Spring showcase recap: four minutes that took four months

Four months of rehearsal. Sixteen counts of eight. One evening. It’s over, and I’m writing this while the hairspray is still structurally load-bearing, because I know from experience that the details fade faster than the bruises.

The build

We started learning the piece in February, when it was still dark at five o’clock and the choreography felt like algebra. There is a particular despair, around week three, when the steps live in your head but refuse to move into your body — and a particular joy, around week nine, when you realise you’ve just danced a full minute while thinking about nothing at all. Both are part of it. Nobody warns you the despair and the joy are the same process at different stages.

The final fortnight was costume fittings, spacing rehearsals on a stage that felt enormous after our studio, and the nightly discovery of brand-new things to worry about. My favourite: a genuine, focused fear of the third diagonal, which had never once gone wrong in rehearsal. (Foreshadowing? Read on.)

The night

The wings are the strangest place in the world. Dark, crowded with ghost-light and whispered merdes, everyone breathing like they’re about to jump into cold water. Then the music starts, and someone who is technically you walks out into the light.

Here is what I remember: the heat of the lights, the blessed invisibility of the audience beyond them, and the third diagonal arriving like an old enemy — at which point four months of rehearsal simply took over and carried me through it while my brain stood aside, astonished. I was half a count behind coming out of it. I stole the half-count back on the next phrase. Nobody in the audience will ever know, and that secret is one of the sweetest things about performing.

And then the bow. Four months, four minutes, one breath shared with the whole cast, holding hands in the light.

What I’m keeping

That rehearsal is a savings account and the stage is the withdrawal. That nerves and readiness are next-door neighbours. And that I would do all sixteen weeks again for those four minutes — which is convenient, because autumn rehearsals start in September, and I have never wanted anything more.