Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Japan Grand Prix Award 1990


Madonna accepts the Japanese Grand Prix artist of the year award and rehearses Express Yourself from the Blond Ambition Tour at the Disney Studios in Los Angeles, California.

9 comments:

  1. I've never seen this before! I love rough rehearsal footage like this. It's very interesting to compare this to the final product to see little things that got changed as the tour went on. A few minor things that I noticed:

    - When she came up on the stage, she didn't do an ad libbed introduction (and she actually screwed the intro up a little). I'm curious if she decided to do ad libbing after the tour started, or if she just didn't bother saying anything since it was just a rehearsal.

    - When she takes the black jacket off, the inside of it is lined with a shiny pink material. In the final show, the jacket didn't have any lining.

    - The bottom of her top is obviously different. It is a bit longer and does not go around her crotch. It also doesn't have the straps.

    - She didn't moan when she was humping Slam. I believe the moaning wasn't added until she came to the US?

    - At around 6:35 into the video, in the final show she does a move where she pulls Slam's head close to hers as if she was going to kiss him and then pushes his head away, however that move was absent here.

    - Right at the end of the song, during actual show she would go in the front of the stage and do a move where she'd point to both her shoulders, then both her hips, then point to her mouth and do a little kick. That was absent here as well.

    Was there anything else that I missed? Such an iconic performance...

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  2. She's wearing the gold 'Like A Virgin' corset here. You can tell she's still getting used to the headset mic! Her voice is really rough here though.

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  3. Oh is that the gold LAV corset? I'm blind.

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  4. I've seen this rehearsal before, but never Knew where it was shown on tv

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  5. yes, it's the gold one, you just can't really tell due to the poor picture quality. I remember an old video tape had literally the last second of this performance on it and for years I was convinced that she performed a show wearing the gold corset during the opening act. Only later did I find out it was a rehearsal.

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  6. I wonder why she wore the gold corset for this rehearsal. Considering everyone else is in their normal costumes, I'm assuming this must have been a proper dress rehearsal. Do you think maybe they initially intended on having her wear this corset all the way through the first half of the show? Hmmm... or maybe the pink corset wasn't finished being made yet? Mysterious...

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  7. I think she probably had 'rehearsal' versions of outifts while Gaultier finished the real ones. I read he had to make them all smaller during the rehearsals as M lost weight from all the dancing. This corset looks more silver than gold, actually, but the design is the gold one.

    In the Juilen D'Ys book, you can see M rehearsing in early versions of the final outifits for the Re-Invention tour. Same with the rehearsal footage for the Confessions tour.

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  8. I love this! I first saw it myself on a French TV documentary "La Saga Du Rock" in 1990 while the tour was on - it was shown on a TV channel which I could get via satellite at the time!

    I almost died when it came on TV one Saturday afternoon and since the entire program was in French, I could not work out where this performance was from!

    I was always struck that she was wearing the LAV corset and I figured that maybe the original plan was for that corset to have been worn throughout the first section right up until the end of "Papa Don't Preach" - a bit like how on the WTG the black corset stayed on from the very start and was under lots of costumes.

    Also interesting I think that in rehearsals, she was doing EY live. By the time the tour was on the road she was lip-synching this song entirely or doing some live vocals over backing tapes.

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