Dance life

Tonight I went to see the Radio City Rockettes Christmas Spectacular.  The Rockettes were spectacular, but the show itself was a bit of a disappointment for a teenager.  I was expecting the see an extravagant dance show with sparkly costumes, happy Christmas songs, and lots of kicking lines, but the show was too kid-oriented.  I’m a kid at heart and I enjoy smiley cheesy characters but this show was a little too young for me, it was geared at kids who believe in Santa. 

I was excited to get the see the famous Rockettes perform, and in the back of my mind I always felt that if I really committed myself to dancing I could have been a Rockette too, basically because Cameron dance is recognized of its kicking lines.  The opening number was exactly what I’d expected.  They were dressed as beautiful sexy reindeer.  They performed a sharp and very esthetically pleasing jazz routine, equipped with the infamous kicking line.  I was shocked at how simple the movements actually were.  Everything they did was simple yet well executed so the effect was amazing, I felt my eyes glazing over trying to look at everything at once.  The costumes were amazing and the props were incredible.  I would love to be in such a professional looking dance.  It was the only time I saw a group of girls in buns look truly beautiful.

When I focused on the dance I was captivated, but I the show itself made me feel a bit sad.  We had bought seats in the Club section of the Bell Centre, but our tickets were updated to the red section close to the stage because they hadn’t sold many tickets.  The audience was empty, and almost an entire section seemed empty.  I felt horrible for the performers because this must have seemed like a pathetic show for them. Poor Santa who came out during the reindeer dance was trying to pump up the crowd, but he seemed to realize there weren’t enough people to cheer loudly.

Between the dances there was a story. Two brothers, one who didn’t believe in Santa, needed a Christmas gift for their sister.  It was cute, but the best part about the whole acting portion of the show was the poor security guard sitting against the stage.  Every time Santa made it snow or used his magic to cause a shower of sparkles and confetti it showered down on the security guard who was covered in a layer of fake snow by the end of the scene.  There was also a group of six singers between dances who looked and sounded like the kids from glee.

The best dance the Rockettes performed was as tin soldiers.  The dance was almost entirely focused on visual effect and most of the routine seemed to just be controlled walking and kicking lines, but with 18 girls in long white pants it looked fantastic. Asides from their basic kicking line dances there were others, like tap and ballet on pointe, that made me realize my random fantasies of ever joining the Rockettes were over.  I realized that the dances weren’t simple, they made them look simple.  They had one routine about Christmas in New York City where the dancers were kicking outside the windows of a tour bus as it moved around the stage.  I was pretty amazed.  They also had a routine as rag dolls and they used blocks that spelled out Merry Christmas, even though I’d seen that bit in the commercial I’m still a sucker for spelling out words in dances, I think it’s really clever.  They had an interpretation of the Nutcracker with big (slightly creepy) animals. The dancers wore huge suits, the kind a mascot would wear, and one of the bear heads could even blink its eyes…it was a little weird.  They made up for it with their Santa dance.  In this one they were wearing Santa suits with stuffing, no sexy Mrs.Claus outfits, and they did an amazing group routine that was once again very sharp and precise.

The show ended with their rendition of the nativity scene, which looked great, but in my opinion wasn’t the best way to end a dance spectacular filled with glitz and glamour.  When everyone came out to bow I was shocked, the whole show was less than an hour and a half.  I was sad to see it end, but I couldn’t help but think that next Friday’s much less expensive 10$ ticket to New Moon would leave me more satisfied. 

My neck is stiff, my back is hurting, my legs are sore, and my feet feel swollen.  That’s right; I just got back from the weekend dance convention, Coastal Dance Rage with some of the most popular former dancers and choreographers from So You Think You Can Dance. 

Our first class was with Nico, Canada’s first SYTYCD winner, and he taught us contemporary jazz.  In all honesty I remember liking him and enjoying his dance, but I can’t remember much about his class because it was at eight in the morning and we’ve learned almost ten dances since then.  I loved Nico, and voted for him all the time last season, but he never had the same friendly and lovable personality some of the other dancers/choreographers had so he’s easy to forget sometimes. 

Blake is unforgettable on the other hand.  His dance, and the song we danced to, keep replaying in my mind.  He has an in your face attitude, and he can come off a bit strong sometimes, but if your keep trying, you’ll get it.  Blake walked into the room, got on stage and started teaching.  Even though it was fast, and hard to keep up with, in the end his dance was our favorite.  As soon as the song came on, I took the night by Chelley, we all just got it.  

