THE GUARDIANS

A religious organization in Colorado Springs needed one night to say thank you to the 95 donors who fund its work. A donor event carries its own kind of pressure: the room is full of people who already have a stake in the mission & a generic night of entertainment would work against that instead of supporting it. The organization didn't want a rental act running through a standard set list & it didn't want a theme borrowed from somewhere else. They wanted a show built for that specific room, that specific audience & that specific message. That's the brief they brought to Hana.

Hana wrote an original story for the night, called The Guardians. Two characters carried it: Corina, standing for light, and Sage, a friend of hers pulled toward the dark. Corina's six Fire Guardians, each one built around a different part of her, Passion, Determination, Compassion, Wisdom, Courage & Hope, stood with her as the story moved forward. None of that cast came off a general roster. Hana built the show around the story first, then cast performers to match it: 7 fire performers, 1 violinist, 3 aerialists & 2 acrobats, each one playing a specific role instead of filling a generic slot in a lineup.

None of that reached the stage by accident. Turning one written story into a full production means a script, a score built around a live violinist instead of a backing track, choreography for three aerialists and two acrobats & safety planning for seven fire performers working in front of a live audience. Getting all of it, story, score & thirteen performers, onto a Colorado Springs stage took 1156 miles of travel & 324 hours of work before a single flame was lit, all run by the Hana Ohana. The donor group didn't manage any of it. They only had to show up & watch.

What played out onstage was a story, not a variety set. Corina sensed something dark taking hold of Sage, once a close friend of hers & set out to reach him before it consumed him completely. The confrontation that followed was the center of the show: fire against darkness, played out in front of the room, until Sage finally let his guard down. In that moment he chose to release the darkness rather than hold onto it & a new Guardian, named Redemption, stepped into the light he had spent the whole show fighting. It was a donor event built around a message the organization already stood for, performed live for the 95 people funding that work.

That's a custom Hana show: written from nothing, cast to specific roles instead of a lineup & staged for one brief, one room & one group of donors in Colorado Springs. Leon Clayton's photos & video are the record of the night that came out of it.