Yuki says...

Yuki is one of the dancers from RS Musical. She is 22 years old and wants to pursue a career in musical theater. When we first met she asked me to teach a dance class for her and a few of her students. After spending one day together with a bit of a barrier between our two languages we found out that there was a lot of information I could give her. So we spent the night together, went to the bath house, I taught her a dance class as well as a private lesson from 10-1 and exchanged a ton of information about videos to watch and different styles of dance to look up. She is extremely eager to learn more and more about dance so that she can become a professional somewhere in the world. Presently she is getting her passport so she can come to New York, explore dance, singing and acting and hopefully audition as well. Since her English isn't the best (although it isn't as bad as my Japanese) she promised to spend the next year studying English very hard. Hopefully I will be there next year, or one of my friends, so that she can come and stay for free; showing her the same hospitality her family has shown me.
In this video she talks a little about the work we have done with her and what she has taken from it. check it out!

Here are our new yukata's that the Kondo's bought for Brandon and I. We love them, they are fun and also a lot lighter than I thought they would be...

of course he would...

We are truly excited that the performance is tomorrow, and then RS musical has a performance on the 29th and then...BACK TO NEW YORK!!

YTJ Experience...

This is a video of the dance I choreographed for the students at YTJ (Youth Theater Japan) titled "Free my soul". We literally had 2 and 1/2 hours to learn it...This was taken two days ago and since then we have had one rehearsal and they look great now. Even though some of them are incredibly nervous I am happy to have given them this opportunity to perform. Some of them are not in the show "High School Musical" that is being performed tomorrow so this is their only chance. Also. I was only supposed to use the six dancers that you see featured here in the dance, however because I am stubborn I fought to use everyone equally. I think they are doing a great job...tell me what you think!

Hayama part two...

In the next video he says that he believes this work is important especially for students he has seen living here in Japan. We found that Hayama's daughter (Natsumi) is open and ready as a students and he thinks the reason she's this way is related to her participation in workshops that he has put together before. Unlike so many other Japanese students her age she has been given the chance to express herself constantly either alone or with friends. Hayama talks about Brandon's workshop as well as my workshop and expresses his gratitude for what we are doing here even though we only had four hours with his students.

This workshop opportunity was a step in the right direction as far as putting something together like this in the future. Hayama has been incredibly generous to our group and we are thankful to have come across someone like him and his family. Thank you RS musical, we want to come back!!!

Hayama Says...

After working with the RS Musical kids for only 4 hours we had a chance to interview Hayama San, the coordinator of the workshop for the day. In the video above he talks about what he does for a living.

Two additions to our team...

We've added a few utilities to our site so that your experience will be even more pleasing than we're sure it already is. To the right (as always) are where you'll find the new functions. One is a Search Tool. The other is an RSS feed.

1) The search tool is pretty self explanatory. If you've been using the internet for any amount of time you can work that one out for yourselves. Give it a few days to meet it's full potential, because Google has to "crawl" our blog before the search tool will know to look through every nook and cranny. It's like an electronic game of hide and seek; Google needs to find all of our best hiding spots.

2) The RSS feed is a little less intuitive. Even wikipedia's article might confuse you more on this one. Essentially what it does is allow a user to subscribe to a web-page (mostly blogs or frequently updated material) so that they are notified through a RSS reader or an email of when a particular page is updated. Google has one, as do most internet browsers. The icon to look for looks like this. Hopefully, if you choose to use this option, you won't have to check to see if we've updated. You'll know when we're being lazy... *cough*... I mean busy and when we're diligently working to share our trip with you.

Lastly, a request has been made. Leave comments. Leave them about the posts, about the pictures, about any more crimes Tsukasa has committed. Leave them. We appreciate the personalized emails (keep those coming too), but do help us realize the extent of our support and community. It'll be interesting to see if any dialogue is created in the community, and if there are any questions or requests to expand on certain subjects or events.

As always, we love you.

- us

Dance Dance Dance!!

 

Above is a video of some choreography that the students learned in about 20 minutes. They are talented and quick learners as well as willing which is beautiful. This is a very different way of moving for them, however they were extremely excited to try it out. There are only a few dancers here, but there were 17 in the class. They are musical theater students from the RS Musical group we taught. Watch it and tell me what you think!!