JAPANEXILE

I won’t bother apologising for this one, just get straight into it. If you recall (put link) Craig and I are regular members of the Toya Yosakoi dance team. Practicing for two hours every Monday and Friday. All our practice was finally put to the test at the end of November for our debut performance at the Sogo Centre for the Toya Culture festival happened. We had spent pretty much every opportunity available practicing in the week running up the big day. After all, when you are doing synchronized dancing mistakes are pretty obvious. And horrendously obvious there were. Seemingly I don’t do well under pressure, within seconds of coming on stage I was sweating more than a (insert analogy here). Amazingly I managed to make a mistake within the first two seconds whilst we were in our tight packed triangle formation, and being twice as tall as the girl in front of me it was a clearly visible mistake. Mercifully things picked up a bit from here, I looked mortified the entire time, but at least I managed to get through without any more terrible mistakes. Watching the video afterwards was painful anyway, more practice is definitely needed. I would post the video if I weren’t so deeply ashamed. And in all seriousness it may as well have been filmed by a blind drunkard, its that good, Spielberg would be proud. The next performance was to be at the “200days before the G8″ festival on December 20th. Which, joy of joys, my parents would be able to watch. (Was that sarcasm? Even I’m not sure)

The so called festival was held in a much larger exhibition centre over in Toya-onsen. It was a pretty big event, with quite a few local politicians and important people coming along. They were aiming for 1000 people to come and watch, I have no idea how many actually came, it seemed pretty full, but I dared not look at the crowd for fear of making a mistake. Waiting back stage was horrible, the sweats had already started and I hadn’t even got going yet. But the time came and in all honesty it went pretty well I think. Didn’t make any big mistakes, which is always a plus. My mortified look was still a problem, the only time I smiled was when I heard Craig crash into the lights and the back of the stage! Hopefully it was made up for with the crazy hair and makeup. For the first performance Craig and I had quite literally rolled out of bed and come up to the centre, where we found everyone else had made themselves up rather coolly. So we vowed to make an effort this time. With my quite long hair that was easy enough, at first anyway, no-matter how much wax I used it would not stay up for long. Looked cool regardless. So mission accomplished. Next time is going to be extravagant. Mum and Dad seemed quite impressed at the after party in the glamorous Guten Tag, I wonder if they had the same reaction I did when I first saw Yosakoi in action, as in “My God that looks cool!” Onishi-san (guy with the awesome beard) made a video or parts of the performance, and I’m sure a full video must exist somewhere. Just have to find it!

Yosakoi has again moved on however, the day we got back from Tokyo an instructor from a dance school in Sapporo came to Toya for an all day session on our new dance. The parts I was there for seem doable. Unfortunately I missed the first session so the beginning escaped me a bit, completely. It probably didn’t help that I was not remotely in the mood for dance practice. Having just got back from Tokyo I was in much need of a good sleep and Xbox session – the effect of staying up reading a book about a video game. Thankfully I got my fix and finished the game last night after a marathon session