Bobby Newberry, our next choreographer, has a very similar style, only his choreography was a lot more intricate.  After struggling for a while most of us managed to get the gist of it, and it ended up being a really fun class as soon as we stopped thinking bout the details and just had fun.

Shannon, Blake’s sister, was our contemporary teacher, and she likes to throw her head around a lot.  The entire ballroom seemed to be in pain the day after her intense head rolling choreography, but asides from the pain it was a really great piece.  I loved doing it, even though I knew I looked like an idiot it just felt nice to throw myself around and be emotional because it’s something I don’t do a lot.  

Twitch, runner up in season four’s SYTYCD was the best teacher of the weekend, and I’m so happy to see that his personality is just as personable and genuine as it appeared on TV.  He went really slowly with us, and broke each movement down, so we could get his hip hop routine even if (like me) we weren’t very gangster. 

Benji on the other hand…the winner of season two’s American SYTYCD, was my least favorite teacher.  He had great personality on the show, and even though I didn’t like him and was upset he won, I respect his dancing and I knew he won because of his great personality. He has a great personality, and every time he wasn’t teaching he was funny, and nice, and charming, but as soon as he started teaching he was harsh and aggressive and too fast, especially since the style he was teaching was completely unfamiliar to all of us.

Francisco, an amazing ballet dancer, taught us ballet the second day.  I feel a little bad for him because people don’t want to be doing ballet in a convention, but he’s an unbelievable dancer and I’ll never forget his tour jete. 

Asides from the celebrity teachers we had a few famous assistants in a few of our class, including Cody and Taylor, two of the dancers from this season’s Canadian version of SYTYCD who’d been eliminated.  There was also Melanie M who’d been eliminated just last week from the show assisting too, but she never assisted any of our classes. 

Even though I’m in a lot of pain the weekend was unbelievably fun and it’s worth the stiff neck.   

Jamye Rae is my favorite dancer on the show and this week she made it into the top six!  Next week the final four are chosen and I hope everyone votes for her so she makes it in because she deserves it!

I’ve already posted a blog about Jamye Rae and her partner Daniel’s afro jazz dance, but here are two more of her great dances.

The first video is her and Daniel’s Dance Hall.  I loved this routine because it really showed of her hip hop side, and she looked freakin’ good.  I love the grinding halfway through the dance and dutty winds they did right after, but my favorite part is the pelvic thrust at the end!

This next video is the second routine from last Tuesday’s episode.  Jamye Rae and Everett’s routine was Jazz Funk choreographed by Nico Archambault and Wynn Holmes, and it was the best routine of the night.  In this routine Jamye Rae played a sexy bad ass chick and Everett was the nerdy guy falling for her.   The music in the dance is amazing.  It got me into the routine and went perfectly with the dance.  Everett and Jayme Rae play their characters well, and they both just make me smile. I love the thumb bite, it reminds me of Nico’s lip bite from season one. The dance is so good, I love watching it every time!

When people hear that I am a dancer one of the first things they ask is if I will try out for So You Think You Can Dance.  Of course it would be a great opportunity and a lot of fun, but it just isn’t me, and I know a lot of other dancers who feel the same way.  I love dancing, but I’m not a soloist, I’m a group dancer.  I’m part of a team and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

This weekend was the CanDance competition and we did fantastically.  At the competition, and a few others this season, I realized how close we are as a team.  

Our first dance was ‘500 Miles’, a dance which requires a lot of energy and endurance.  By the last minute of the dance we’re usually all exhausted, but this time everyone seemed to find an extra boost of energy…everyone except me.  I was having a great time dancing when my energy started to drain.  I started to think too much and I could see my kicks going lower and I felt incapable of pushing myself that extra amount.  I came off stage disappointed in myself and I looked around to see all my team mates smiling.  My teacher said it went well, my parents and friends said it went well, and I was the only one it seemed who didn’t feel it went well.  Because everyone was so happy about the dance their enthusiasm rubbed off on me, and within minutes I was raving about the dance too, almost forgetting about my lack of energy.  

Our next dance was ‘Maestro’, a dance where the intermediate and senior dancers are combined (giving the dance a total of almost 20 dancers).  It is such a fun dance to do because it allows a lot of expression and personality to shine through.  I felt great while dancing it, I committed myself to it and I managed to finish the dance without any mistakes.  I came off stage ecstatic looking around smiling to see the reactions of my peers.  My best friends were mistake free like me, but when we met up with our teacher she said that she’d never seen so many mistakes in that dance before.  I looked around and realized that people were less than satisfied with their performance, and it made me feel bummed out, not because I was disappointed in them, but because I felt like I did badly as well.  We’re a team and if a few people don’t perform to their potential even though we’re supportive and understanding, we still all feel it as if it were our mistake. 

