Felt Instead of Heard

"Dancing is a language that is felt instead of heard."
-- Prince Eric in the Disney musical The Little Mermaid

Today was the second part of my audition for the Babson Dance Ensemble.

 One of my friends has what I consider to be the perfect audition blog post. It's general enough to have applied to multiple auditions for her, but it also says everything that really needs to be said. So, I'll get to the details later, but here's the most important part, with thanks to Rach:

"My line wasn’t the best, I wasn’t always with the music, I didn’t have the best technique, my extensions weren’t the highest, I didn’t stay on relevé the longest, my turns weren’t the cleanest... But I worked as hard as I could. And furthermore, I had fun with it, because I love to dance. And hopefully the way I danced at that audition conveyed that to the judges."

Now, details.

I did part two of the audition before part one, because part two is supposed to be tomorrow night, and all the Olin freshmen have a TIPS (training for intervention procedures -- alcohol) training tomorrow from seven to eleven. So, all the Olin freshmen who were interested in Babson Dance Ensemble did part two of the audition on Sunday, with the Babson girls who were going through sorority recruitment this week.

Part two was all about solos, performing 30 seconds of our own choreography. Each person did her piece twice (to have two chances and so that people couldn't just improv).  I described what I ended up doing for my solo here, but basically, lots of leaps and turns, because those are my strength.

I was really curious as to what other people would do, and it ended up being mostly hiphop or really classical jazz full of attitude. I would classify the dance I did as jazz, but of a much more flying sort. There were a couple of really good lyrical pieces, too, though they tended to be simpler. I was surprised by the infrequency of jumps and turns. There were some but not many, and no was trying to impress with those parts of their choreography. Which, err, I was.

There were a lot of good dancers, and overall people were much weaker as choreographers than as dancers. I could tell they were awesome dancers from how they executed certain steps, but their choreography got muddled by the transitions. My favorite pieces were definitely a couple of lyrical ones and a couple of hiphop ones. I thought they were both choreographed and performed really well, and I hope those people are accepted.

I ended up going last, and I was okay with that (but I was offered the chance to go second to last and probably should have taken it). Neither of my runs was perfect, but both felt really good. I was so nervous -- while I was waiting in between runs, I had my hands on my ribs, as if I could make myself breathe properly -- and I thought it went quite well. I was very happy, but also very bruised. Between rehearsing over and over and then performing twice, I managed to bruise my left knee pretty badly and my right shoulder somewhat. Yay for ice packs and ibuprofen.

Part one of the audition was tonight. They blocked out three hours for this audition, and that seems like maybe it would be an exaggeration. There were eighteen people. Three hours, really? But oh yes. Eight o'clock to eleven o'clock pm.

We started with a really classic jazz warm-up: isolations, lateral stretches, flat backs, and lunges. This led in pretty naturally to the first dance, which was jazz, taught by the president of BDE. I really liked the jazz dance, which was sort of funny, because it had a lot more attitude than I used to enjoy in a dance. (Seriously, I could only get attitude in jazz walks, nothing else.) It also included one pirouette to the right, which was either a half, a one and a half, or a two and a half. I've been doing two and a half pirouettes to the right easily all summer, including in my dorm room in socks on carpet earlier tonight. For some reason, I just wasn't landing them consistently in the studio tonight.

To do the dances, we split up into groups of three or four by our audition numbers. Because we got numbers on Sunday, this meant the Olin freshmen girls were in the first group. Each group ran the dance twice. I messed up technique or timing on the pirouette both times, but then they gave us two eights at the end each run to do whatever we wanted, and both times I nailed tours a la seconde to the left with a pirouette out. This dance was a lot of fun.

The second dance was hiphop, which was the strength of a lot of girls at the audition and is my weakness by miles. I was just trying to remember all the choreography and get the right feel to the dance. Actually, a lot of people had trouble remembering the choreography. Out of the three dances, the most people forgot the hiphop choreography. I didn't, which was good, because unlike most of the others, I couldn't have freestyled until the music got back to a part I knew. They did give us 16 seconds to freestyle at the beginning.
I salsa-ed.

Last was the contemporary dance. The president told us they knew we were tired, knew most of us weren't as comfortable with contemporary but to just try, etc. Umm, my favorite dance of the three. The dance best fit to my style of the three. Flowing turns, a shoulder roll, a straddle leap, and a pretty lyrical style? Yes please. The only problem ended up being that I traveled way too much on the straddle leap prep and had to time the leap on when I could safely jump and not hit someone, as opposed to being on count. Oops.

It was exhausting, I'm going to hurt on Wednesday, and it was so much fun -- because I love to dance, and tonight I was with a lot of other people who love to dance, and no matter our specialties, for three hours we spoke one language.