At the end of term 2, 37 keen dancers started working on our dance troupes. These dancers came to an audition in term 1 which was a decider for who was in each troupe. After the teams had been arranged the dance troupes started practising and preparing for the competition. They were working hard on these dances until it was time to perform them!

We had to arrive at school bright and early at 7:45am in case of traffic. The drive there was really fun because you were with your friends and buzzing with excitement about the day ahead. When we arrived, we put all our bags into a small corner where they would be staying all day. At the start of the dance day, we had a warm-up with Dean - The creator of DanceNZMade - at 9:30, this went until 10:00. This was so we didn't injure ourselves with all the workshops we would be doing throughout the day.

Our First workshop was with Emma *This is where we learnt a small bit of jazz choreography and practised it until it was good enough to be performed in front of the choreographer. In workshops like this, the goal is not to get the choreo perfect, but to express emotion and just have fun with it; this is really what they are looking for. Every now and then Emma would come around and tap you on the shoulder. This meant that you could potentially grab yourself a chance at a golden ticket. At prize giving if you got tapped more than twice, you would score yourself a golden ticket! Then later on in the year you get to spend a whole day in Palmerston North full of dance.

After the first workshop, we got to chill out for around 1 hour and 15 minutes. Most people in our troupes went to the cafe and got either hot chips or/and ice cream. This was kind of like a break while the older kids were dancing. While the older workshops were going on we played games, like monopoly deal and snap ect.

After some of the workshops, we had a lesson for learning the finale dance. This we would perform to the audience after the show. The dance was pretty interesting and we had a lot of fun trying to channel the choreography. This dance was one of the longest dances and probably the most complicated.

At around 6:00pm it was show time. Overall, I think all the dances performed exceptionally well! It was such a fun experience and one of our troupes actually made it into nationals! Unfortunately, we couldn't go because it was at an inconvenient time for our school dancers. We would definitely do it again next year!

A big congratulations to Kinetix Team who placed 2nd and Noctis Team who placed 3rd in the Year 7/8 Competition. Also a big congrats to the following students who placed with their solos, duos and trios the night before:

2nd Place Year 7 & 8 Duos/Trios - Sarayu Gangavarapu, Samiksha Singh and Ananyaa Ghai

3rd Place Year 7 & 8 Duo/Trios - Neve Taylor and Lucy Patience

1st Place Year 8 Solo and a nomination to Nationals - Jade Tufele

3rd Place Year 8 Solo - Neve Taylor