よっさこーい♪♪

So I have been doing cool things lately!

By a random and sudden sequence of events, despite the fact that I had decided not to join any clubs and wanted to just study hard and focus on my grades this semester, I joined a dance team at the very end of April called Tokyo Hanabi. The style of dance is known as yosakoi, which is an extremely high energy festival dance usually performed in large groups. Basically, I get to wear a badass costume and play with a fan called sensu or wooden clappers called naruko (no, not Naruto!) and hang out with a bunch of wonderful people.

Everyone on the team has such a fun and upbeat personality and we're all practicing really hard for our first performance on May 25th -- Shounan Yosakoi, in Kanagawa. Unfortunately, I joined the team nearly a month later than all the other newbies so I've been working really hard to catch up with everyone else in order to appear in the festival. We have regular practices Tuesdays and Saturdays from 7~9PM and every other day of the week there is independent practice from 6~10PM... so basically I have been practicing nearly every day since the day that I joined! Hopefully I can learn the routine well enough to perform by the end of this month~

Here's a video of a combined performance by the two yosakoi teams at my school, Tokyo Hanabi and Odori Zamurai, at the Waseda 125th Anniversary last year. (I was actually sitting at the front of the audience during this performance. Little did I know that six months later I would be joining this team! >:O) The dancing doesn't start until about 4:30 into the video so I recommend loading it in your browser and then watching.