Alright. I wanted to post about a few things, but I knew that I needed to tell this story first.
Shows seem to be a big deal in their culture--performances of all kinds, dancing, singing, random talents. So quite frequently, we would be dragged into these performances (often the day of..."So, you're doing a song for tonight's show, right?"......"Uh...sure!"). One of these performances (which we thankfully had more notice for) was involvement in this dance-off thing. Groups would get together to create a dance to a set of 8 counts. Groups would have no idea what song it would be danced to, but you were responsible for creating a dance for a given amount of time. And then come show time, two groups would be pitted against one other, dancing at the same time to the same music. Additionally, each time would then bring out a solo dancer after the group dance to do the same thing.
So the first round, we did some dance in black outfits with Russian scarves tied around our waists:
Alaina was our solo dancer, as she had some dance experience. She was pretty much amazing. ;) She broke out some pirouettes.
We ended up placing in it somewhere, which meant that we had to go on to round 2 (I think everybody actually did). So we had to come up with a whole new dance, joined by some Russians on our team. And we raided the costume room in the main lodge and found lots of animal costumes. So, we had a variety of animal or other nonsensical creatures doing this completely ridiculous dance. Full of cheese, nowhere near being a cool dance like we attempted with the first dance.
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| Tiger(A), Butterfly (R), Carlson (R), Juggler (R), Dance Manager Natasha (R), Dinosaur (A), and Grasshopper (A) |
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| Yep, those would be pinwheels. |
And, as before, we needed a solo dancer. We are walking into the gymnasium, and we still haven't chosen a dancer. And I say, okay, fine. I'll do it. Totally winging it.
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| Me, in my starting pose. Thinking, I have got to be kidding myself. |
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I do some random steps, old dance moves, but really just being ridiculous and looking like I'm having a ton of fun (which, besides the pressure factor, it was). And since everyone seemed to like it when the boys threw in gymnastic stunts, I decided to not let them have all the fun and broke out a front handspring! Didn't quite land it, but everyone went nuts--the rest of my team and our Russian friends were amazed! Haha.
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| Galina, giving me a huge hug, after my ridiculous (and apparently amazing) performance. |
AAAnd we won. We won the Dance Grand Prix. Yep.
