Danceified

Jul 27, 2009 17:18

Well, I'm back from my whirlwind trip to Vegas, where I managed not to drink, smoke, gamble or get married by Elvis. I'm so boring.

My original flight on Friday got cancelled, so I spent six hours in an airport for no reason, went home to snag a nap, then got up at 5 am to catch my 7:30 flight. I got in to Vegas, met up with my troupe (and panicking dance teacher), practiced a bit, had lunch, took a nap, did my hair and makeup, watched part of the competition, put on my costume, performed/competed, got a troupe photo taken, changed out of my costume, watched a bit more of the competition, had dinner, watched even *more* of the competition, watched the award ceremony, didn't win anything, and went to bed at 1 am Vegas time after ~22 hours awake. Got up after getting very little sleep (worrying about whether I'd gotten the time of my return flight wrong), went to the airport, flew home, went to bed for 11 hours. Hooray exciting weekend.

The competition was interesting. In hindsight I wish I'd gone to the workshops, since there were both Turkish and flamenco fusion workshops, but I would have had to miss more work. The competition was interesting if a bit boring. There's definitely a "style" to the competition -- all the music basically sounded the same and all the choreography mostly looked the same. If you deviate too much, you could get knocked by the judges (as we did, because we hate this trend of dancing to three songs spliced together), but if you don't deviate enough you get written off as boring. So the people who won were people who danced in a very conventional style, but with some kind of prop or gimmick -- veil poi, or water sleeves. So while I don't think the winners were better dancers than us, they were better at being what the judges wanted, so I'm not too bothered about not placing.

I think I danced better than I have in a while, and I'm proud of our performance. Plus we went to dinner with one of the judges (not from our category, but she's judged it in the past) who was very helpful with a critique as well as being a cool person.

All in all, a good time, I think. I'm feeling inspired to dance again, plus the girls have asked me to teach them a Turkish routine, and I got my dance last name! (It's a weird thing our dance school does; if you're part of the family, you get the school's surname.) So: yay, but exhausted.

belly dance, dance

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