Category Archives: Entertainers

A tribute to remember

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Tribute bands are very popular nowadays and can be the perfect thing for your ‘themed night’ or maybe you want a few of these tribute acts to get your party started. From Elvis, to ABBA, we are sure you will find your perfect act here at Red Masque. You may want a 70’s evening where your entertainer can sing and perform a melody of by-gone year tunes.

You could be organising a corporate party, private party, wedding or talent show, the choice is yours.  Red Masque has the best Tribute acts available today, so if you’re looking for a top performer to get the party started then you’ve come to the right place. To hire a tribute act is easy – you are able to book them yourself by filling out an online booking form provided on their profile. All your details and requirements are sent straight to your chosen entertainer and they will be in contact with you shortly.

Red Masque is the UK’s leading entertainment directory. Every event is different and finding the right event entertainment can sometimes be challenging and time consuming. Here at Red Masque we are constantly sourcing entertainers of the highest calibre from all manner of genres of entertainment. We pride ourselves on choosing top class acts from different areas of entertainment, such as comedy, dance and variety. We offer our clients the ultimate in party, wedding and event entertainment, with only the best, highly talented and unique acts around.

Bring some Reggae to your event

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How about having a bit of Reggae for your event? You could be organising a theme party with a caribbean theme where a Reggae band would fit right in, especially if the suns shining. The laid back tones of summer Reggae music will certainly get everybody swaying to the beat, from lovers rock to Ska, reggae sounds are suitable for all ages and have been around for decades, so there will always be Reggae that will appeal to young and old alike.

You could be having a Wedding, corporate event, launch party or private party, but whatever your organising you can be sure you will be hiring the best. Here at Red Masque we have a fantastic selection of reggae bands for hire and we offer only the best, highly talented and unique acts around. We guarantee amazing and memorable experiences every time and we understand that no matter how big or how small an event, to enable it to run efficiently and successfully, it’s always essential to provide the best if you want an honest, reliable, effective and professional service at all times.

Red Masque prides itself on advertising only top Reggae artists available in the UK. If you’ve found your perfect artist then simply fill out an online booking form. We promote the best wedding, party and corporate events entertainment with the very best acts and entertainers on offer, enabling us to help you create the most memorable and successful occasions every time.

Ensuring the right entertainment

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So, you have been planning your private party for ages and now the moment has come… the big day is now in sight! Of course, you already have an idea about your venue type, colour scheme, decoration and considered the entertainment. Ensuring you have the right entertainment can be the difference between a ‘good’ party and an unforgettable one! It’s important to keep your guests entertained throughout and it’s important you get it right, including picking the right venue to suit your plans.

Whichever entertainment you decide on, you need to make sure your venue can accommodate. Whether you have ideas on a party band, or dance troupe you need to ensure the venue suits the entertainment.

Stage
Some venues will have a stage or something similar, such as a raised part of the room. These are quite useful particularly if you want musicians or entertainment acts to be seen clearly by your guests.

The size of the stage is also important. If you planned on having a dance troop come and perform, you need to make sure the stage will be large enough to accommodate their routine and numbers.

Space
Function bands are always a great form of entertainment as they can work as a brilliant ice breaker and really help to get your guests on their feet and dancing. If you have a function band in mind, you need to ensure not only that there is enough space for the band to perform,but plenty of space for your guests to get up and dance.

Other forms of entertainment such as closeup magicians or caricaturists only need space to move freely around tables, whereas more exotic forms of entertainment such as a fire dancer will need a large area for safety reasons.

Accessibility
Checking that your venue is accessible can sometimes be the make or break for your choice. It’s important your venue can be accessed by all. If you’re having a twelve-piece band but your venue is on the top floor of a building with no lift, it’s certainly not ideal for a band to carry all their instruments up. You need to make sure that any equipment or props your entertainment may need can be easily transported to your venue.

