OK, I think I've finally recovered enough from dance camp to blog about it. Since I made so much of a fuss about performing at the event in my last couple of posts, I'll address that first and get it over with - I didn't. I was scheduled to perform at the student show Sunday, which was supposed to take place from 8:30-9:30 p.m. But after two days with little sleep, a headache began to set in Sunday afternoon - not one of my more severe ones, but a headache nonetheless, and the kind that only goes away with sleep. OK, I thought, I'll perform and then turn in fairly early and sleep it off. But then the show organizers decided to move the student performances to the end of the show, after the instructors performed, meaning we wouldn't start going on until after midnight. So at that point I decided not to go on - I knew I wouldn't last until then, and besides, who wants to go on after some top-notch professionals had already wowed the audience?
As far as the camp itself - the instructors were awesome. I'll just mention two here because it was my first encounter with each and I enjoyed their classes the most - and they're about as far apart on the dance spectrum as you can get: Lee Ali (who taught traditional Moroccan trance dances and Greek folk dance) and Darshan (who taught tribal fusion and ATS). There was "old school" (Egyptian and Turkish) and "new school" (Indian fusion and flamenco fusion). And the evening performances were great - live music with open dancing, followed by some amazing performances by the instructors and others.
And then there were the accommodations ...
Now, I'm not one for "roughing it," but even so, this was probably the worst campsite I've been to in my four trips to dance camp. Start with a musty, dusty cabin where the windows wouldn't open, meaning you had to keep the screen-less doors open in order to get any air, bathroom stalls built on a scale for small children, and no privacy in the shower area. Add to that the main building used for dance classes that gave off a stench when it was first opened on Saturday (it improved after they opened all the doors) and with a floor covered with some kind of artificial-turf-like rubber that was painful to dance on barefoot; terrible food served in a musty, dusty dining hall that had birds flying around in it; and the fact that we had to actually share this "paradise" with a youth camp; and even some of the most enthusiastic camping-types were grumbling. It seemed that a number of corners were cut in order to keep the fee down to $375, but my friends and I agreed that we would gladly pay up to $500 for better accommodations. As it is, I wouldn't go back to that campsite again, unless the made some big changes.
So I had fun at dance camp, and I didn't have fun at dance camp. I guess I just have to learn to take the bad with the good.
