WDFKP

I know that most of you are wondering what that acronym stands for, no it’s not some sort of slang. It actually stands for the Will Dance For Kids Project. This is a competition put on by the Utah Food Bank, where all of the proceeds go to feeding impoverished families. Park City Dance has gone to this competition for as long as I can remember. This is one of my favorite competitions, because I love the venue. This competition is at Taylorsville High School in Salt Lake.

Practicing my solo in the dressing room.

This year, I competed four dances: jazz, tap, ballet, and my solo. My solo was contemporary and was choreographed by Michelle Player, who also choreographed my jazz dance. I performed my solo Friday night and the rest of my dances throughout nine hours on Saturday. For all of you non-dancers, there are four main ranks for dances: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. At certain competitions, there are eight ranks: bronze, hi-bronze, silver, hi-silver, gold, hi-gold, platinum, and ultimate platinum. WDFKP is not one of those. For my solo, I got a gold, but I was a point and a half from getting platinum.

The first dance that we did on Saturday was tap. Our tap dance is to “Happy” by C2C. In the dance, we are all depressed until my friend, Savannah, possesses us and makes us happy. We competed in the advanced teen tap category. We were the only ones in our category, so we won by default with a gold. However, the top 30% of the entire teen advanced category was recognized. since there were over twenty dances in teen advanced, there were seven dances in the top 30%, “Happy” got number five. The funny thing was that no one, except for responsible Faith, was at awards because we had to get ready for our jazz dance right afterwards... and no one knew that awards were happening.

From left: Ali, Lucie, Mikelle, me, and Taylor right before tap.
Photo creds to Mikelle

The next dance we had was “Seven Nation Army,” our jazz dance. It was to a bluesy cover by Haley Reinhart and Post Modern Jukebox. This is one of my favorite dances that I have ever done because of the choreography. The dance is army themed (of course) and super sassy. It was choreographed by Michelle Player, the same lady that did my solo. Michelle has been my teacher for a while now and she is practically my mom. The dance did pretty good, but it could have been better. 

The last dance that we did that night was a ballet piece called “Waltz of the Hours”. It was repertoire from the ballet Coppelia. The dance was rather difficult because it was on pointe. There was also a ton of girls in this dance because a ton of girls are needed. That made it difficult to clean and revise because every girl had issues with different sections. The dance was kind of a disaster. One of the girls lost a part of her costume, so she had to buy a tank top of the same color and strategically pin it to look like the others. We were all stressed out after the tank top incident, so when we got on stage, most of us forgot changes that we made in class that week. We were all very surprised when the dance got gold at awards.

Over all, it was a pretty successful weekend. I always have a ton of fun at competitions. The next big dance-related event that is happening is in April. Part of the studio gets to dance in a parade at Disneyland! I’ll keep you guys updated on rehearsals and when the big day comes. The quote for this week is from C.S. Lewis “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” See ya later.

~Rachael