….And here is part 2! Picking up from where I left off, Ayu changed from her mermaid dress to her costume for evolution, which was the silver sparkly jacket and pants. She also put her hair back in a bun, as it was for Rule. (Which is different from pictures we’ve seen!) evolution was AMAZING, and my second favorite performance of the night. She sang back and forth with the audience; she would sing one line of the chorus, and then we would sing the answering line, which everyone did as loud as they could!
evolution lead into SIGNAL, and for this song the screens flashed tons of colors again, of course using red and green for the key points in the lyrics where she mentions them. Towards the end, streamers exploded out from the ceiling, and fans rushed to gather some up. This song was really energenic, and it almost felt like this should have been the climax of the concert… but there was still the best to come!
The band and dancers had their extended performance here, while Ayu changed, and it’s also where we had the band intro (if my memory is correct). When Ayu reappeared, she was wearing a purple jacket and black pants, with that fake square blond wig, and red Geordi La Forge inspired glasses (I don’t know if anyone is familiar with Star Trek the Next Generation, but if not, please Google). rollin’ starts, and she acted like a creepy robot throughout the song – and I mean it was seriously scary looking. At the first chorus, she removes the red glasses and her eyes looked dead, like they did during marionette, but without contacts. That being said, rollin’ is still my favorite song from the album, and I was not disappointed with the live performance of it.
Sparkle picked up right after rollin’ and the dancers began acting a little bit sexy again, although not as in your face as Identity was. Ayu did not really replicate her sexy dancing from the PV, but instead pushed away her dancers, as she sang “no no no.” There was A symbol shaped confetti falling in front of the stage during this song. At the end, she kept shouting “more more!” to the audience and had us sing “no no no!” repeatedly. It was a lot of fun.
Next, the stage went black, and Bridge to the sky began. On the middle screen, photos of Ayu began flashing by – from the most recent images, and backward through time. They scrolled rather quickly, so it wasn’t as easy to see her young pictures as I’d hoped, but when it finally reached her baby photo, the progression slowed down so that we could get a good look. Then, the photos reversed back to the most recent picture very quickly as we transitioned into NEXT LEVEL.
After all of the shouting at the end of Sparkle, Ayu’s voice was getting a bit horse during NL. She appeared in her white costume with the hat and Aladdin pants. There was a chair at the top of the stage’s staircase, but at first Ayu appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Eventually she made her way up to the chair, sat down, and the chair was lifted up toward the ceiling. The chair had a chandelier hanging from the bottom. She floated forward to the front of the stage, and then the chair went down. Overall, considering how much I love the song NL, this part could have been better, but it was still good.
At this point, Ayu and her dancers take a bow, say thank you, and disappear from the stage – It was the end of the main concert. The A symbol video starts up, and on the screen it said “Since we haven’t been to Hokkaido in three years, here are highlights of the A!” At this point we were shown video from AT 07, CDL 07-08, and AT 08, with imitation Kojima Yoshio and Omuro. This was special only for Hokkaido, but as a result we didn’t see the new AT 09 A! Oh well.
The encore started fairly quickly. When the lights went up, there was an acoustic piano at the top of the stairs, and Ayu was there. She sang Curtain Call with only the piano and it sounded beautiful (better than the recording, I thought – even with the inclusion of Peco and Princess).
Next up she sang For my dear… also acoustically, and her voice went sharp/flat quite a bit, but it still sounded better than the ASFXX version. She also switched the lyrics of two of the verses a little bit.
Then she started the MC. I finally got a good look at her outfit, she was wearing a white AT 09 tank top, with overalls, and her hair was pulled up only at the front with two bobbles (this reminded me slightly of a Pomeranian). She apologized for not coming to Hokkaido for 3 years, and also for the late start our show had. Then she called up Subaru and Jin to be guest MC. Zin sang “negai ga kanau nara” in a high pitched falsetto, and then Subaru launched into a Hokkaido dialect quiz. It turns out that Jin, Locky and Shu-ya are all from Hokkaido originally. They quizzed her on “bakuru” which means “koukan/exchange” but she couldn’t guess it for the longest time. Next, they played a game which was a bit like telephone combined with pictionary. In this game, one person sees a word and has to draw it. Then they show their drawing to the next person, and so on down the line, until the last person has to draw and name the picture.
The first drawing was corn, and 2-yan went first. His drawing looked a bit more like a corn dog than corn… and poor Locky then drew a tree. Somehow, Jin started bringing it back when he turned the tree into a pineapple, and Shu-ya turned the tree back to corn. Ayu finally drew a quick scribble and wrote corn, winning this round!
Round 2 was “horse.” This time, Jin, the best artist, went first, and he drew a great horse. Unfortunately, 2-yan went second, and his horse had a strange bulbous head and a round tail. Locky went next and drew what looked like a fox or squirrel. Ayu drew what seemed most like a Coyote with a huge ear. And Shu-ya finally drew and guessed that it was a chameleon, losing the second round. At this point, Ayu had enough and decided to continue with the singing!
The next performance was everywhere nowhere, and Ayu’s vocals recovered quite a bit from For my dear… She sang it mostly on the catwalk with the dancers dancing around her in a circle. In the middle of the song, she forgot the lyrics, and screamed sorry to everyone before continuing. Everywhere nowhere lead right into Humming 7/4, which I don’t really like on cd, but I’ve decided it’s a lot of fun to jump live!
Next came Boys & Girls. Now, anyone who’s seen her concert DVDs knows that Ayu usually screams out lines and then has the audience sing the next line. For this concert, she actually SANG her lines, to my great relief! It sounded great and was fun to sing along to. At the end of the song, the she did another band intro, then followed by the dancers. Finally the song ended with smoke coming down from the ceiling at the front of the stage.
Ayu announced that the next song was the last song, and then launched into My All. However, since this song had never been performed in Hokkaido, and since we didn’t get lessons on how to do the dance, the para para parts were very disorganized in the audience… :p. The dancers and Ayu all did it though, so we slowly caught on. Ayu’s voice was very hoarse during this song, but it was still a good finish.
Then, Ayu and the dancers took several bows she thanked us all a bunch of times. After the band and dancers left the stage, she made us be quiet, and screamed thank you without the mic. Then Who… started playing and it was announced that the concert was over.