So this weekend, even though we did extremely well (winning Platinums, Golds and special awards) the way I felt about each dance was a direct reflection of what everyone else on my team felt. 

This past weekend I went to Tremblant with my dance team for the 5678 Showtime dance competition.  We all love going to Tremblant together, but the competition itself is something we’re not very used to because it’s so different. First of all we have to dance on the floor instead of a stage, and second of all this is the only competition we go to where we are not guaranteed an award.

My schedule for the 5678 competition was great. First I had our older dance from last year, then a modern dance later that day.  I like starting out with our older dance because it’s familiar and I feel good about it. The modern dance is really fun to do because it’s not very stressful. The next day I only had one dance, our big galaxy winning production, and we spent all day stressing about it. When it finally came time to perform that night everything went perfectly and I was really proud of myself and all my friends.  Our last dance was the most important dance in my opinion.  It’s the perfect dance for our school, weird and really random…it’s such a Shena dance, and it was the only one she had choreographed for the team this year.  This was the dance we spent every class practicing, and it was our last chance to do well this competition, so we gave it all we got. 

We’d been dancing really well all weekend, but the awards we received, or lack there of, didn’t seem to live up to the standards we’d set at other competitions. Dance competitions aren’t so much competitions since every dance that enters gets marked and wins a certain prize according to their mark (high silver, gold, or platinum usually). This dance competition wasn’t like that. All the dances were categorized and first, second, and third place awards were given.  That means that if your dance was in a category with more than three dances, you might not win. Unfortunately that’s exactly what happened to us with a few of our dances, we either placed low or we didn’t place at all.  Basically we were kind of bummed.

After all our bags were packed, all our dances were done and all the awards were given, our dance teacher went to collect our marks and comments. It turns out that even though we didn’t win an award, our dance still awed the judges and they invited us to World’s. It was unbelievable. Only the best dances in the competition which get over 90% get invited to Worlds, and we got chosen out of the few to represent Canada at the international competition. YAY! It goes without saying that this made our weekend, so CONGRATS everyone from Cameron, and we’re gunna rock it at Worlds (buy your tickets at TicketMaster for 75$).

Dance exams are coming up next week and when I think dance exams, I think unitard.  For those of you who don’t know your dance vocabulary a unitard is a one piece dance outfit that can either have full length or knee length legs.  All unitards are ugly.  For those of you who may be confused between a unitard and a leotard, basically a leotard is one piece body suit that looks similar to a bathing suit (popular in ballet).  Leotards have the potential to be nice, unlike unitards, which I repeat are always ugly. 

When you perform your exams in front of the examiner you need to be in simple, tight, clothing, usually an unattractive black spandex unitard.  Although it’s impossible to look good when you wear a unitard, black is the least offensive unitard.  Those who have danced with me for years at Cameron School of Dance would know that when I was younger the unitard I wore was probably the most offensive of all unitards in existence…it was a full length turquoise body suit. 

 <— Not Cool at all…

I wore this unitard…similar to the one the girl is wearing on the left…every week to jazz class.  I wore it to dance shows, and worst of al I even wore it in my elementary school play.  I remember buying the unitard with my mom, I told her I liked the color but I wasn’t sure if I should get the simple black one like everyone else.  We ended up buying both, the black for dance exams and the turquoise one for everything else.  Why did I not realize when I was in a class full of black unitards that something was wrong?  Why did I think it was cool to wear a bright full length unitard to the point where it was too short and too tight in the crotch area…yes I have pictures of me in my unitard with a camel toe.

All this to say…I am done with unitards.  This year at the dance exams we are allowed to wear a black leotard with black shorts over! Hallelujah!

So this weekend the new Zac Efron movie, 17 again, is coming out.  I hope there’s some dancing in this one, I have a good feeling they’ll slip some in since Zac Efron is such a good dancer.  Even though High School Musical was kind of cheesy, it gets credit for having some really entertaining singing and dancing scenes. 

My favorite scene from High School Musical 3 is a dance number to the song “the boys are back”.  Troy and Chad are in a junk yard and they break into dance while reminiscing about their childhood.  I loved it! It was really creative but it still had the perfect amount of cheesiness. The guys were so hot and they didn’t even have to take their shirts off…they should have though.

