Wonder Girls Dance "Tell Me"

Shad Valley UBC 2011 was surely an amazing experience for me, filled with countless surprised and unexpected adventures, including one in which I had to rediscover my dancing abilities!

On the very last day of the 4-week program in Vancouver, some Shads (that's what we call ourselves) were responsible for organizing an "Open House" event in which parents, families and friends would come to our campus and see our House Projects (more on that in the next post). In the afternoon, there would be a "talent show" kind of performance by anyone who wanted to show off his or her artistic talents.

Two weeks prior to the event, I somehow felt the urge to actually participate in this event, along with 4 other Shad girls. Normally at school I would never even think about auditioning for any type of show but the Shad environment was undoubtedly so different - to the point where all the stage frights, self-humilation, and lack of artistic talent were not for a second taken into consideration. I felt that the 51 Shads and a dozen or so Shad Staffs were really family and that I was more than comfortable to be surrounded by them, regardless of the situation.

As a result, the 5 of us, formed the girl dance group called "Shad Girls" (inspired by Wonder Girls) and decided to learn how to dance to Wonder Girls' "Tell Me" song. Thankfully there were two Korean girls in our group who were naturally talented in kpop dancing and quickly learned the dance in segments. The two girls, Eunsu and Lisa, then taught the rest of us (me, Rose and Lily) the dance moves beat by beat. We practised tirelessly for 5 nights straight, with each rehearsal lasting for 2 hours. Moreover, the rehearsals were done after 10 pm each day since our program schedule was packed with activities from 8:30am-10pm almost every single day. However, bit by bit, we slowly learned the entire dance and was able to put on a show as an entire group.

The Shad Girls(from left to right): Lisa, Lily, me, Rose, Eunsu

Here is our dance uploaded to Youtube (try not to laugh, haha). The pink one is me, if you can't tell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RuEDoh7Hbw

Although we were far from perfecting our moves and our stage line-ups, we were all really proud of ourselves at the end of the day, to have finally been able to put this together in a week's time. Before our grand performance on the Open House day, we reassured each other that no matter how badly the performance goes, we are going to have fun on stage. In fact, that's all it mattered.

Aaron and Jab doing the Dougie with us at one of our first casual performances

Some of our fellow Shads were quite jealous of how much fun we were having on stage and so they jumped right up and joined us in the last 30 seconds of the show. The sight of seeing the 5 of us practising on our own was so ubiquitous that practically everyone picked up a move or two!