, but we are all changed from the experience that we shared. There is a bond that comes from enduring a challenging and fulfilling experience together.

Our final show was probably our best. We closed our show to our biggest and most appreciative audience and we were all able to dance with that unique mixture of excitement but centered energy that happens when you are truly living in the moment.

There are things that we know we learned, and many of those are documented here in this blog. We learned to appreciate our own enthusiasm. We learned to celebrate how different we all are. We learned to manage our energy to make it through long, tiring days. Our dancing got deeper and more refined. As a whole, Fragment tends to relish big movement and overt emotion, but we found the quiet moments and the subtleties as we continued to perform the piece.

I’m sure every muse can say that they will each take something personal away from the Fringe experience. But I also think that there are subtle, subconscious and very deep ways that we have all grown and learned that we can’t articulate and that might change as our memory of Fringe alters with time. I still find myself humming our “Fragment chant” to myself and smiling with nostalgia. The chant means something different to me now than it did when we were barking it on the Royal Mile. And it will mean something different to me a year from now, but it will always mean something to each of us personally and to A Mused Collective…collectively. It is indelibly imprinted in our psyches.

So, we move on from Fringe but we take the experience with us. We will always be those  “buff babes from A Mused Collective (and one guy too)”. -Shelly

They say that you have to expect the unexpected at the Fringe. And today, we seized an unexpected moment to make a fantastic Fringe memory! About five-minutes into our almost sold-out show, the lights suddenly surged and the power blew out in the theatre and all the way down the block. In our plucky A Mused Collective fashion, we asked the theatre management if we could just perform the show outside in the garden. Darren, the owner of the venue, responded with a smile, “We wouldn’t expect anything less from your group!”

The entire audience stayed with us as we performed Fragment in the muddy grass as the sun intermittently poked through the clouds to shine on our impromptu garden show. I speak for all of the Muses when I say that this was one of my favorite and most memorable performance experiences ever! The performers and the audience took a potentially terrible situation and made something wonderful out of it. We took lemons and made some magical performance lemonade! One audience member gushed to Abby: “you filled me to the brim, even my soul.” My soul is full too! Thank you to Greenside, to Darren, Tara, Twitch, Tina and the entire management team to the Muses and to our fantastic audience today at the Fringe.     
       -Shelly

There’s an ultra-feminine clothing store here in Edinburgh called “ness” (so cute, it doesn’t need to capitalize) and we won giggles from the store clerk when we dorky Californians posed to take a photo in the storefront.  I’ve mentioned Abby’s use of the word “ness” before in this blog. We define it as the essence, the identity and the positive flowing energy that A Mused Collective generates when we are all creating, dancing and playing music together.  This Edinburgh Fringe experience has made us more clear and confident about exactly what our “ness” is. 

We know that A Mused Collective has always celebrated the goodness, the rawness and the humanness through our work. We are now proud to add: realness, sassiness, quirkiness, connectedness and most importantly, HAPPINESS. We are continually tickled that the biggest risk to take here at the Fringe, or at least the unexpected choice, is to perform a show that is genuinely joyful, where the performers show how much they enjoy performing together. 

We are steadily building our audiences here where nobody knows us. People are always surprised when we tell them that we all have substantial careers outside of A Mused Collective, but that is part of our “ness” too. – that we are driven, ambitious, intelligent and multi-faceted women (and man). We had a funny Scotsman joke that the “Scottish psyche” doesn’t really know how to handle our bubbly, California effervescence. We are winning them over with our athleticism, if not our spunkiness. It’s all a part of this unique and singular culture that is the “ness” of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 
- Shelly

A Mused Collective has finished our first week of Fragment at Edinburgh Fringe! We are finding the humor of the work and are truly soaking up all that this Festival has to offer. We have found that what makes us unique is our California brand of tireless enthusiasm. Here’s to week 2! - Shelly

Another great day here in Edinburgh! We are “getting our fringe legs”— learning the ropes and finding our stride, so to say.  This festival has its own culture and way of doing thing, and what is effective here may not be at other festivals. But some things are universal and we have found that being kind, having real conversations with people and being our genuinely enthusiastic and friendly selves is the best promotion that A Mused Collective can do. Having an awesome show doesn’t hurt either!! - Shelly

“It’s been a long, long day” but what a fantastic day it has been. We spent the morning singing and dancing along the Royal Mile. After our sanctioned street performance where “It’s Been a Long Day” was a rousing hit (we even started a sing-along!), we mischievous muses performed renegade songs down the Royal Mile. The Fringe Police only stopped us once and I think he secretly liked us because he let us dance and sing for a while until the crowd was too much to ignore.

As with every single performance that A Mused Collective has done in the past year, we opened today in a massive heat wave. After a few technical difficulties, Fragment was hot, sweaty and awesome at Greenside. A blown-out cable sent Tony sprinting back to the apartment 5 minutes before the house opened, but we had a great show to an appreciative audience.

We topped off this great day with champagne, a delicious dinner and a walk through the city. We happened upon an incredible local band busking in the street. The bagpiper was jumping around and dancing while playing the bagpipes. And we thought we had stamina!

All in all, we are tired and fulfilled. And we do it all again tomorrow. - Shelly