23 September 2019 – 29 September 2019
- 3rd dance class for X1’s “Flash”
Photo Credit: Soompi
As promised during last week’s blog update, I would work on my moves so on the Sunday before the dance class for this week, Jun and I arranged our own dance practice session.
We had a really great time and I was happy that I managed to clear up some of my confusion regarding the steps (Jun helped me a lot!). Here are some photos I took during our practice session:
Yes! We had the whole dance studio to ourselves!:)
A pre-dance workout selfie. We were exhausted by the end of the practice:(
On Wednesday (the day of our dance class), we started the class off by going through a few runs of the whole song to recap all the steps we have learnt. Also, I think our instructor probably wanted to test how much we remembered from all the steps she had taught us for the past two weeks.
Another photo taken before the dance class.
Luckily, we both did our homework! I was really worried about not remembering the steps so imagine how glad I was when my steps flowed naturally while I was doing the runs. In fact, I think I did most of the steps quite nicely so our practice truly paid off! *Clap Clap Clap*. I am sure our instructor could see our effort and we passed the test.
This whole process took up the first half an hour of the lesson and for the next one hour of the class, we spent time coming up with our formations to prepare for our last lesson the following week. Now that we got the moves down, our instructor got us to start by watching X1’s dance practice video to pick a favourite member (and presumably to follow his steps for our final dance practice) as well as to see how each of them executes the steps so that we can improve our performance of them.
This is the dance practice video we watched:
After watching the video, Jun suggested that instead of doing complex formations that involve us moving around a lot, we could just do mirror versions of the dance, meaning one person will dance the moves for the left side and the other person will do the ones for the right. Since we only have three people doing the dance, we could not do the intricate position changes anyway so we all thought it was a good idea.
So the rest of the time was spent learning the opening part of the song, which was forty seconds long. I had some trouble doing this part and kept making mistakes because even though the moves were not complicated, it was difficult to coordinate the timing and making sure that I was moving my hands and feet on the correct side (I was doing the moves for the left side).
Furthermore, Jun and I had to learn a partner dance that will come in during the later part of the dance. It felt a little awkward and weird but we had fun with that too. This was the most memorable part of this week’s dance class for me so I decided to name this week’s update with something related. Since the title of the update had to be something related to NU’EST as well, I thought of naming it “Daybreak” because the song is a duet by two of the NU’EST members, JR and Minhyun. It is an interesting song because these two members cannot have voice qualities that are more distinct from each other. JR has a deep baritone voice when he raps while Minhyun sings in such a smooth and soft voice that it sounds like honey in your ears. Despite their different voice qualities, their voices mesh so well together that sometimes you cannot tell when one ends and the other begins. I felt that the song perfectly captures the essence of a partner dance because while both Jun and I may not work well together at first, each of us brings a part of the dance with us in our own distinctive styles to make up a better whole when we move together in time with the music.
After struggling for some time, we finally got the hang of it and while it was not perfect, we were all quite proud of our final run that day:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hva9qeye70vp41k/WhatsApp%20Video%202019-09-26%20at%2003.05.13.mp4?dl=0
Nearing the end of the class, our instructor asked us to think about what colours to wear for next week’s class. Apparently, she will try to colour coordinate for all her classes when it is the last lesson. She said we could look at X1’s stage outfits for inspiration and we were both excited to go do our research before the next class. Having said that, I was also a little sad that it is going to be our last class soon because I really enjoyed going back to dancing after a while. Seeing that our piece is finally stitching together as we learnt the transitions that had previously been missing is a bittersweet feeling. I guess I will just have to treasure the short amount of time I have left with this dancing project of mine and I sincerely hope that we will be able to give an awesome performance next week.
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