The Dance Buzz: I Survived Recital Weekend!

Friday, June 8, 2012

I Survived Recital Weekend!

Recital weekend was this past weekend for my studio and it was exciting, exhausting and most importantly is OVER! I can now join the "Done" Club for Studio Owners who are done with their show! Hooray!

We crammed five shows into three days and it was great, but I'm glad to be done. Here's a peek into the weekend, and my entry for May's "Performance Pic" Challenge.

This year we rented a local school for our shows. The auditorium holds about 1000 people. We got in around 2pm on Friday to set-up the stage and theater for the 6pm show.

I let the students sit in the auditorium - I feel like they enjoy watching the show. I have alumni students who volunteer as aisle monitors. They are responsible for two to three classes and oversee them in their seats and making sure they are brought backstage on time. The teachers also patrol the seats, and help with their rowdiest classes.

Pre-show chaos!

In this auditorium, I sit down front to direct the show and control the music and lighting board. I run the music with my laptop through iTunes and then it goes through all the sound equipment. My husband snapped this picture of me and my sound guy. Note the iced coffee crammed under the table... that is my fuel for the weekend!

From this point on, there's really no stopping. Our shows are Friday 6pm, and then Saturday and Sunday at 1pm and 5:30pm. They are usually two to two-and-a-half hours long... our longest show was 2:35 this year. We open the doors 45 minutes ahead of time, so it can be a bit tricky on Saturday and Sunday to clear the auditorium and get ready for the night show, but this spacing seems to work for us.

This was our 30th anniversary year and so we had a few special numbers... the biggest highlight was our "Dad's" dance - "Goodship Lollipop" had everyone rolling with laughter.

Chest-bump was not in the original choreography.

We also invited had an alumni dance, so I got to get up on stage as well...

In case you're interested, for our babies, our teachers stand at the front of the stage to help them with their dancing instead of having a leader or having an assistant stand in the wings. I know many studios have different methods for this, but this is what has worked for us.

And then at the end of each show is the part I dread.. the finale speech! I will say that it does get better each year I do it, and by the fifth show of the weekend I hardly need my cards. I would prefer to interpretively dance the finale speech, but I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet.

At least I get to wear a pretty dress.

We don't do a finale dance, we just invite all the students back on stage for a final bow. Some of our pre-school parents leave at intermission, but I would say about 75% of the kids stay to come on stage for the finale. I try to keep it short, I introduce our assistant teachers, graduating seniors and faculty and say a few words about summer and fall registration and then it's over!