Dance Retreat

This weekend we had the dance retreat for the Genki Musical. Basically, it entailed going to a youth center up in the mountains to learn the dances that will be in the musical, prepare props and costumes, and run all the way through the musical for the first time. The retreat lasted from 9:00 Saturday morning until 5:00 Sunday evening.

Since no alcohol is allowed at the youth center, I went out with Ashley, Nelson, Jamie, Catriona and Emily for a few "responsible" drinks on Friday night. By "responsible", I mean that the plan was to go out, have one or two drinks, chat a bit, and make an early night of it. Of course, it didn't work out that way. After spending some time at Hirome, we went for karaoke (all you can drink, naturally) and finished up at the Boston Cafe. I didn't get to bed until about 4:00 Saturday morning, and had to wake up about two and a half hours later to meet Amy and Marisa at the station.

The road up to the youth center was long and windy, so that wasn't a whole lot of fun with a slight hangover. I wasn't actually carsick, but it was unpleasant. When we got to the center, the day started out with an orientation. One of the staff members explained where everything was and went over the rules. They were very particular about the way things were to be done; they explained exactly how we should make and unmake our beds, including which direction the crease should face when we folded up our blankets in the morning. It was kind of funny, and very Japanese.

After orientation, our first thing for the day was warmups. We played a few icebreaker games and stretched out. Once that was done, we started in on the Bollywood dance. The musical will end with the full cast on stage for a Bollywood-style dance which will transition into curtain calls. Though the dance isn't choreographed, we were taught some moves to combine however we liked. The music for that dance is pretty awesome; the song is called "Tunak Tunak Tun". Here's a link to the music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bAN7Ts0xBo

That lasted until lunch time. We were eating food prepared by the youth center staff, and it was decent. I usually can't eat everything in a standard sized meal, but this time I cleaned my plate. Following lunch was the paso doble session. Since I'm not in that dance, I was expected to help out with prop making or whatever else needed doing. I went to the prop room, but they didn't have any work for me to do at that time, so I curled up in a corner and dozed. The lack of sleep was catching up to me. After laying around for a bit, though, I felt pretty good. I more or less just messed around until dinner time. The most productive thing I did was practicing lines with Amy, and it turned out that I have mine pretty well memorized.

Dinner was also fairly good, and I had a large appetite. Maybe it was from the dancing, or from being up in the mountain air. Or possibly from all the energy expended trying to stay warm; it was below zero degrees Celsius when we arrived in the morning. The youth center was heated, but the gym we practiced in wasn't. Once dinner was over, we had a tutorial on stage makeup. That was fairly interesting to me. Since my character is styled after Lady Gaga, I'm going to be wearing some very dramatic makeup in addition to the regular stuff. After the tutorial, I went back to the prop room and helped cut and fold paper leaves for some trees that will be used in the background.

In the evening we also had bath time. Since this was a youth center, it had an onsen-style bath. You undressed and left your clothes in the entry room, then went into a tiled room with several showers and a large tub. There were no dividers between the shower stations, so you had to be okay with being naked in the presence of other people. After scrubbing off at the shower station, you could soak in the tub, which was big enough to hold three or maybe four people. Sitting in the warm water felt really nice after a long day.

After bathing, I worked on some more paper leaves before lights out came. We all had to be in bed by 10:30 pm, which was perfectly fine by me. I shared a room with Sasha and Julie. Kathy was also supposed to be in our room, but ended up being unable to come to the retreat because she was sick. The room had four bunkbeds, and on each bed there was a pile of three blankets. Since Kathy wasn't present, we split her blankets between the three of us. This meant that we each slept with four blankets on. It ended up being about the right level of warmth. I slept really well, though I had some strange dreams.

In the morning, we unmade our beds and went down to the gym for the morning meeting. One of the staff members led us in rajio taiso, which are basically calisthenics done to music played on the radio. It was more than a little dorky, but not a bad way to start the morning. Once that was done, it was time for us to do our chores. Using the youth center was fairly cheap (we each pitched in 3,000 yen), but it meant that we had to do a little bit of work as well. Julie and I were assigned to clean the women's bathroom on the second floor. It turned out not to be all that much work.

Following cleaning time was breakfast. I was hoping it would be rice and miso soup, but it turned out to be fish, mystery vegetables, rice and soup. I'm not a huge fan of fish first thing in the morning, but it wasn't bad fish. I didn't finish all of my meal this time around. After breakfast, I went to the gym for what would be the highlight of the weekend: the Gaga dance.

