A Curious Invitation Winter Ball
Earlier this year I went to an amazing event called 32 Londoners which involved drinking gin on the London Eye and learning more about the weird and wonderful people that shaped London. When the organisers, A Curious Invitation, invited me to their Winter Ball I knew this would be a similarly spectacular and intriguing event. Held at the stunning 1920's built Conway Hall in Bloomsbury, everyone was told to arrive in a mask and embrace the midwinter pagan rites of 2014's last full moon. As well as there being a large ballroom with live band and DJ, there were also three cocktail bars, the ladies of the Russian Winter Fair serving up slavic street food, my favourite life drawing organisers Art Macabre running a session in Santa's Grotto (naked Santa!!), naked drinks servers painted gold, and a brilliant live show with drag queens and saucy performers from The Familyyy Fierce.
Check out the video I made with Jules, my fellow Twin Geeks presenter. It captures the spirit of this mad-cap night of revels more than my photos can, and you can see a bit of the insanely good (and insane) cabaret:
It was great to see Art Macabre again, and attempt some 1am drunken life drawing. I didn't film in there for obvious reasons, but after the session we had a good chat with the gang, and Santa really loved Jules' charcoal drawing of him.
I was lucky to be given a selection of masks from Theatrical Threads, and I'll show you the other ones in another post. But I went for the Batman style mask (as seen in the video), and loved saying "I AM BATMAN!" in a Christian Bale voice a lot. Hashtag geek. Wearing a mask all night makes everyone feel a bit super hero-ish, we couldn't help noticing how confident and chatty everyone was (although, that might also have been the super strong Russian themed cocktails). I really recommend you check out what A Curious Invitation has in store for 2015; the two events of theirs I attended this year have been inspiring, hedonistic, highly original, and so much fun!