Writing this blog from sunny miami, fl. Over the last few days I have traveled from Gainesville to Tampa to Gainesville to Miami, and I danced a show in each location. It’s like I’m going on tour.
My “weekend” started on Thursday night with the final dress rehearsals for my classes at Cameron’s as well as putting the finishing touches on a men’s trio that I put together for the three guys on the company; namely, me, matt and dean. The next night was the opening night of our dance recital. The performance went really well and we had a lot of good response from the audience. Our director Nina even told us that she wanted to have our trio perform at each of the recital shows (Saturday morning, night and Sunday afternoon). Unfortunately, I would be in Tampa with Apocalypse on saturday night and dean would leave for camp on Sunday. So for the time being, we just added an encore performance for Saturday morning.
After the show on Friday night, I rehearsed until 3am with Apocalypse for the show we had the next day. We put in a lot of work that night and really made the routine super clean. Additionally, we also added in our final stunt that would hopefully be the icing on the cake to the whole dance. Being out so late made the recital in the morning really difficult to perform in but I pulled through. Not even an hour after finishing recital, I left with Apoc to get to Tampa for the Glo dance cru competition. The whole show turned out to be a lot more underground than we intitally expected. We came to Tampa expecting to dance in an auditorium or Gymnasium with standard stage lighting against other hip hop crews. We ended up competing in a night club amongst a ton of bboys that had showed up for the same competition, as well as 2v2, freestyle, and locking competitions. The venue was much smaller and the other dancers were not in our style range. It was a little intimidating at first but we got over it. We were among 5 other dance crews that were fighting for the $1000 grand prize. The judges featured members of enigma dance cru and breakskate, so we had to really step our game up to get noticed. After a really solid routine and several grueling hours of waiting, we were anti-climatically announced the winners by the mc who said “hey so in a few minutes we’re going to get started with out 2v2 semi finals. its gonna be crazy. oh and the winners of the crew competition were apocalypse dance cru.” Video being posted soon.
We were up until 4am jamming with breakdancers from across Florida and talking it up with enigma and breakskate members. Tony Zane of breakskate told us that our choreography was something he had not seen come out of Florida. We were really happy to get that compliment. By 7am I was back in Gainesville trying to catch a few hours of sleep before my final recital performance on Sunday afternoon. By the end of the recital I had performed in 3 different routines and watched in silent pride as my 3 hip hop classes put on stellar performances.
Not even 10 minutes after watching my last class perform, i jumped into a car with Ms Vanessa Vargas to head down to Miami and teach some dance. So here I am, dancing in Miami after dancing in gainesville, and tampa. Life is pretty hectic but I wouldn’t have it any other way. So far so good at the dance camp. Really talented and dedicated kids here. Final report coming up next week.