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  • March3rd

    Audette’s 3-3 Update of Up To’s

    Posted in: GENERAL, PERFORMANCE/ENTERTAINMENT

    Welcome my friends & allies– It’s my birthday & time for an overdue Update…

    I apologize for not staying in better touch.  Know that I LOVE YOU.

    What have I been up to??

    Well, the short answer is I have been passionately focused on recreating my Catalyst Arts business into a viable events & entertainment company.
    (But I am a multi-faceted creature if there ever was one, so here are nicely organized bullet points of my activities of late.)
    • I am working on a Catalyst Arts business plan as part of a 3 month business training through Women’s Initiative. (which rocks.)
    • I have conceptualized a new batch of really fantastical and highly interactive characters tailored to specific kinds of events, and the costumes are being sewn into reality this very month. (and soon i will be hiring and training charismatic talented ladies to embody these characters at events)
    • I am a couple months into a PR/marketing internship in SF with the International Association of Business Communicators. I spend 2 days a week in a cubicle learning through experience how the big players do it.
    • I am face painting a lot more (see album on fbook) and still running the MagiKidz biz- playing professional dress up and doing cute activities with lil ones parties and such… plus have brought a few new entertainers on board and am booking them out. I am producing kidz zones & villages at multiple events this sunny season- if interested peek in at www.magikidz.com
    • I have adopted (rescued) a 7 yr old super darling tiny white chihuahua (with many names) and her and I curl up and read sci fi fantasy novels at night once I finally manage to put my laptop away. On the weekends Hunter visits from his scholastic life in Santa Cruz and we go on sweet dates.
    • I have done a grand makeover on my main web site- www.audettesophia.com
      Please pop in for a peek.
    • I am working on the new & improved Catalyst Arts site. Navigating branding & messaging & photo shoots and all that… stay tuned and if you aren’t already on it– please join the MUSELETTER List- for infrequent but inspiring updates.
    • As an attempt to remedy my too much geeking out not enough socializing equation– I have a standing invitation Creative Co:Lab night at my house in North Oakland on Wednesdays (email or call me for details) and me & some friends will be doing a regular Lakeside Sundays thing behind fairyland at the bandstand, Lake Merrit– to picnic and play games and connect with eachother in a playful easygoing context. Look up Lakeside Sundays on Facebook.

    COUPLE OF UPCOMING PUBLIC EVENTS:hope to see you!

    March 8th-
    Face Painting 6:30-9:30pm at fabulous & *free* Mardi Gras party @ The Mystic Theater in Petaluma (Delhi to Dublin playing!) Come get your face painted and celebrate fat Tuesday with me Louisiana style!!
    _________________________________________________________
    March 11th-
    Face & Body Painting from 9-11pm in the chill tea lounge space & then Mask dancing & ‘light nucleus’ projection dancing with the Alchemystics (yes, that is the name of my stilt dance troupe, and happens to be very similar to the name of the event coincidentally)
    ALCHEMYSTIK Friday, March 11th 2011
    At Public Works- 161 Erie Street @ Mission in San Francisco, CA
    9pm to 5am 21+
    $15 Presale or before 10:30pm, $20 after

  • February5th

    Great Simple Career Direction Exercise

    Posted in: CREATIVE BIZ/CAREER, GENERAL, PRODUCTIVITY/TOOLS

    Easy way to explore new career directions– target potential future jobs, etc…

    In doing market  and industry research for a business training I am currently taking, I stumbled upon a simple but profound exercise.

    If you are curious about or actively exploring other career paths or job directions, this is a fast simple way of narrowing it down to some more specific targets.

    Here it is:

    1.) Type into search engine something like “list of events related job titles” but fill in the industry you are interested in. “marketing job titles” etc… Find a good list and paste all the job titles into a word document.

    2.) Now go through them all and put a start or two stars next to the ones that sound appealing to you.

    3.) Compile all of these that got stars into one place and look them over in more detail. The ones that seem like the best fit you can now research deeper and start pursuing.

    NOTE- After you gather as much info as the web will give you, the next step before applying for education or internships or jobs is to do an Informational Interview with someone currently holding this position. This can save you a lot of wasted time and resources.

