Dance Marathon '13

Hey, everybody!

On 15th November me and nine other students from my class took part in one of the most exciting events that everyone had been waiting for months -  Dance Marathon. Although I didn't want to  participate at first, now I'm very happy that I did, because it was an amazing event that not only brought me and my classmates together, but also was a real challenge for me that I overcame.

I found out about Dance Marathon about two months before an actual event, when one of my classmates told me about it and offered to participate in it together. Even though I dance for about five years now, I'm kind of afraid and a little bit shy attending such events, so I told her that I didn't think that was a good idea. However, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and after all I decided to face this challenge, gather a group of students and participate in the show.

First task for participants of this event was to prepare a dance. We started practicing about a month before an event. To do that, we had to find people who wanted to be a part of it. To be honest, there were a lot of them and at the outset we had a group of about 15 people that was definitely too much. However, when the real rehearsals started some people just didn't show up, hence in the end only a team of 10 committed people were left.

Another challenge was to decide on a music for a dance, since we all had different opinions about how our performance should look like. Trying to compromise, we split into two groups (6 and 4 people) according to our taste in music and ideas of the show. This way we created different dances and then joined them together with an idea of two battling crews.

I was the one who had to create a choreography in our group and it wasn't difficult for me, since I had done it many times in my dancing lessons. Furthermore, I had to teach the rest of the team that dance routine and it was a bit harder, because I hadn't done that before and other girls were dancing other dance styles in their free time. Nevertheless, I would say that we succeeded and in the end quite a nice performance was built up.

When the day of Dance Marathon came, we were all really nervous and had been practicing for about 3 hours that day. The result of  our efforts was really loud applause from spectators of the event and that was an amazing feeling.

Another task for participants was to create another performance, but this time in 15 minutes with given music and chosen teams. We managed to do this really well and once again attained a great support from viewers.

The final task was to improvise by the music played by organizers. I was kind of afraid of this task, but when I heard house music playing I decided to try and improvise a little, since I dance house dance for 3 years or so. And it went quite well.

All in all, Dance Marathon was a nice event and I was happy to be a part of it. I learnt to face the difficulties and nervousness, to work together with my team and, of course, I had a great time!

This activity integrated two aspects of CAS - Creativity and Action.