Friday is the big performance!

Today starts later than the rest of the week and with a short warm up class. Pedro taught the class and as usual he had a great class with a lot of humour (which I really needed because I was so tired, more mentally than physically). We then run through variations. It didn't start off very promisingly but I managed to get everything pulled together before our time ran out. We than ran through repertory. The timing is still tricky, and Kathy did some final tweaking. It's going to be interesting to see how that works out. It really all depends on if we get our timing right. The music itself is kind of tricky but at lunch I figured out that we need to listen for the bass notes of the timpani and not get distracted by the upper melody notes.

This year, a lot of us had to drive to the theatre (because of the hotel change) which made it a little confusing. We got to Grace St Theatre, which is like coming back to an old home now. The performance order changed this year. The upper level repertory started the show. They are doing a mazurka from Swan Lake and it looks really complicated! Very fast and lots of character dance, but they looked great as always. We did our variation after that. I was extremely nervous about this particular dance this year. I had a few minor boo boos but nothing horrible. I hate that all of these variations end with turns and so frequently chainee turns, because they are a weak point for me. But I tried to finish strong nonetheless. The 3B's did their variation after that, which was Kitri from Don Q. This is such a fun variation. The men did a really neat dance and most of them were quite good at being in character. They had 3 jumps landing on their knees and amazingly, Dennis the oldest of them, did all three with aplomb. We did partnering after that. Dancing with Danny was quite fun. He's a very strong dancer. I wonder if his having taken ballroom helps at all with this. The last thing was our rep piece. We're going to have to see the video to see how it went. I started off being able to hear the timpani beat, but by the time we got to the front-side-back part, I had totally lost it. Kelly said it looked pretty good, but was better in the practice run, which is often the case. Heidi had a nice little speech at the end, and she was kind of teary, which immediately got me all teary but it's such a great celebratory feeling to be at the end of the performance. Tonight was the final dinner. We were a little delayed in getting there due to some airline difficulties (which I won't go into because it's just stupid and irritating). The locale turned out to be not as great as last year. The outdoor setting meant there were a lot of mosquitos and the indoor areas had smokers nearby plus loud music. We cut the evening short in order to be packed and ready for tomorrow morning.