Jugglers aren’t boring

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Chris Marley
A brand new act, Chris is a highly trained expert juggler and loves sharing and discovering new ideas. Many of which are connected by his interest in Yo-Yo, juggling, circus, skeptical thinking and performance.

He has set a few records juggling (yet to be beaten). Arron performs in lots of different shows all over the place, suitable for different party venues and occasions. Arron is sure to be a crowd pleaser for any occasion.

Jason Maverick
When you think of booking a juggler for your event, you’re probably thinking of something very similar to Jason Maverick. Able to juggle with a whole host of props from juggling balls to cubes you’re sure to be impressed by his ability! Having trained at the National Centre of Circus Arts, you can be safe in the knowledge that you have booked a true master for your event. A gentleman juggler with a contemporary twist, you can’t go wrong with Jason

Crystal Wizard
What do you get if you combine an acrobat with a juggler? As you might expect, the result is the wonderfully named Crystal Wizard, using LED lights and crystals to wow and entertain your guests with a juggling light display. A clever act which will amaze.

Contact jugglers
A little bit different to juggling in the traditional sense of the word, contact jugglers have an incredible ability to make balls apparently levitate in the air. Well, not ‘levitate’ exactly, but making it appears as though a silver ball or two has a weightless quality. Very difficult to describe but just as hard to ever forget, hiring a contact juggler is one of the finest decision an event planner can make if they want an unforgettable experience for their guests!

Saint George’s Day

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The feast day of Saint George is celebrated by various Christian Churches and several countries and cities where Saint George is the patron saint – including England. The day is remembered on April 23 each year – this is the date traditionally accepted of his death in AD 303.

While St Patrick’s Day and St Andrew’s Day are bank holidays in Ireland and Scotland respectively, St George’s Day is sadly NOT a bank holiday in England.

The heroic soldier slayed a dragon and now we celebrate each year with quintessentially English traditions. Here’s what you can do on April 23 to get involved….

Although Saint George is England’s patron saint, George would likely have been a soldier somewhere in the eastern Roman Empire, probably in what is now Turkey – if he ever existed. He is also the patron saint of Ethiopia, Georgia and Portugal, and cities such as Freiburg, Moscow and Beirut.

The well-known story of the dragon mainly comes down to the Golden Legend – a popular collection of saints’ lives written in the 13th century. According to one version, a town in Libya had a small lake inhabited by a dragon infected with the plague. Many of the townsfolk were being killed by the dragon so they started feeding it two sheep a day to appease it.

When the town ran out of sheep, legend has it that the king devised a lottery system to feed the hungry dragon local children instead. But, one day his own daughter was chosen and as she was being led down to the lake Saint George happened to ride past. The story says that George offered to slay the dragon but only if the people converted to Christianity. They did, and the king later built a church where the dragon was slain

In the past, a traditional custom on Saint George’s Day was to wear a red rose in your lapel – but not many people practise this anymore.

More popular customs include flying the Saint George’s Cross flag, with English pubs often festooned with them

In cathedrals, churches and chapels on Saint George’s Day it is common for the hymn Jerusalem to be sung.

We celebrate the day with anything involving English traditions – including morris dancing and fetes. The odd Punch & Judy show can also be seen and there are also town crier contests.

Many places across England also host a feast with traditional fare and some areas hold theatre events, jousting and re-enactments.

Music for your Irish party

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We thought we’d provide a few ideas on Irish entertainment. When thinking about the Emerald Isle and the entertainment that it has provided to the world, an obvious place to start is the harp.

It is known that the harp was revered across Celtic culture and Europe in the 1100s with various leaders having their own resident harpist who enjoyed a high status and special privileges. What did they have to do? As one might expect, they were expected to play music in accompaniment to other forms of party entertainment – poetry recitations or reading of psalms, etc. Alas, no music for the harp is written down from this period.

