DAY 97 - February 4th 2014 (By Elina Ayako)

DAY 97 - February 4th 2014 (By Elina Ayako)

Jillian Meyers, Winter Drop & now Anthony Lee?!
Yes, you've heard right. 
That's what the 1Yeppers are going through for 2 weeks.. 
Kinda sucks. 
They all make us work way too hard & we get too inspired. 
Pffff.

Let me tell you a little more about today. 
The morning got unexpectedly emotional - in our one hour evaluation we reflected on the different experiences we've had over the 4 days of Winter Drop. 
We shared our thoughts on how much we are proud of each other & how much fun it was to have so many people from different countries in our studio for the same reason, dance! 
Everyone said very important & inspiring things about what they individually have learnt the most of in these 4 days so I won't get into all of the comments. 
Personally, I found back to the pure joy of dance. 
I didn't put any pressure on myself in the classes.
I didn't think about having to "kill" a choreography or having to impress or prove anything to anyone, including myself. 
Those past 4 days reminded me what it really is about in dance: sharing, supporting, inspiring & spreading love (or at least this is my opinion). 
And if you focus on being positive, everything magically follows. 
So Winter Drop was for sure one of the best dance moments in my life so far!

Let's get into what Anthony did with uf today. 
To start off, a small disclaimer: 
Anthony is a genius. Period. He's like one of these "Kinderüberraschung" chocolate eggs - you already know you'll get delicious chocolate but then you get surprised by a freaking epic, fully functional miniature toy car inside the chocolate egg. 
Just in this case, the chocolate is Anthony's talent as a dancer & the toy car is his amazing personality combined with his teaching skills. 
Yes, I just used this awkward metaphor.

Today's focus was on musicality. How do you listen to a song? How do you see a sound? How do you translate that sound into movement? 
So what we did was we paired up in groups of two & started choreographing to.. no song, just our sounds. 
To understand the concept of this better, we tried to find out together how for example a cough looks like as a sound. 
Maybe something like a hill that flattens out? 
So next step is executing this picture into dance. 
It was really fun experimenting like that & just be silly & have fun together. 
For the final test of the day (if you'd like to call it that) we had to choreograph two 8 counts to a song, specifically focusing on how the sounds make you want to move like. 
The four groups taught each other two 8 counts each so that we finally had a pretty dope choreography. It was quite hard but Anthony knew exactly that this would help us understand a lot. 
And I guarantee you, all of us were blown away by how much our minds have improved after today. So cool, right?


Elina Ayako