Anime USA 2008 – Versailles -Philharmonic Quintet

AUSA has become my personal favorite anime convention (eat your heart out, Otakon). Sure, it doesn’t compete with the sheer size and scale of the big names like Anime Expo and Otakon, but it’s just like how I might rather have a small gathering of close friends as opposed to a big party where the entire neighborhood block is invited.

Although technically a small con, AUSA undoubtedly gets some great guests every year. One of the biggest draws to this year’s AUSA was the visual kei band Versailles coming straight from Japan. They put on a great performance, despite an atrocious five hour wait pass their originally scheduled performance time.

According to the con chair, there were some massive technical difficulty and sound problems with the band’s equipment. Because of miscommunication and translation problems between AUSA staff and the band’s management, AUSA did not have the adequate equipment to accommodate for the band’s very specific technical requests. Consequently, sound testing took five hours because of malfunction and feedback.

Still, I have to give props to the AUSA staff. In such a shitfest of a situation, they did their best to pass water to everyone who needed it in line, set up fans all over the hotel to keep the attendees cool, and they worked with the hotel to turn the air conditioning as cold as possible.

With a line that wrapped around half of an entire floor leading to a very hot stone fire exit staircase (about 3-4 stories), artists and dealers at the con no doubt suffered a blow in sales from would-be customers who weren’t willing to give up their spot in line.

When they finally let line in after four hours, it was another hour wait in the concert hall. They got the audience to sing happy birthday, asked what state everyone was from, played random musical clips of dancing bears and fire – anything to keep the angry mob calm.

Most hilarious though, they got one of the band members to come on stage and perform a very silly dance to keep their minds off the fact that they’ve been waiting for 5 bloody hours – very cool of them.
Eventually, the show began (1 a.m. is better than never), and Versailles assaulted our senses with their epic metal symphony and ridiculously flashy Victorian-era inspired outfits. They mostly played tracks from their ‘Noble’ album, starting the show off with ‘Aristocrat’s Symphony.’

Despite being forced to eat a girl’s pony tail in front of me due to the extremely tight space, having a particularly avid fangirl throw me around like a ragdoll from behind, and worrying about my friend next to me when she said “I’m about to faint,” I whole-heartedly enjoyed Versailles’ performance and their elegant, symphonic J-rock sounds.

“We, as a convention, have learned a lot from this incident. I want to assure everyone that we will take what we learned this year and keep this from happening again.”  Mark Pop – Convention Chairman, posted on animeusa.com forum.

Keep up the good work.