Welcome Back! New Contract, New Adventures!

hey all!
So I am so happy to announce that I've been blessed to receive another performance contract that will take me to brand new places! This time...Toronto, Ontario Canada, Los Angeles California, and various places along the coast of the Mexican Riviera with the Disney Wonder Cruise Ship. With this new adventure, and with my limited means of communication (text and skype only in toronto...e-mail only while on the ship), I figured I'd bring back my China Blog and re-vamp it a bit to keep you all updated if you're curious about my new life!


Sooo....


I guess I'll dive right in!


We arrived in Toronto last Friday afternoon, after a delayed flight at La Guardia, during which I was able to chat with two of my future castmates, Christina and David - both lovely fellow New Yorkers. Upon arrival at our apartment complex, The Rosemont, we checked into our rooms (I got a sweet, well-lit little studio). Friday involved an initial paperwork meeting, a mini exploration of Toronto to find pizza, and then a brief little mixer in the party room to get to meet a handful of us. Then it was off to bed for me...I was beat.


Sat AM:  
First rehearsal! Met our director, Phillip, our stage manager, Michael, and everybody else we would be working with for the next 2-8 months. Introduced ourselves, and our pre-assigned characters...I guess here is where I should mention that I'll be playing Cinderella in the Disney Dreams show, Cruella De Vil in The Golden Mickey's, and Bo Peep (after later auditions) in Toy Story.  

Next we had our dance placement evaluation....alllllllways my favorite part (ugh)...but despite my nerves, it went fine (:


From there we had our Spanish Web training which has been the best part of this process, thus far! It's essential an aerial circus skill where you climb a rope about 20 feet up, attach your wrist to a small loop at the top, at which point you can hang freely. At the base of the rope is a "web setter". This person spins the rope at the bottom which allows the performer at the top to spin at various speeds, integrating dance poses while spinning. We all were encouraged to do it, regardless of our performance tracks. Getting up was terrifying, but the cast was all really supportive of everyone, and once we were up, in the wrist strap and spinning, it was just freaking awesome. No other words. haha I was literally flying. And watching everyone else do it - it is just a beautiful, beautiful art! The spanish web is used in the Tarzan segment of Golden Mickey's....here's a clip from the show so you can get a better idea as to what i'm talking about. Between 1:12 and 1:40, you can see essentially what we experimented with on Saturday. And yes! We actually looked like that (:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRT6AAMa8c8


After web, we had our lunch break and then came back for our understudy tracking auditions. Basically all the mainstage performer girls, bout 7 of us, got together with our music director, Lona, to go over all of the princess music in Disney Dreams. Shot me right back to 7 years old, playing in the basement of my Gram's house with cousins, Jack and Pete, and Ah-ah-ahing at the top of my lungs, pretending to be Ariel. hahaha it was literally a dream come true! We each got be Ariel, Cinderella, and Belle....I've never felt more giddy and girly hahaha. We princessed around for a couple hours and then our day was done.


From there a handful of us headed to the gym to begin our first Insanity Workout. Luckily, David came uber prepared to the contract with the entire collection of P90X, Insanity, and any other dvd workout program you could imagine. We have since appointed him our cast "trainer". Anyway...took our first fitness test of insanity. died. went to bed. end of story.


Sunday? Our day of rest (: Not much to note about this day other than much sleep, reading, and television watching was had by all. 3 things that are completely alien to my lifestyle. So yes. It was quite a nice day.


Monday AM: More of the same as Saturday, as we still had Golden Mickeys, the Welcome Aboard Show, and Toy Story to cast and run understudy tracking for. More princessing was had and some reading auditions for Toy Story and the Welcome show....My age and height (particularly in these shows) brought about some new characters for me to be introduced to and considered for...ie. the "Mom" characters. It's a strange type to wrap my fingers around but it was new and fun!


Monday night brought our second day of Insanity. Over the course of our day off, we had adopted about half of the cast, if not more, into our workout program. Because of this, we asked to use one of our rehearsal spaces to accommodate our size increase, and David, once again, our fearless leader, led our workout. Rough, but do-able. Get ready...I'm gonna be the most ripped Cinderella you've ever seen by the end of this ride. WOOOOOOOOOOO!




Phew. Sorry to have written you all a novel. I promise that will be the longest one. I'll try to update regularly and only on the really cool things, so as not to overload on the info (: