Hell Week

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the infamous show choir "hell week". This is the week before our first competition, traditionally held at Linn-Mar. This week is to make sure we are prepared to compete and do our best. It is especially important this year. There are 12 groups competing at Linn-Mar that typically make it into finals. There are only 7 spots in finals. Therefore, there is a pretty great chance that we may not even make it into finals. I can’t think of any year that Happiness did not make finals. There’s a lot of pressure from alumni as well to do well because last year Happiness placed second after finals at Linn-Mar. They all say we have a reputation to uphold. It’s going to be a pretty stressful week.

Our planned schedule for the week goes as followed. Monday we are planning on starting practice at 6:30 until whenever we're done. This could mean we end practice around 11 or later. Tuesday we're planning on the same schedule. That's two nights in a row we'll have a close to a 5 hour practice. Then on Wednesday, our choreographer is coming to clean and give us pointers from 3:30 to 6 before our dessert concert on Thursday. The dessert concert is a concert in which all three show choirs, Chanteurs, Protégé, and Happiness, perform their 20 minute long show after the jazz choir, Moonlight, performs a couple of their songs. The dessert concert is a great way for alumni and family and friends to see the shows without following us around to different schools. It makes it easier for everyone. It’s also a great dress rehearsal for the choirs to run the whole show in front of an audience without the judges and get some feed back. Thursday night we have been instructed that we get 10 minutes to go say hi to family and everyone and let them tell us how good we were, and then we are expected to be back on the stage. There, our director will promptly tell us all of the things we did wrong and how to fix them. We will spend as much time as we need to after this to go over all of the mistakes he spotted until we get them right. Seeing as the concert starts at 7 and will not get over until around 8:30, this could very well go until 11 just like Monday and Tuesday.

Protégé is competing for their title Friday night and instead of having a practice, we are to go support and watch them. It will be a nice break from all the practice. While we are cheering, however, there are some rules we must abide by. First rule, there is to be absolutely no shouting of anyone’s name performing. It has been deemed as distracting and we don’t want to hinder our groups in any way. We must stop cheering when the group is singing, aside from the 5 seconds we are allowed to cheer and clap right after a soloist is done, is the second rule. The third and final rule we were told to follow is that we need to cheer loudly for the other groups, which includes our mass cheers such as “jump shake your booty”, without hurting our voices. We need to find the balance. We can cheer the proper way, by using our diaphragm and not our throats, but that would be the logical way to cheer so no one ever does it. It’s going to be very hard to get through the whole week without hurting voices or bodies before our first and hardest competition this season.