Although the weird monster car bit is a little uncomfortable, but around two minutes into the dance it picks up and you forget about the previous weirdness.  It looks amazing when all the back up dancers join them because they’re all moving together perfectly in sync.  The dancing itself is really ‘butch’ in a sense.  The choreographer must have tried to make the guys look really manly, so the moves, which are a lot of fist punching and chest bumping, are executed with a lot of force. At 2:41 Troy and Chad turn into themselves as kids, and it’s so CUTE! They are such adorable little dancers; more little boys should take up dancing.  When Troy and Chad go back to their normal ages (and hotness), the dancing gets even better. They start doing a lot of tricks and they do some really cool moves with props.  Some guy does a flip off a car, and another is doing quadruple turns…there are so many cool things happening it’s hard to keep your attention on Troy and Chad, despite their hotness.

I remember watching this scene in the theaters and I just turned to my friend and said, “That was really good.”  It was better in the context of the movie, but I hope you can still appreciate it now.

Can’t wait for 17 again, better be some dancing…

Every year my dance school puts on a big show at the beginning of May.  There is usually some sort of theme, like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or ‘Peter Pan’ (generally the theme is some sort of Disney movie because we have a lot of young kids in our school.)  This year our theme is ‘Enchanted’, which is that new-ish movie that came out with Patrick Dempsey that’s half cartoons half actors.

We did something different this year with our theme.  Instead of just giving the roles to the most expressive or most technical dancers in our school we held auditions to see what undiscovered talent there was.  At first my friends and I were hesitant on trying out, because we weren’t sure what to expect.  The whole competitive team showed up and it was a really relaxed and friendly process.  There was no pressure. 

I’ll just say it; I’m a pretty big creep. I used to try to be cool, back when I thought being cool was cool…then I realized I’m a lot more interesting when I let my inner creepiness shine through.  This being said I let my inner creepiness show like I never had before at the auditions and I got the part of Nathaniel…the biggest creeper in the show. 

It may seem strange to want a potentially embarrassing role in the school’s theme, but I was happy to accept the part. 

When you watch dance, really good dance, there’s usually a story behind it.  Dancing is like acting, and you need to be in the right state of mind.  When you’re dancing to a contemporary or hip hop, you shouldn’t just smile the whole way through.  You have to get into character, and understand what you’re dancing. 

You need o know the difference between a smile and expression. 

There have been times when I stayed in character the whole way through, like last year’s Mary Poppins dance.  I was constantly making weird faces and exaggerating my movements.  There are also those times when I forget about myself and I just think about what comes next. Those are the times your face is stuck in a smile or worse, it’ blank.  It’s the worst feeling to come off stage without knowing you did your best, and when you’re not in character it’s never your best. 

That’s why I’m so excited to be playing a role in my school’s rendition of Enchanted.  Yes it’s because I enjoy being a creep in front of others, but it’s more importantly the opportunity to be a character and express myself in a way I can’t in other dances.  So it doesn’t matter who I am as long as I’m in character.

I’m usually a pretty fit person.  My team and I went through a series of activities to test our fitness levels, and it turned out that I was the most fit in the class.  I thanked my exercise program, Turbo Jam, which I had done two days earlier.  By doing the workout tape on Saturday I was able to give myself a day of ‘recooperation.’ Thank god Sundays are my lazy days, because I couldn’t move the next day.  Come Monday night I was feeling really good and it showed. 

I went through a stage this year when I would do my exercise tape once a day.  It was fun at first, but really hard to keep up without the proper motivation.  My motivation was, lose weight and look better, but when I started to look and feel better I figured I could take a few days off…those few days have turned into a few months.  I haven’t felt this out of shape in a long time. 

This past Monday I went to dance class after a nice big supper.  Feeling all warm and full and happy from my meal I walked into my dance studio not expecting anything out of the ordinary.  We started our usual warm ups and I began to feel unusually hot.  My whole body felt sickeningly warm and then as we began to turn and jump around I started to get dizzy.  Then I started cramping up.  It’s safe to say I wasn’t feeling good.  The past few weeks I’ve been getting out of breath faster and feeling pretty dead half way through the warm ups, but last week half a song of jogging and I didn’t think I could make it through the rest of the class.  I escaped to the bathroom during my least favorite exercise and I cooled myself down by the sink, but my whole head was throbbing and my legs and hands were shaking.  I sucked it up finished the warm ups, did the dances and managed to feel fine by the end of my three hour practice. 

Two days after my uncomfortable exercise experience and my legs and arms are still hurting.  My whole body feels stiff and tight, so I’m thinking it’s time to start using Turbo Jam again over the Easter holidays.  If it doesn’t improve my fitness in dance class at least it’ll help me burn off the excess chocolate I’ll be eating this weekend.