The last blogpost...
The last week working as a fulltime dance teacher for Sport for life was a good ending. I had a hiphop camp Monday to Friday with a final showing for parents. The kids were 4-5y and I had them for 1,5 h per day and to keep their attention and motivation for dancing hip hop the entire time took some good time planning since I never had such a long class for kids below 5 years. But it went very well and finished my year with another challenge completed!
Next day, this is second part of July by the way, I continued to Portugal and Lisbon where I met my beloved family who was there on vacation. It was so good to see them again and spend some quality time and especially my brother that I had not seen since Christmas.
We moved to a resort outside of Cascais which was very beautiful surrounding and tranquil atmosphere and a lot of nice Mediterranean food of course.
Because of having a lot of things to get in order before leaving china, my independent workout got a bit unprioritized (but dance classes I took 😉 and one with a Russian contemporary choreographer was especially great). But arriving there with more time I began my training 2.0 again and felt stronger every day which felt great.
After a little more than a week we returned to Sweden and I ended up being there for approximately 2 weeks. Mostly travelling to nearby cities and meeting family and friends and some more training. Since Portugal, I have done Yoga almost every day and now I can’t stop, It just feels so good. I have always liked it but now my interest has risen to another level.
I think it does not good work for my body, and especially the back, but also helps me keep calm in periods of big transitions in life were it is usually easy for me to get a bit of mental breakdown. So I will continue doing this in the future.
I went online looking for dance jobs, since it was my new goal to get one. I ended up getting one after sending a lot of different dancing clips (instead of audition) in Greece and the Island kos. But I had 1 month “free” so what should I do before that?
2nd week in august I went to Oslo, Norway to join workshops and visit friends. I danced every day for 2,5 week and it was amazing getting back to the dancer body again. When you feel connected to all limbs and a bit sore everywhere and also there, feeling an improvement of your skills every day. I did contact improvisation and improvisation, ballet and jazz and most of them at PRODA. It is a free daily dance training for professional dancer so the level was a bit of chock in the beginning. Especially catching choreography fast. This became easier after a while I it was very good preparation for my awaiting dance job.
Sometime things doesn’t go according to your plan and while I was first supposed to fly out to Greece in end of September I good a request to come out earlier, starting 1st of September. Since It was very last minute, I went back to Sweden for 18h, repacked and watched and rehearsed dances from videoclips to be able to get In the show as fast as possible. I got picked up by the airport and then spent the day rehearsing and next day I started performing on stage again for the first time since over a year and was amazing!
So Here I will be for 2 months and then we will see what happens. I jumped in an entertainment company because one of the dancers had to leave before the ending of the seasons. We are 8 dancers (divided into 2 teams -4 per show) and performing 6 days a week at different nice hotels.
We get hotellbuffé (which is top class!) on every show night so that is awesome but living conditions are not the top… but that’s Greece right.
There are over 80 choreographies in 3 different shows but I am not doing all routines. So far I have 19 and it just gets more so my brain and body needs to work intensively now in the beginning. But it is so much fun dances and I like the travel around the world best with for example kalinka (Russian), river dance from Ireland. But yesterday, in Extravaganza, I did cancan and another one with big wings that was also a lot of fun. Some of the choreographies are not that hard but some are more technical difficult such as 10 foutté pirouettes or tricky hand and arm movements that confuses me but I get by pretty good so far.
This week I am doing the fairytale which has more acrobatic numbers and ballet with amazing props so it will be exciting. The other dancers are really good and basically from ballet backgrounds and has many years of working experience so I really feel like a newbie. But they are all so nice and helpful helping me rehearsing and I like living together with them in the apartment this Austrian company arranged for us.
Tonight my team has a night off so we decided to go to hot springs at Kos around midnight. I Look forward to this and also visit other places here on the island. Of course I have some free time during the days also now so I can swim in the ocean so it feels like the best of all world right now: Dance training, summer vacation, performance!
In the future I would like to come back to the more artsy side and contemporary dance but it is really fun to do some commercial as well.
Thinking back to Shanghai it feels like so long time ago even if it is not even 2 months.
What I miss:
Student and colleges, ZY dance studio, cheap shopping, delicious street food
What I don’t miss:
Pollution, angry and a lot of people, travelling on local transportation, no nature
I am really happy I went to Shanghai because it was an amazing adventure living in another culture and working as dancer teacher. Dancing and travelling are 2 of my greatest passions!
But maybe soon I can be a little bit closer to family… only time will tell.
