Palatsi Course, Day 2

I woke up today feeling like I had forgotten at least half of the choreography we learned yesterday. I mean, if I have to wake up at 7.30 (like today) it takes me at least two hours to be even able to walk and think at the same time. Well, luckily we didn't jump to that scary dance routine right away because we warmed up first. We took a look at the basic steps of mambo and salsa for the West Side Story dace routine we'd be doing later on this week and it was really fun, loosened up even my anti-morning body. Brought back memories from a dance course back in high school! (Finns who are reading this, I'm talking about the course for Wanhojen tanssit!)

Vocal warmups were pretty much the same as yesterday, but after that we got to work on some stage rage (is that a real, established term? It should be, it sounds good!) and it was really hysterical! This too was in preparation for the upcoming West Side Story Mambo number where we'll be split into two "teams" who are competing against each other. Basically we just ran around the stage building up RAGE and then we'd shout it all out. The only downside to this awesomeness was that right after that, we started to rehearse Good Morning Baltimore and everyone's voices were hoarse from shouting... But we still managed to sing and dance okay. The teacher decided that some of us, with higher voices, would do harmonizing in this number. I've never sung harmonies before, so this was really great and exciting.

After lunch, we had free time to rehearse independently whatever we wanted while a couple of people worked on a scene with the teachers. So some people worked on the two choreographies we had now learned, others were going through their lines, and I tried to write my monologue... and failed. Total writer's block. Luckily it didn't matter that much, we just worked on the scene without my bit for now. And as I stayed behind when the day's work was officially done, the acting teacher gave me some more ideas about what I could put into the monologue and that really helped. Oh, there was one thing I forgot to mention about yesterday! I sort of stayed behind that day too and got to see the room where they keep all the costumes, which was incredibly cool! There was this one little black top hat that I was really itching to grab with me...

So another day is done now. I'm trying to get that monologue ready for tomorrow and really looking forward to when I get to work with I'm Not That Girl from Wicked. Before the course began we were given a couple of songs to choose from which we'd be doing in smaller groups and I chose that one, we haven't done anything with it today but maybe... tomorrow?

The interior of Palatsi! The stage looks a bit different now than in the picture,  here you can't see the balconies and the stairs. But you can see it's quite a special-looking little theatre!