As any lover of history may tell you, Celtic culture wasn’t as popular as it used to be and the social status of a harp player began to lessen as the years wore on. No longer retained amongst the higher echelons, they took to the streets, performing as travelling musicians to the delight of crowds. Perhaps they were enjoyed too much; although the Irish harp was a symbol of the country and embraced around the world, it was now see as an emblem of resistance against the Crown and England. It was henceforth banned from the end of the Middle Ages and in just a few centuries, the Irish harp had all but disappeared.

…Well, almost. In 1792, a group of harpists travelled to Belfast for a traditional harp festival. A passionate musician, Edward Bunting, noted down the music they played and it is thanks to him that traditional Gaelic music lasts to this day; it had never previously been written down on paper (presumably because nobody ever saw the point or most harpists couldn’t read or write sheet music.)

There are less than a dozen Celtic harps that have survived from the medieval period. The oldest one is also the most famous – the Trinity College Harp, upon which the official emblem of Ireland is now based. It can be seen if you decide to visit Trinity College in Dublin and no doubt, you’ll learn even more about this lovely instrument.

No dancing

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Up until recently, you could walk down a busy Japanese street in the early hours and find many people dancing the night away. If these same people then set foot in a nightclub, what they were doing would have been seen illegal and could have resulted in jail time. Why? To find out we have to venture a number of decades into the past.

The ban on dancing in nightclubs, bars and any other public venues has been in place in Japan since the American occupation of the country during the years after WWII. The law made sense at the time, ‘dance halls’ were often a front for prostitution, which was rampant across the poverty-stricken nation. But seventy years on, why was the law still in place?

In truth, it wasn’t in all but name. During the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Japan thrived. With a high standard of living and vibrant nightlife, officials largely turned a blind eye to what some had described as an obsolete and oppressive ruling. Why could you dance into the evening but not once the clock reached midnight? The dance scene took off across the country during these years with many teens and twenty somethings inspired by western culture, fuelling numerous club openings across the
major cities like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka.

Unfortunately the fun couldn’t last. A spate of high profile drug busts, some of which involved celebrities, as well as a hugely publicised 2010 club brawl led to a crackdown from police after a 22-year-old died. A litany of arrests followed with clubs being raided if they flouted the law. Japan’s War on Dance had begun.

Police began arresting DJs and club patrons, submitting them for drug tests, clamping down on the nightclub scene. With fierce resistance from those in and around the music industry, as well as lawyers and politicians, the law was revamped in 2015 with some nightclubs allowed to have dancing after midnight but only if the lights were left on, giving off a similar vibe to a cinema when a film plays. Those that remained darker still had to stop at midnight with illuminated ‘No Dancing’ signs calling attention to the need for visitors to bring a halt to proceedings. The solution? To head outside and continue dancing in the streets!

Thankfully the law was completely abolished by Japanese politicians in 2016, with many noting Tokyo couldn’t simply turn off the lights at midnight when the Olympics arrived in 2020. We just hope that the first song they danced to was the classic eighties number, Footloose! Kevin Bacon is sure to be pleased next time he visits Japan.

Remembering information

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The Method of Loci might be familiar to fans of Sherlock on BBC1 because Sherlock once used his ‘Mind Palace’, which was much ridiculed online. Even so, this method of remembering information is highly praised by memory experts and is used by those to whom memory is very useful indeed.

Derren Brown utilises a system for his incredible live shows whilst Simon Reinhard, European Memory Champion, showed such an effective deployment of the strategy that he was able to remember the position of all 52 cards in a deck in just under 21 seconds.

The easiest way to perfect the Method of Loci is to think of a journey that you make on a regular basis. For most that would be their commute to and from work. The trip should go past a number of distinctive ‘landmarks’ – a skate park, a memorable building, a colourful fence – which you tend to pay attention to every morning. The more memorable the place, the better the method will be.

Next you write down every bit of information that you’d like to remember. After assembling your list, you then attach a picture or symbol to each item. If you need to remember to buy a birthday card for example, you’d simply affix an image of a birthday card in your mind to the skate park we mentioned earlier. Every time you walk past, it will be instantly imprinted in your mind!

