Dance Option's competition on July 18th

Looks like I struck a nerve with some people with my last post! Sandra sweetie, thanks for your support about my line dance competition messes. Received some semi-good news. The Bangi comp which was supposed to be completely cancelled is on again with the proposed 1-day friendly event structure. I can't remember the proposed name for the event but I do know that it has the word 'carnival' in it. Somehow brings to mind circuses and trapeze acts. Anyway I guess our practice is not a total loss as we can still go into this comp to try to win the cash prize to recoup our finances. Hope we win, anyway. The bad news is that there will be no more competitions organised by Bangi in the future. A lot of people are sorely disappointed, I heard especially this talented dancer called Azira. The Bangi comp has only been held in the past 2 years, and for both years Azira won the amateur prize (only eligible to non-instructors, must participate in the maximum number of events in the comp, i.e. 4), and she needs to win the 3rd year running to take home the Equatorial cup. This year doesn't count as a comp, and without anymore competitions in the future, the poor girl cannot take the cup home. I can only imagine how she's feeling. It must be an incredible letdown after gearing herself up for this year. And now because of some screw-up that she's not in control of, she cannot take the cup home which she has been eyeing since the first year she won the amateur prize.

Anyway.... for those who didn't know, there was a latin/ballroom dancing competition on Sunday (July 18th) with a line dance category. My team entered the line dance group category.

The competition was pretty badly organised, with the programme released only on that day itself. We were told registration is from 9am onwards, so two of my teammates and I arrived by 9.20am, only to wait until 10am before a booth was finally set up. The events were split into the day and nighttime events... and our category was ONLY at night! A bit annoyed to find out that we had wasted our time. Deprived us of precious sleep...

So anyway we went home and zzz before coming back by 5pm only to wait around and wonder when our turn would be.

There are only 3 teams in our division (each team had to submit 2 dances). One of the teams had very cheerleader-like routines which would have been good if they had been more polished. Another team was from the PJ dance academy which had an interesting paso doble-style choreography for one dance and another was a dance they had done for last year's Bangi competition.

How did it go? Well... my team thought we did pretty well. We even had someone videotape us while we were dancing and when we watched it afterwards, we thought we looked quite good.
 
And.... we got 2nd placing.

Congrats, you say? Thank you very much!

No, I'm not boasting here. Actually my teammates and I were quite disappointed. To be honest, we thought we had put up a good show and we were aiming for the top prize. And truth be told... we were expecting to get first place. It didn't help that our conceit was fettered by others around us saying that they thought we were the best. To be fair, the winners were also good, but we thought we had given a fair fight.
 
As we went off for dinner afterwards (at 11pm) we talked about it and tried to understand what went wrong and only when our coach joined us later did we find out the truth. And the truth was, we reap what we sow... My coach was quite unhappy with our performance. She told us what we had done wrong, and she said that we deserved the placing that we got. She compared us constantly to the winners (who were from PJ dance academy). We had made no mistakes, no forgotten steps, nothing. Everything was on time. What went wrong was this: the music played was somehow a little slower than what we were used to, and she said that we lost our technique by allowing the music to control us, instead of the other way around. Yes, we were on time, and we followed the beat, but we had lost our sleekness and our sharpness that we had just 2 days ago by falling into the slower tempo of the music. That severely cost us our win.

We hadn't realised the trap we had allowed ourselves to fall into, and my coach was fair enough to accept that. We obviously had a lack of experience to respond to unfamiliar situations, and she told us to learn from this experience. Actually, we had the same problem with one of our earlier shows, and she was quite disappointed that we had not learnt from that experience. I guess we still have a long way more to go.

It was a bitter pill to swallow for all of us. We were on our own high horses, and we took a fall. My coach has never been one to sugar-coat her words, but I'm glad she gives it to us straight because otherwise, we would never learn. It was not a pleasant experience, but this is a good one to remind us our shortcomings and what we need to do to overcome them.

Well... hope for the best for Bangi!

(PS: My coach is having a dance party this Sunday. Anyone interested to come??? I'll be performing then. It's RM48 per head including food. Focus is on dancing though so bring your dancing shoes)