Sunday, May 1, 2011

Song & Dance

Today is song and dance day. To start with, Nicola headed down to the Wellington West Plaza hotel for a breakfast, before crossing the road for rehearsals for this afternoon’s Sweet Adelines International Region 35 (that’s New Zealand to the rest of us) Annual Convention and Competition, which is taking place this weekend. The chorus competition is this afternoon – the quartets were held yesterday. The main focus of the competition, for the Wellington City Chorus, isn’t the position achieved (although winning would be nice, of course) but what marks they achieve, as this will affect whether they get an invite to the World Championships in Denver next year.

Meanwhile, I had a leisurely breakfast before wandering down to the dance studio in Vivian Street, to take my silver medal test. I met up with some of our gang from the intermediates class, and we all made our way through our routines with varying levels of self-perceived ability or otherwise. We’ll get the results tonight when we go to the social dance.

In the afternoon, I went along to see Nicola perform in the actual competition, and saw a couple of the other choirs that they were up against. In the end, the Wellington City Chorus came second with a score of 620, a result with which they were not best pleased. There will be a post-mortem on the result when she goes to practice tomorrow, so expect an update then.

We weren’t allowed to take any photos during the performance, so here’s one of Nicola in full war-paint:



In the evening we took a taxi down to the dance studio on Vivian Street for the Social Dance. There we met up with others from various other classes, some of whom we’d met before. The social dance was slightly less well-attended than previous ones we’ve been to, which helped in reducing the opportunities for bumping into fellow dancers…navigating around the dance-floor is one of the tricks that we haven’t really mastered yet! I received my silver medal, together with my scores and comment. As expected, the silver medal standard is higher than the bronze, so whilst I still got a “Highly commended”, my marks were down on the previous medal. As usual, there were helpful comments on my dancing, and a certificate.


3 comments:

  1. To be clear, 620 isn't a bad mark at all and the Waikato Rivertones were very worthy winners. But we had hoped and expected to score at least as highly as in last year's competition, when the chorus posted 640. Hope it wasn't because they had me this year and not last year ;-)! Still, I'e learned quite a lot about the sorts of standards that have to be delivered.

    How'd you like the eyelashes? I got them Done at a salon. I'm now stuck with them until they start to moult off, which will apparently take a couple of weeks ... (:-0

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  2. Well done, both of you. :)

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  3. Well done to you both in your dancing and singingness. I wouldn't have recognised you Nic, if Rory hadn't said it was you. You scrub up lovely! Did you watch any of the wedding? It wasn't at the best time of day for you but hopefully you managed to catch the highlights. It was a super day. xxx

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