This technique may sound simple and that’s because it is, but it will still take some time to perfect.
And why is it called the ‘Method of Loci’? The reason being that ‘loci’ is the Latin for ‘places’ and the method itself has been around since around 80BC.

It is referred to in the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, Rhetorica ad Herennium, and also features in Cicero’s De Oratore in 55BC and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in 95CE. Considering they have been around for well over 2,000 years, you can be certain of the fact that they work!

Christmas party ideas

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There are lots of ways to celebrate Christmas at the end of year office party. Many companies go for a themed occasion, but you can also strip it back a little bit. Away from the electronic entertainment and acts that require a loud sound system. You can take it all the way back to traditional Christmas party ideas, perhaps highlighting the true values of the holiday.

Victorian Performers
When thinking back to Victorian times, you might find yourself wondering what they managed to do with themselves with no television or films. We know, it’s hard to imagine. Of course, it was the theatre that they loved to visit and no doubt they were entertained by street performers en route.

Parlour Games
With all this wonderful entertainment on display, you might be thinking of wanting to hire interactive entertainment! This doesn’t mean that you need to sacrifice your Victorian theme and bring in loud noises and bright lights; we’re talking parlour games like quoits. If anyone is successful then they may just win a Christmas present from the company or maybe a little more time off. Go on, be generous, it’s Christmas!

Costumed Characters
The number one thing you need to do if your employees are going to really feel as though they’ve gone back in time is to hire costumed characters. They don’t have to be famous Victorians but one or two certainly look nice (Charles Dickens for example), whilst others can mingle with the crowds, adding to the atmosphere of the occasion. A Dickensian Christmas is actually another popular theme; why not add Scrooge to the festivities whilst you’re at it?

Christmas Carol Singers
What Victorian Christmas party is complete without some Christmas carol singers. The best thing about this form of musical entertainment is that the group can wander about the venue, singing as they go, or you can make their background music a centre piece to the party.

Christmas Brass Band
A Christmas brass band can provide all the Christmas classics your party requires. They can either stick to strictly Victorian carols or play a few more modern Christmas hits once the drinks start flowing (nobody will notice the change of era once they’ve downed yet another sherry). Perfect for evoking the spirit of Christmas, opting to hire a brass band for your Christmas party always goes down well.

History of a Jester

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Mention a court jester, and one pictures a whimsical creature in a belled hat or, perhaps, the ill-fated character in King Lear. Otto’s lively, well-researched text proves that there are centuries of other examples and that the jester has a rich tradition worldwide.

The jester is an elusive character. The European words used to denote him can now seem as nebulous as they are numerous, reflecting the mercurial man behind them: fool, buffoon, clown, jongleur, jogleor, joculator, sot, stultor, scurra, fou, fol, truhan, mimus, histrio, morio. He can be any of these, while the German word Narr is not so much a stem as the sturdy trunk of a tree efflorescent with fool vocabulary. The jester’s quicksilver qualities are equally difficult to pin down, but nevertheless not beyond definition.

The Chinese terms used for “jester” now seem vaguer than the European, most of them having a wider meaning of “actor” or “entertainer.” In Chinese there is no direct translation of the English “jester,” no single word that to the present-day Chinese conjures an image as vividly as “court jester,” fou du roi, or Hofnarr would to a Westerner.

An individual court jester in Europe could emerge from a wide range of backgrounds: an erudite but nonconformist university dropout, a monk thrown out of a priory for nun frolics, a jongleur with exceptional verbal or physical dexterity, or the apprentice of a village blacksmith whose fooling amused a passing nobleman.

Just as a modern-day television stand-up comedian might begin his career on the pub and club circuit, so a would-be jester could make it big time in court if he was lucky enough to be spotted. In addition, a poet, musician, or scholar could also become a court jester.