In Act 4, I enter with an entourage of people dancing to a combination of Poker Face and Bad Romance. At the previous week's rehearsal, Chisa, the choreographer, taught me a bit of the dance. Today I would learn the rest. It's a very cool dance, and also very high energy. Most of it is done in unison, but there are a few sections where I'll be doing solos. We learned the dance in chunks, and since we went out of order, putting it all together turned out to be a struggle. I feel like I know all of the steps, but I don't know where they all go. We practiced from 9:10 until noon without breaks, and even then none of us really had it down. It was looking pretty good, though.

One of the more entertaining aspects of rehearsal was attempting the dance while wearing a headpiece that will be part of my costume. It's basically a cluster of fabric-covered styrofoam blocks meant to look like buildings. They have rectangles of shiny reflector tape for windows. Since the elastic on the hat was very snug, it stayed in place reasonably well for most of the dance. There's a little bit of trouble in one part where I have to flip my head down, but I think if we add a comb or something to the hat and pin it to my head very securely, it should work out. It's a very awesome hat; I'll have to post a picture of my costume when it's done. My shoulders and one hip will also be covered in little buildings like the ones on my hat.

Lunch today was rather disappointing. It turned out that there was also a large group of school children passing through, and they were eating some sort of noodles. But what we ended up with was a section of an orange, some cooked cabbage, and a bowl full of rice mixed with some vegetables and tiny fishes. It was a lot less food than our previous meals had been, and not terribly delicious. I wasn't thrilled about the tiny fish. They were about a centimeter or two long and very thin. They were whole fish; you ate them eyes, bones and all. Honestly, they didn't have a noticeable texture or flavor, but looking at them was a little gross. I was hungry, though, so I ate nearly all of the fishy rice.

After lunch, most of the group went to learn the Stomp routine that will go at the beginning of the play, but a few of us worked on the Gaga dance some more. I wouldn't have minded being in the Stomp, but I couldn't have gone to the practice because I needed to stay and learn some of the solo sections for the Gaga dance. Chisa taught me two of the solos, but I don't quite have them down. We practiced the entire dance many times through and I tried to add my solos to the extent that I could remember them. In the afternoon the dance started making some more sense; I'm a little more certain of where the various sections fit together, though I still couldn't do it on my own. By that time we were all very tired, though, and turning into zombies.

At 3:00, it was time to do a full run through of the musical. This weekend was the deadline for memorizing the script, and nearly everyone knew their lines. The whole thing went much better than I expected. I was thinking it would be a mess because we were all so worn out and had our heads full of the stuff we'd been learning over the course of the weekend. But somehow it went fairly smoothly. The dance routines were looking good, especially the paso doble. Sasha choreographed that one and did an amazing job of it. It's being used as the battle scene, with the two generals and their soldiers squaring off against each other. The Gaga dance was messy, but I think it's going to be great once we've practiced it more.

The run through was timed, and it took about an hour. It was missing a few things like scene changes, moving props around, and the songs that a trio of narrators will sing between the scenes, so the final estimate for the musical's length is 1 hour and 30 minutes. That's about what we were aiming for, so it looks like things are going well. Last year they discovered at the technical rehearsals that the musical was entirely too long and had to cut a bunch of stuff at the last minute. I'm guessing we won't have to do that this year, though.

Finally, we had closing remarks from the directors and called it a day. We swept the gym and meeting room, packed up the rest of our stuff, and left. In Amy's car, we made our way back down the mountain. We intended to get dinner at Kaiten Sushi (a conveyor belt sushi restaurant), but there were 13 groups ahead of us in line, so we would've had to wait at least an hour. In the end we just stopped at Starbucks so Amy could get some coffee, and Marisa got a little bit of food at a convenience store. They dropped me off at the train station, and I went home by tram. On the way home, I stopped to buy some stationery and heard music from Chuo Koen. It looked like there was an event going on. I think I heard a band playing "Johnny B. Goode". Normally I would've gone to check it out, but it was raining and I was so tired. So I just went home.

Now I'm enjoying the warmth of my apartment and putting off fixing dinner and getting my materials ready for tomorrow. I've got a Jeopardy game to finish putting together. I'm already feeling sore all over, so I'm guessing that tomorrow I will feel just awful. We did dance for about 5 hours today, so it makes sense. All in all, it was a pretty fun weekend. From here on out we'll be rehearsing the dances as well as the acting each weekend. I'm looking forward to getting the Gaga dance figured out and learning the rest of my solos.