Clubs!

Friday afternoon was club fair! What this means at Olin is that all the clubs set up tables around the center of campus (the Oval), and the freshmen wander from table to table, talking to upperclassmen, eating food, trying things out, and signing up for more and more mailing lists.

I didn't come off too badly (by which I mean that my email won't be horridly flooded on a daily basis). I had already joined Olin Dance Project, the contra dance group, and WHACK (the weapons club, and they had foils at their table and it made the foilist in me very happy), but at the club fair I also signed up for Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF), Midnight Mathematicians, Fiber Arts, Stage Combat, Franklin W. Olin Players (FWOP, that's theater), and then I was convinced to join the Olin Opera Organization! We'll see how that goes. I'm also planning on going to TARDIS -- that's the Doctor Who club -- events, but I'll know when all of those are from Carine.

The club events continued after the fair, though. SWE had a meeting last night, complete with lots and lots of cheesecake. They talked about what kinds of events they do, tried to convince us all to go to the national conference -- why are engineering conferences so much more expensive than math conferences? -- and what fundraisers they do. And we ate cheesecake. Lots of fun. Today was the second TARDIS meeting, though the first I've been able to attend, and we all crowded into a dorm room and ate food, drank Coke, and watched today's Doctor Who episode. "Dinosaurs. In a spaceship!" That basically expresses all the awesomeness.
Continuing the club subject, I'm auditioning for an organization at Babson, the Babson Dance Ensemble. The Olin Dance Project is all social dance, but BDE is performance dance. They're open to doing basically everything, and what pieces they do really depends on their members. Auditions were supposed to be Tuesday and Wednesday nights, but it turns out that Olin Introductory Experience is at night this Wednesday, not in the afternoon, so there's a conflict. The result is that the Oliners who are auditioning are doing it Sunday and Tuesday.

So part 2 of my audition is tomorrow (well, technically today), and part 1 is Tuesday. I found this out this morning, and I was only told the format of the audition last night. Tuesday is pretty normal. Everyone will learn three different combos of different types of dance and then perform the combos in small groups. Sunday/Wednesday, though, the dancers perform 30 seconds of their own choreography.

So, last night: "Okay, I need to come up with 30 seconds of choreography sometime this weekend."
This morning: "Oh darn it I need to come up with 30 seconds of choreography today."

Here were my basic ideas on how I should go about choreographing:
1. I didn't know if I would get music or not, so I chose music but made sure the dance made sense without the music. I'm doing 30 seconds from the middle of "No Reply At All" by Genesis, starting with the line "I get the feeling" and going to "The buck stops here."
2. This was my choreography on myself. I needed to play to my strengths, and I needed to keep everything well within my abilities. That meant I needed to leap a lot and turn a good bit, but doing the types of turns with which I was most comfortable and not try to do too many. It also meant I could avoid things that showed how weak I am as far as flexibility.
3. 24 hours isn't long enough to do anything complicated. Clean and fairly simple are good qualities.

So, here's how it turned out: two leaps, two turns, four turning leaps, and a shoulder roll. Playing to my strengths, oh yes. I do get music, so I'll be taking my iPod. And it's not too complicated at all, though there are a couple of spots that I need to run through tomorrow to clean up. Or I can just improv them and pretend I'm dancing in the living room at home.

So, we'll see how much I actually get to do of everything! The first semester at Olin is Pass/No Record (pass the class, it's recorded as a pass, and if you fail, then it doesn't show on the transcript), so the tradition is that the freshman class takes advantage of this and does lots of things to decide what is worth continuing to do when classes aren't Pass/No Record.