    RESOURCES

    Here is a great site with titles and descriptions of Creative, Marketing, and Communications jobs.

    http://www.paladinstaff.com/services/job-title-descriptions/

    http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag_index_alpha.htm – List of all Industries- ‘Industries at a Glance’

    Bureau of Labor Statistics

    http://www.bls.gov Includes stats on the hourly pay, amount of employees, unemployed, etc… in that field.

  • January4th

    Tips to Power your New Years Resolutions

    Posted in: GENERAL, INSPIRATIONAL, PRODUCTIVITY/TOOLS

    New Years resolutions are a great tradition, but have started to become more associated with wishful thinking than with serious goal setting.
    Because we say I want to do more of this and less of that and then hope that because we wrote it down it will magically happen…

    After many years of doing resolutions, I have gathered and developed a few tips and tools to help give some legs to those intentions so that they can walk out of January and into the rest of the year.

    1.) WRITE IT DOWN- & put someplace visible.
    It is not enough to write down your goals and hopes and dreams in your journal. That is a great start. It is best to use your notebook or journal to process and get to clarity, but once you are clear, put it down on a nice sheet of paper that you can hang someplace highly visible. Then you will have a reminder of your resolutions or goals in your space making it less likely for them to fade from memory.

    2.) BREAK IT DOWN into small chunks that can actually be tackled.
    This can be done in a linear way by making a list of small items beneath the big one, or you can also do this by mind mapping. Put the Resolution in the middle and brainstorm all the connected bits and branch them off of it.

    3.) MAKE A GRID TO KEEP TRACK of Progress

    Using one of my resolutions as an example– I want to revive my ‘morning practice’, which means 20+ minutes first thing in the morning for writing, meditating, yoga, or some other centering non mental activity. So I write 1/1, 1/2 etc… down the left side of a page in my notebook and then the intention at the top and then make boxes where I can check the box on the day that I did the morning practice. This way, at the end of the month I can see exactly how many days I realized my intention and how many I did not. This visible accountability is an extra band of incentive… and you can always give yourself some reward if you hit 20 out of 30 days.

    4.) GET AN ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDY

    If you are the only one that knows that you only exercised 1 day this week despite the goal to exercise 5 days, well… but if you have someone who you check in with and who will want to know why your results were weak this week… this simple accountability is incredibly powerful. This is one of the main reasons people hire life coaches… to have someone who knows what you are intending to do and who will hold you accountable. If you can’t afford a coach right now, then find a friend who could use support with their resolutions and schedule a weekly call to share your progress and get support through resistance or obstacles that inhibit progress.

    In Summary:
    Get those intentions for 2011 onto the page, broken down into their components, put onto a simple grid, and find a buddy to check in with on your progress.

    To Your SUCCESS!

  • December19th

    Getting CO:LABorative

    Posted in: CREATIVITY/ARTS, Collaboration/Co:Laboratory, INSPIRATIONAL, PERFORMANCE/ENTERTAINMENT

    “If you can accomplish your dream all alone, your dream is too small.” – Unknown

    I have got something up my lab sleeve. A project that features two of my favorite things– creativity and collaboration.

    I have a very strong conviction that Synergy & Collaboration are major keys to success for individuals and especially for communities and the human species as a whole. Everything becomes possible when we work together.

    So we are cooking something up in the Catalyst Arts Laboratory… recipes and prompts and games and structured invitations to get people connecting and creating… in an Interactive Arts Co:Laboratory area we are producing at a large New Years Eve party in SF– Sea of Dreams.

    The last couple years I have pulled myself in away from the super social party party scene to focus on my various creative and entrepreneurial projects. When I do go out, I often feel some crucial ingredients lacking in the default party template equation… participatory engagement and depth of sharing and breaking out of the solo dancing and familiar friend clusters and actually seeing who is at the party and what they bring to the table in the big scheme of things… and though some networking and alliance building does happen, I always find myself wanting to encourage it and make it more efficient and accelerated. For a few months I hosted Synergy Laboratories in Oakland where artists got together to create and explore co-creation.

    Sea of Dreams has given me the chance to test my theories and a produce a playground to invite synergy into. Because this is a part of the event producers intention for the party- (and I quote)
    ” We have always viewed the nature of partying as something highly individual and highly interactive. We extend that to weave all kinds of analog and digital directions, environmental and visual artforms into one long night’s DIY journey of potent possibilities.”


