Dance Life

DANCE LIFE UNITE

We are off to the Nationals in Sydney!

On Friday, June 14, the Mount Eliza Secondary College dance team competed in a National Dance Competition called Dance Life Unite, held at Xavier College in Kew. Every Wednesday for the past three months we have stayed back after school in preparation for the competition. Ms Manning choreographed an amazing contemporary routine for us called "So Cold", which was an elegant piece that required a lot of emotion. We were also lucky enough to have one of Ms Manning’s previous dance students, Mikayla, and two year nine students, Lotte Waters and Ella Pascoe, help us with our dance as well.

At the start of the year, many of us were really keen to get a dance team up and running, we are so lucky that Ms Manning decided to come to MESC, because she is now our dance teacher. Ms Manning has been an amazing mentor and taught us about technique, artistry (emotion), synchronisation and even provided us with beautiful costumes.   We were lucky enough to visit Berwick Secondary College (Ms Manning’s previous school) to do a dance workshop with their school dance academy and watch each other’s dances. After seeing Berwick’s dance, we knew that the competition was going to be tough, but we held our heads high and gave it our best shot. Before we performed, some of us were so nervous, but once we were on stage, we gained courage and danced our contemporary piece like we never had before.

When the awards were announced, we were very happy to find out that we had placed 5th. Once we read our report with our feedback and scores, Ms Manning told us some very exciting news that we will be going to nationals as we had scored over 80 points. We were so stoked that we screamed so loud people in the foyer could hear us! Nobody could believe we made it to nationals on our first ever competition!

 We have come so far as a team in such little time, from most of us never having danced before, to getting to the nationals and putting together a competition routine. We are all very excited to go to nationals in Sydney in the September school holidays where we will perform our routine against dancers from all over Australia! In the next few months we will be doing lots of fundraising and hard work for the big competition. Thank you to Ms Manning, Mikayla, Lotte and Ella for giving up their own time to help our dance team. Without them, none of this would have been possible. Dance Life Unite was a great experience, and we cannot wait to represent the college in further competitions.  By Jess Leatch.