Oberlin Blogs

A bit of my weekend...

November 19, 2008

Zoe McLaughlin ’11

I spent most of my time last week trying to memorize a dance for the International Festival, which was held on Saturday. Since last year, I've been learning Bharatanatyam, a form of dance from Southern India. What started as an ExCo has since changed into a very small dance class. We got asked to perform anyway, and through an interesting series of mishaps, wound up having to prepare a dance in about two weeks. But that's fun, right? (Well, looking back on it, maybe.)

The festival itself turned out to be a huge success. I had planned on eating something there before dealing with makeup and costumes, but I actually managed only to eat a little bit of rice. There was food offered from many different countries, and it all looked really good, but the room was packed. I didn't have time to stand in line, watch other performances, and do eye makeup which--trust me--takes a long time.

The dance, despite my worries about the little time we'd had to actually practice it, went fine. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good, especially compared to how it had been a week before.

And even better, after I danced, I could relax and enjoy the rest of the evening, which included a really interesting, if slightly scary, Aikido demonstration (those people fell hard), impromptu African dancing, and balloon popping that allegedly was helping to clean up (I jumped every time).

Some of the awesome people who came, most of whom I met at the festival

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