    So Erin Fairy will help to create the blacklight lounge and a silly mini puppet show stage, Brodie and Dusty of Liquid Vault will be our interactive VJ’s, Hunter Boucher will capture the whole thing in photographic snapshots, and others are stepping forward to paint faces, create honeycombs to colaboratively paint, and to be technicians & facilitators.

    If you are interested in contributing to this event, or to the conversation– please reach out and add your artistry to the collage.

    QUOTES on Synergy & Collaboration & Such

    “Coming together is a beginning.
    Keeping together is progress.
    Working together is success.”

    Henry Ford

    “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” – Ryunosuke Satoro

    “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

    “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upond the shoulders of giants.”

    - Isaac Newton

    “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

  • September29th

    6 Costume Tips from a professional shapeshifter

    Posted in: CREATIVITY/ARTS, INSPIRATIONAL, PERFORMANCE/ENTERTAINMENT

    Costume Closet

    I have been playing dress up pretty much my whole life.

    I have been being paid to play dress up for about 10 years now.
    (I’m a performer, stilter, & face painter)

    My inner child is thrilled about it.

    Dressing up in costumes is fun, creative, and occasionally truly glamorous, tranformational or therapeutic.

    I go out in public in costumes on a regular basis. I love Halloween because everyone else shifts shapes and comes to the party as something new (& hopefully) interesting. So maybe you are not a dress up type but you just want some ideas for Halloween costumes so you don’t feel left out. Or perhaps you are a clothes horse and want to up your game in terms of costuming yourself.

    THE TIPS

    1.) Choose a character direction that is currently genuinely inspiring to you.

    It could be compellingly attractive or compellingly disturbing, but it should be compelling. If it is tired, or more true to the old you, it won’t make you come alive when you wear it. If it doesn’t have juice for you, you won’t really rock it

    2.) If you don’t have a great idea, use your friends.
    If you are drawing a blank then make a brainstorm game out of it with some friends and bounce off each others ideas until you get one that makes you really excited. Or you could ask everyone you know what their all time best Halloween costumes were, and then just steal your favorite idea. (provided it meets tip 1 criteria)

    2.) Give it time. Don’t wait till just before the party/gig/event to pull it together.

    If you know you are going out for Halloween or are invited to a masquerade ball or need to pull a _____ themed costume out of the hat for an event soon to come, give yourself as much time as possible to daydream ideas, shop at stores, yard sales & thrift stores, and pull it together. This way you won’t feel stressed and be tempted to sucker out. This way the magic and synchronicity have time to help you get it together. (costume fairy’s do exist!)

    3.) Strive for Originality. Don’t go for a made in China ‘costume in a bag’.

    Oh it can be tempting to go online or sneak into some halloween superstore and just grab yourself one of those one size fits all costumes in a bag. If you do really want to be a sexy nurse or a vampire or a pirate or some other trendy character- find a way to do it so that you don’t look like the other 20 people at the party who bought the same cheap-o costume. Browse google images for inspiration. Repurpose fabrics & clothes in new ways. Bribe a friend who can sew to actually make you something. It is worth the effort to not look like you came off the assembly line.

    4.) It is all about the Face Paint and the Attitude.
    If your face paint looks great and you are totally in character, it can make up for a shabby costume. It goes a long way to actually try to be the character your costume is indicating. Get into it. Have a different accent and do things you wouldn’t normally do. That is a huge part of the point of costumes in the first place. Intimidated by the face paint part of this tip? Find a friend who is good at it or look up videos on you tube. (or hire someone like me:))

    5.) Bring a Prop and have a Schtick. *
    This is crucial for having a fabulous time in your getup and contributing greatly to the overall social dynamic. You will have a lot more fun if your character has some sort of playful gimmick or way to engage other party goers. IDEAS & GENERAL EXAMPLES: If you are a geisha, bring a fan and cool down the sweaty folks on the dance floor. If you are a giant banana, bring a banana and tell people they have a phone call on it. PERSONAL EXAMPLES: I was once a princess of hearts and I went around painting hearts on people with my red lip liner. Last year for Halloween I was a genie and I had this super cool lamp filled with yummy oils and I asked people to touch the lamp and make a wish and they smelled the oils and closed their eyes and made their wish and I told them it would be granted. This was infinitely more amusing than just wandering around looking like a genie. It is all about interaction. Schtick Schtick Schtick.

    So, I hope this helps and I hope you have fun creating  another costume for your arsenal.

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