Week 5: Overcome

16 September 2019 – 22 September 2019

• Second dance class for X1’s “Flash”

For this week, I attended the second lesson of X1’s “Flash” dance class at Studio De S. More of the choreography was taught and things are getting a lot more challenging but as mentioned in the previous project update, I am prepared to work hard to master the choreography. To reflect this determination and remind myself to remain motivated till the end, this week’s blog post is titled, “Overcome”, after the name of the title track for NU’EST’s fourth mini album. 

As usual, my friend, Jun, accompanied me to the dance class and it was just the two of us in the class that day as the third student could not make it. We started with the usual warm-ups and recapped last week’s choreography at eighty percent of the normal speed. I was quite glad that I had been a good student and made an effort to practise last week’s steps on my own prior to the class. As a result, both Jun and I were able to follow the steps of our dance instructor, Kei. I was really proud of us when she nodded her approval and moved on to teaching us the other parts of the choreography.

However, this was when things started getting a bit harder because there are now more steps to remember. At this point, I would like to mention that actually the moves for X1’s “Flash” are relatively easy to follow compared to the dances I have done in the past but the challenge lies in doing the moves powerfully and precisely when the song is at full speed. 

After learning the new steps, we tried practicing the moves together with the music while linking the steps from the previous week. Although I made some mistakes, I could follow most of the steps and I was glad that I was able to do that even though the steps were newly taught to me. Memorising steps have always been the toughest part about dancing for me so I was particularly happy when I did not embarrass myself too much by messing up the moves. 

Since we had mostly been practicing the song at eighty percent of the original speed, Kei then got us to try dancing at a hundred percent of the full speed. When we first heard the original speed of the song, both Jun and I were shocked because it felt like the normal speed of the song was just like the two times faster speed of other K-pop dances. This was when I acutely felt how talented the members of X1 are for being able to pull off such a fast song.

Nonetheless, we tried dancing at full speed for a few times. In fact, we both worked so hard that we were even practicing during our water breaks. This is a link to the video with our final run that day:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ocn4wbch8kc6f7c/WhatsApp%20Video%202019-09-20%20at%2008.29.50.mp4?dl=0

Unfortunately, I felt that the video does not do justice to our hard work. I think we were both tired from having to kneel down and stand up for the floor work in the dance such that our final run did not look as clean as I would have liked.

Yet, practice makes perfect so I am glad that through this lesson, I realised that I need to work more on my stamina and brush up on my steps. I will work on this before the next lesson and as usual I will post my progress on this blog. Despite the difficulties, I will stay true to my original intention of rising up to the challenge and eventually ‘overcome’.