I wrote about the preparation for this post's happening, or lack of, here.
The stage lights were blinding. Joyce and Claire were playing Butterfly Lovers on horn and piano. After my completely improvised ribbon solo en pointe, and Jasmine and Morgan's parasol duet, it was time for our fan dance trio.
We had a lose idea of what we were going to do for out Chinese New Year festival performance for two months, maybe three. There were going to be parasols for sure, and the song we chose was Butterfly Lovers. We had arranged for Joyce to play piano, and for Claire to be on French horn. That much was organized until the two weeks preceding the event.
The first day in that two week crackdown period was a Sunday. The basic sequential aspect of our act was devised. I would have a ballet/ribbon solo, Jasmine and Morgan would do their parasol work, and then we would join together. Claire's music was not yet arranged at this point, and the fan choreography was only in the beginning stages. The parasol dance was loosely created.
The fan choreography was not completed until the midnight of the Friday/Saturday transition, the weekend before the Monday festival. I knew this would be a rough performance. We learned the whole set of choreo on Sunday and didn't even manage a full clean run through. I still hadn't heard the song all the way through.
On Monday night, we had a vague idea of what we were doing. In regards to my pointe solo, I just winged the entire thing. I also fell at one part, but I mean, it happened. The parasols were rather okay, but when it came to the fans....yeah. Right before I went onstage, when the curtains were about to open, Morgan told me that she had completely forgotten the choreography. In the pictures I had my friend take of us, you can see clearly what was happening. There were pictures where I was doing the dance, and both Morgan and Jasmine were standing there, blatantly staring at me. In most, you can see us looking at each other laughing. On stage.
You'd think that it'd be an embarrassing event. It wasn't. Coming off stage, we just gathered together laughing so hard, not in shame, but in genuine amusement. It was hilarious, but had enough parts that were actually quite nice, so it wasn't completely tragic. People that had watched us told me we looked good, or that it was a pretty performance, but the whole thing feels like an inside joke. Overall, it really exercised our existing friendship, and made for a good memory, especially for Morgan, who is graduating this year.
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