#244 - 24/7 live

sunday night i went to my last 24/7 dance production. my youngest cousin is graduating high school this year so she's the last one to go and watch. it's actually been a pretty cool experience going to watch the two of them dance. when they were little they were in a real cutsey-type of dance school so they did cute kinda of dances for the grandmas and parents, but when they got older they joined 24/7 danceforce and man that has been an eye-opening experience.

first of all, those 24/7 people seriously just dance all day every day. that's like their lives, completely, i don't know how my cousins balanced that and high school, but i give them credit because they kept both up pretty well. secondly, 24/7 is much less for the grandparents and much more a "contemporary" dance kinda thing... meaning the guys dance like girls, the girls bare skin, and the guys bare even more skin. it's gross. like sometimes they don't have enough background girl dancers (or something, maybe the guys just like to dance the girl parts) so they have one or two guys dress up like girls and dance the same way, it's so distracting.

i mean, i actually do like it when the guys dance like guys, like the hip-hop stuff is cool and the b-boy stuff is damn cool, but unfortunately that's way more the exception rather than the rule. which is too bad, because they do the hip-hop stuff really well, but they LOVE to do those contemporary dances, y'know, the kind where they dance twice as fast as the music, like they look all spastic dancing to slow songs, that kind.

one thing i gotta hand to them though, even though it's super gay, it's a damn production! music, lights, video, group choreography, even transitions between numbers, everything is pretty awesomely put together. this time they had a live band and live singers instead of taped music, a cool idea, and even more surprisingly the band and singers (most of them) were pretty darn good too.

anyway, it's an eye opening experience for sure. it's just a totally different crowd from what i'm used to. i mean, growing up a school-teacher's kid, and having a whole bunch of school-teacher kids as friends, and now working around nothing but school-teachers has given me a pretty naive and nerdy social network, so going to something like this totally lets me see a different group of people. a super gay different group of people, but fun nonetheless. i mean, where else can i go watch my cousin dance (pretty awesomely i might add) and also see about 5 guys with mohawk-mullets just walking around during intermission? seriously, their hair was like a foot tall at least, it was awesome (in a very creepy way). also, i don't see any of those school-teachery type of girls either, they're a more trendy type of girls that i don't get to meet often (except you have to be careful because they're probably all in high school, haha). plus, just sitting around outside the theater waiting for my cousin to come out to give her a lei is entertaining in itself... the number 1 thing over-heard at the 24/7 performance:

"you did so good, you weren't just a backstreet boy, you were nsync!"

haha, a different experience, for sure.