Hitomi

Hi, guys! I’m Hitomi. I go to Central Hawke’s Bay College with my great partner, Miyu. The temperature in New Zealand is getting lower, but on the contrary my weight is going up…Anyway! The time passes so quickly. I can’t believe this month is June. 

 

At the end of May, Stage Challenge was held. Through the competition, I had such amazing experiences, so I will write about them.

 

At first, let me tell you a bit more about Stage Challenge. It is a dance competition battled between schools with acting and performing varieties of dances; hip-hop dances, classic ballet, contemporary dance, mime etc. I joined a group as a contemporary dancer. More than 100 people applied for the competition. Among them, the number of contemporary dancers was only seven people including me. They have really nice expressiveness and skills, so I was stimulated by their performances.   We started practicing in March. We spent the interval, lunch time and even the time after school for the practice. I’ve learned classic ballet for 13 years in Japan, but I had never danced contemporary dance before the Stage Challenge. So, it was a good experience for me.

 

My school’s theme was “NO MORE”.  The story was about refugees fleeing from their country, but killed by terrorists in the end. Ultimately, we wanted to tell the audience, “Why don’t we have peace?”  In the scene where some refugees fled with boats from the country, I performed “stormy sea” with other dancers. One of the main characters died in this scene, so we couldn’t dance with smiles. 

 

On the day of actual performance, I was so excited. In the morning, the contestants gathered in the venue and held an opening ceremony for easing off our tension and deciding program-turns by a draw. After that, we had rehearsals. Each school could do run-through three times with the music on the stage. During the run-through, I terribly failed my solo part twice. Soon, I got nervous and felt impatient. Before the last rehearsal, my friends said to me, “You don’t seem to be yourself. Everyone knows you are a very good dancer, so you should have confidence!” Thanks to the words, I succeeded the solo part at last. After the rehearsal, we changed into our costumes and made up our faces. What we tried to express was “the sea”, so our makeup was blue. Even my hair was painted blue with spray! When we moved to the back stage, I was dying to dance quickly. Then, on the stage, we made the best performance as ever. In addition, we got 2nd prize and many extra prizes!!