SARI in Sydney

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, but at least the two weeks I spent in Townsville for work helped me finally get better.  June was pretty much a write off for work due to being sick the whole month!  Townsville was great - average temp of mid 20s, was paid to do some fun Angry Birds promo work, plus got to catch up with my sis for her birthday!!  The worst part of the trip however was the 2 hour flight delay back to Brisbane.  Those that have travelled from Townsville will know there aren't many flights out, and when someone else is paying they are always going to choose the cheapest option.  This meant a 9.30pm flight became an 11.30pm flight, making my arrival in Brisbane at 1.30am in the morning!  Now that wouldn't have been too bad if I could've just gone home and slept the rest of the day, but I had to be back at the airport at 6am to fly to Sydney with my dance troupe, SARI.  So after barely 3hrs sleep, I was back to the airport with a refreshed suitcase, and an air of excitement to participate in our first big competition!

Sydney was great, and actually wasn't as cold as I thought it would be and there was only scatterings of rain.  We arrived about 9am and headed straight to a dance studio so we could workshop our two songs we had prepared - one was our own choice, and the other a judges choice song.  As I hadn't seen the others for a few weeks, this was the first chance I had to actually rehearse it with them.  We were quite excited about our final routines, and headed to the hotel about lunchtime so we could relax and freshen up before heading to the competition venue at 4pm.

This was the first big Indian dance competition we had entered, and whilst I still don't think we needed to be at the venue so early, I was impressed that it was the first Indian event we had attended in 6 years that actually ran spot on time!!   The event didn't start until 6pm and we were asked to be there at 4pm supposedly for a sound check and were also informed we'd be able to change / rehearse at the venue.  However the sound check was just someone asking me if 'this' was our music (which they played on ipod for 15sec) and then we we told to change and sit in a large 'green' room whilst we wait to go on.  There was no room / space to rehearse, so we were glad we had spent the morning rehearsing!  So in my opinion we could've arrived at 5pm and still been ready to go on by 6pm.. (and the extra hour would've meant I might've been able to have more of a nap!)..  Anyway, it did run on time, and was otherwise well organised.  It was also great to meet some other performers from around the country!

We went onstage and did our 'own choice' song - which we were happy with, but apparently it didn't impress all the judges.  Comments were made about our costume not being traditional - but we weren't dancing to a traditional song, so it would've looked out of place.  I found this surprising as there were other groups / solo dancers also wearing 'western' style dance costumes, but some of them got through to the next round.  Mind you, some of those dance performances were quite good too.  Our hopes were to at least get through to the next round so we could do our 'judges choice' song, but sadly this didn't happen.  We left tired and disappointed, but happy to have been able to be part of a fun night.

Anyway, I'm now back home and have been having fun doing some different jobs - the past few days I've been a brand ambassador for a new mobile phone; today I worked on the registration desk / events team for a financial planners conference; and tomorrow I will be doing some demo/sampling of a popular brand of butter.  I also had an audition yesterday for a short film; have 2 more auditions tomorrow for more short films, and possibly one more later in the week - so am hoping to be doing more film work very soon as I've lucked out with the past few films I was hoping to do due to date clashes with work or other events.. so fingers crossed for me, and I'll check in later and let you know how things are going!

Oh, and if you're on Facebook, I now have a public page - so you can follow me on there also.  You'll find the link in the right menu bar on here!  :)