Marianne Machin

Choreography, Dancing and Pop

Latitude

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Champion sound
Champion sound

La La Latitude.

Backstage at Guilty Pleasures. It’s DRY! 5000 shiny happy people raving in a tent…bring it on!!!

Latitude is really fun. If you haven’t been, you should go. It’s so pretty and gentle and full of interesting things to do. I know, I know, that all sounds a bit sensible but this is a festival for grown-ups and I’m fine with that. I like it that people pick up their rubbish and go to poetry readings and pop off to bed by midnight…

So, yeah, Latitiude is great, but Guilty Pleasures at Latitude is greater. P.A.R.T.Y. It’s funny, cause the Elbow-loving, Guardian-reading, 6music-listening Latitude clientele probably wouldn’t go for the GP vibe normally…in fact, they’d run a mile. But whack a bit of Katy Perry on in a field and people go bonkers.

For Sparklemotion, this gig is a bit of a ‘moment’. You see, I was in the crowd many years ago and I saw the GP dancers and I thought ‘I want that gig’ and blow me down, here we are. The first year we nearly died of shock. 5000 people!! That’s a big number for a small dance troupe. But we’re cool with it now (ha ha, not really!)

Boogaloo Stu

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Baroque’n’roll
Baroque’n’roll

Heart-shaped Moscow.

Hanging out with our favourite, Boogaloo Stu, in a super-glam restaurant in MOSCOW. Not joking. This place is nuts…

Arrived. Picked up at airport by smiley, friendly, dope-smokey Sergei. The three of us tucked into the back of a car…Sergei and his pal up front, toking on a great big reefer (jail if you get caught!!!)

Welcome to Mokba. We’ve done this before and the driving/traffic/near-death-scrapes are what I always seem to come away with (that, and a headache). However, this trip bucks the trend and we have an altogether different, less vodka-based experience. For starters, we see Moscow by day. Plus its tropically hot (I know, weird, right!). Our host, Sergei, he of the reefer, is a jolly fellow who is keen to impress. We eat a HUGE dinner of strange pickled soup and about sixteen salads (was that the munchies I had??)

Next, we waddle bloatedly to a pretty park and hang out on some big green cushions (where Sergei drops his dope into the actual grass). My ankles have swollen to unknown proportions…it’s 35 degrees for god’s sake! Then it’s show time. HOT. And WEIRD. Performing on the bar of a restaurant (why is it never simple???) to a handful of bewildered diners. They brought us to Russia for this???

Stu cuts an unusual (decidedly controversial) figure in this upmarket Moscow eaterie. I’m not sure they’re accustomed to (or tolerant of) men in gold leotards. But, we get through it without incident and are then whisked off to a club. Amazingly, we manage to have a fairly early sober night (this is not the way previous trips have ended) and get to have a lovely walk round Red Square the next day. I cannot believe I actually saw something other than the inside of a nightclub. Yay! And btw, that stereotype about Russian women being beautiful. It’s true.