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

Only 2 days left! This A Musing Fringe extravaganza may be winding down, but right now we are ramping up for our final 2 days of jingles and attention-grabbing hijinks on the Royal Mile and our final shows in our steamy little theatre at Greenside. It’s the final push and we are going all out!!  -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

The gang is all here!! All seven muses of A Mused Collective are now finally in Edinburgh. As our last to arrive, Jenjen, touched down, the clouds parted and we had a gloriously sunny day here in this city of “green, rain and stone” as Krystal says.  There seems to be a heat wave every time A Mused Collective performs and I don’t think anyone in Edinburgh will mind if the California sunshine stays with us here for the next two weeks!

I started this beautiful day with a hike up to the scenic overlook of Calton Hill with Abby and Tony (see pictures above of our early morning antics).  From the peaceful morning hilltop we prepared ourselves for the real start of our Fringe experience, for our performance baptism tomorrow. We will start the morning on the iconic Royal Mile where we will do our very first street performance. On the historic cobblestone street teeming with people, with the Edinburgh castle as the backdrop, we will gather an audience to a postage-stamp of a stage to preview Fragment. And we are among the lucky few groups that have one of these little pop-up stages that dapple the street every few meters. While the Fringe has a strict application process for street performances, the thousands of performers that have descended upon this fair city just can’t help themselves! People resourcefully stage all kinds of theatrics to market their shows; playing dead on the street in a postcard chalk line, donning crazy costumes, and reciting monologues as they walk. We look downright tame in our short shorts, tie flair and bustles!

After our street performance prelude tomorrow, we will debut Fragment in the garden theatre of the Greenside Parish, a perfectly quaint stone church. Though the church is right down the street from the Royal Mile, it seems far removed from the mayhem. At the base of Calton Hill, the active parish feels like a retreat, a little performance hideaway. Greenside has turned every bit of their grounds into performance space for the Fringe, and while it feels removed, it is a well-attended and well-respected performance venue. Martha Graham famously said,  “Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.” Performingin a space like Greenside, on their holy grounds, we are reminded that we dance and we share our dance because it nourishes our souls and offers us respite amidst the craziness that is Fringe.  It is a spiritual act in many ways.

Of course, we welcome the crazy, which is why we are here! So, here’s to our Fringe debut tomorrow. May all the spirits, gods and angels be with us! - Shelly

We just finished our last rehearsal here in Oakland before we embark on our journey to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  We are still tweaking Fragment - adding new movement, changing lyrics – refining the piece and finding the depth. But we are ready! We have logged over 200 hours of rehearsal and raised thousands of dollars for this opportunity to present A Mused Collective to the biggest performing arts marketplace in the world. 

We will be among thousands of shows, thousands of artists from around the world. This journey will test our mettle and it will inspire us. What an incredible opportunity for a bunch of real women (and 1 man - sorry Tony, my girl-power pride is going to take over for a sec here). We dancers are real women, women who have careers and families. We dance all together twice a week at most – often after full work-days. With only a few hours a week of rehearsal, it is through sheer discipline, desire, will power and fantastic leadership that we have created this work. And this piece Fragment, celebrates exactly that – the fact that we are real women – multifaceted, emotional, competitive, collaborative and everything in between. We are exquisitely flawed and fragmented. This piece is not about perfect dance technique or super-human tricks or flawless harmonies. That is not who we at A Mused Collective are. Don’t get me wrong, we are good dancers and good musicians, but that’s not what is fundamental. Fundamentally, we are a dedicated and scrappy bunch who carve out time to create together by celebrating what Abby calls the “ness” - the goodness, the rawness, the humanness – the essence and the energy that is in the room at the time.  We can’t wait to bring our “ness” To Scotland. We will share our experiences here in these musings. Thank you all for your support and generosity! Next time from Edinburgh! -Shelly

For my pre-Fringe musings published by InDance
check out the link below - 
Edinburgh or Bust: Getting to the Fringe Festival

Stay connected to A Mused Collective and learn about their upcoming experiences at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.