STATE FESTIVAL. It was extremely fun. And awesome and so worth every penny and long hour of practice!
On Friday me and four other senior girls on my company went up to SLCC by ourselves for a dance scholarship audition class. (It's just a modern technique class where people from every college in the state watch you, so it's for multiple scholarship opportunities) It was taught by Cain Keenan. He is the coolest man alive! He's extremely gay though. But yeah, he is such an amazing dancer and I love taking classes from him!!
Then on Saturday morning we rode a bus up with the whole company for the actual state festival stuff at the U. We started with a partnering class where you learn to do lifts with people and such. We learned a really awesome combination from Natasha Washington. I was partners with this kid named Diego on our company, he is a new addition and his first style is ballroom so he lifted me with ease and it was super fun.
Then we had an amazing modern technique class with "Brad"... He looked like Tom Hanks mixed with the grown-up version of cartoon Andy from Toy Story 3. And I totally called it; he was gay too! Anyways, Brad taught us a combination to an Opera song... yeah. It was weird, but they assigned him the music so it's not like he wanted to do it to opera, so I'll partially forgive him. But not completely because he had us do this jump to the floor thing and I went for it and I landed right on top of my knee and it STILL has a bruise that's multi-colored and larger than life. It was a protruding goose egg those first two days.
Us and Brad!
After Brad's suicide class we had lunch and got ready to be adjudicated. Then we walked down to... KINGSBURY HALL! Gah. It was so cool. You walk in and it's all quiet and the old guy at the desk directs you to the dance studio in the basement of the backstage. We warmed up and then went up onto the stage to meet the judges. We were grouped with West Jordan and Tooelle high schools as well so it went in an every other school fashion. After all the performances we went back to the studio in the basement. A few people in our other piece (the Transformers hip hop) told me it was the best they'd seen my piece danced which was a great morale booster! The judges were really great and they had good feedback. One lady was an extreme chatterbox so they ran out of time for detailed commentary, but the judge from UVU said she loved mine!
When we got back from adjudication we took a contact improvisation class. It was so cool. This man and lady were professional contact improvers; they just lean and lift each other with their backs and cores and they hardly ever used their hands. It was SO cool to watch. They didn't fall out of anything either, they were so quiet and gentle with landings. I found this video with them in it, it's not super great, I wish you could see what I saw! But if you fast forward to about 2:45 ish there are some cool lifts in there.
Us and the Improvers!
After contact improvisation we had an hour break. I got to know so many company members a lot better and it was nice to chill out with everyone. Then we had an African dance class! It was Congolese African (from the Congo) The lady who taught it studied in Africa; she was really cool and extremely knowledgeable about the style. They also had live drum music, it was so fun and awesome! Charly and Megan-- One of the drummers was the creepy long blond-haired tall one who was creeping on us at sugar space!! Crazy.
Then we ate dinner and went to Kingsbury Hall for the ending Gala show thing. Every school can showcase one of their pieces so we did Inception. It was the coolest thing to perform on that stage. I loved it. And so many other schools had amazing pieces, it was an awesome show. After the show they announced scholarships and awards. I didn't get any of the scholarships from the class I took on Friday, BUT. I got the "Meritorious Student Choreography Award"!!! They only give out six of them for the whole state, sorry to brag, but I'm going to. :) haha. It was just one of those few successful moments I've had ya know!
Anyways, after that extravaganza, we went to ANOTHER class. We were all really really tired, but it was the best one by far. It was called a contact improv jam session. So we went in with some other schools and this brittish lady explained the rules and then we "jammed". You could do anything you wanted it was just contact improving whatever for an hour. At first people were awkward about it but by 20 minutes in you would be lifted up by random people, contacting with someone you didn't know or never even seeing their face. I got picked up by some huge kid and was in the air spinning... I don't even know how it happened but it didn't even scare me because you just learn to trust people. Everyone was just dancing and moving and lifting each other in the air. It was so cool. I can't even explain it. And it probably sounds really psycho and weird, and it probably is! But whatever :)
It was fun and if you read this whole thing you deserve a medal!
