Our dancers are heading to Nationals!

We didn’t think we would make it to Regionals at all when we went into Lockdown 2 days before the original date - but we finally did and we had the best day! This week 27 of our dancers and Whaea Brie headed out to the Lower Hutt Events Centre for a day of dance. It worked perfectly that the event could be held with numbers under 100 and we were so excited when DanceNZMade was suddenly back on.

Throughout the day, dancers took part in workshops in commercial dance, lyrical and jazz, as well as rehearsing their performance piece on stage. In the evening we moved into competition mode. This year we had an amazing 8 troupes, 9 soloists and 4 trios compete. Our dancers all performed beautifully and looked amazing. Their performances were such a testament to all the hard work they have put in this year. Our students worked collaboratively, alongside Whaea Brie to choreograph their team dances, and our soloists and duos choreographed their work independently. It’s amazing to see the fantastic learning and confidence that our students have developed through this process, and with such a strong year 7 team already we can’t wait to see what next year brings.

A massive congratulations to the Lyrical A Troupe with their performance of Tua who took out the Year 7 and 8 Teams category, and to the Hip Hop Troupe with That’s My Girl and the Ballet Troupe with Lake Ballet who placed first runner up and second runner up respectively. Lyrical A even came third of all teams overall on the night! Both Lyrical A and Hip Hop will have the opportunity to represent Newlands Intermediate at Nationals.

After awesome success at the teams event we had, we went on to more success at Solos and Duos. Congratulations to Charlotte Brown who won the year 7 solos, Lucy Foy who was 1st Runner Up, and Nicole Sugarman who was 2nd runner up. All three year 7s performed so well they were awarded nominations to Nationals - this is notoriously hard to achieve so three students is amazing! Congratulations to Charlotte Kraiger who won the year 8 solo, and to Aanya Gupta and Alex Hoult who won the year 7 and 8 duos. A further congratulations to Aanya Gupta, Nicole Sugarman and Lucy Foy who were awarded Gold Tickets - entry to the Gold Scholarship Awards.

At the end of the day, our biggest success wasn’t all the awards though, it was getting to do what we loved - to perform and to dance and to be on stage, and we feel very lucky that we were able to attend.