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| Can't Stop the Beat: Jazz 3-4 class |
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| Lighting check for Espana |
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| T-shirts on sale in the lobby |
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| Espana: Spanish dance (partly on pointe) |
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| You Can't Stop the Beat: Emma in the middle |
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| Ready for dress rehearsal |
It's Monday and we are trying to recover from Emma's dance recital weekend.Another great production and performance by
The Ballet Center students, teachers and director. (Carol, I understand now why you used to take a day off after Mica's dance recital weekends). My Mom arrived on Friday just in time for all the excitement. We took Jim out to dinner on Friday evening for Father's Day because he was flying to Taiwan on Sunday morning. Billy's was delicious as usual and we had fun writing Happy Father's Day on the white paper table coverings!
Saturday morning started off with dress rehearsal. Emma was in four different numbers so we had several costumes to get together, try on, sew straps to make them shorter etc.... I got Emma and the costumes to the auditorium at 9:30 and then I went to work in the lobby selling tickets, T-shirts, DVD orders and giving directions. There were a couple of us working so I was able to sneak out and take a few photographs of two of Emma's dance numbers. Dress rehearsal lasted 4 hours -- not too bad considering!
So we got home at 1:45 and rested up until call for the evening show which was at 5:30. Mom had made some yummy tuna salad while we were out in the morning and bought flowers for Emma. Jim managed to sneak the flowers into the auditorium without Emma seeing which was difficult because we all went to the theatre at 5:30 and just hung out until the show started at 6:30. Well, it was supposed to be 6:30, but so many people waited until the last moment to arrive and buy tickets that the show didn't start until 6:45. The performance was terrific -- even Jim, who never gives praise just to make someone happy, thought it was the best one he's seen. The first act was a Spanish dance, performed by the older students, including Emma's class. The
pointe students danced on
pointe, and Emma (a beginning
pointe student) danced on
pointe at the very beginning of the number when all the dancers were on stage together -- she was on
pointe for just a few minutes, but it was so cool to see her dance -- she was in the front since she is one of the younger, shorter dancers. Of course I thought she did a marvelous job. Next up were the jazz dance numbers. The older jazz students did a tribute to Michael Jackson feature a medley (
mashup) of songs. There costumes were black pants, a white sparkly T-shirt and, red sparkly jackets for part. They also used black fedora hats for part of the number. It was really well done. Emma's jazz class did a dance to "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray and I loved their psychedelic costumes and the dance was great too. The choreography was pretty involved and intricate, in fact on Sunday's performance one of the dances was off her mark a bit and managed to kick Emma in the face and Emma's braces cut her lip which started bleeding and she had to make a discrete exit off stage while the rest of the group managed do finish the dance with a person missing! (She's just fine).
The second act was the ballet "Alice in Wonderland". They used music from the real ballet, but didn't do all of it (in fact Emma just downloaded the music from the ballet on
iTunes -- another benefit of dancing -- introducing kids to classical music). Emma was part of the corridor of doors -- the part where Alice grows and shrinks -- they did this using a big Alice and a little Alice in the same costume, both with
blonde long hair. She was also a red card. I was really impressed with the way the director worked the little kids into the ballet and had them on stage in the background while others danced, so they all got a bit more stage time. The girls who danced the solos of the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar were really great. The slithery choreography was great. The show was over by 8:45 so not too late. Emma was totally wired -- no surprise there, but said she had a great time performing. Our neighbor was there too and gave Emma and her friend's daughter flower bouquets -- which was a nice surprise for Emma.
Sunday morning I got up at 4:30 AM to drive Jim to the airport to catch the first of 3 planes to Taiwan. I got home at 5:45 and went back to bed, but it didn't really help as I was tired all day. Call for Sunday's show was 12:30 and I was working in the lobby, but managed to see most of the show again. I watched from the back row and got a totally different perspective from the one I got Saturday in the second row. Anyway, lots of fun and hard work with friends. Looking forward to doing it again next year.
FYI: There are more ballet recital (and other photos) at my Flickr site. There's a link in the left hand sidebar of the blog.
