Lots to celebrate in the Dance Community

The dancers in the Enhanced Performance Dance Programme have done it again!  For a phenomenal 12th year in a row, TNT Dancers will be representing the college at DanceNZMade Nationals in Palmerston North.  For the last 3 years, TNT has been crowned the Taupo Regional Champions.  This year we will be taking both the Year 9-10 Team (It’s a Kind of Magic) who won the Year 9-10 Category and the Open Team (El Tango de Roxanne) who not only won the Open Team Category, but were awarded overall Regional Champions.  Both these groups were choreographed by Grace Bilbie (Y13) who also received two choreography awards, one for each of these groups.  The adjudicators only award this if both adjudicators give the choreography 10/10.  Our MJ Y9-10 group came 3rd in the Year 9-10 Category and our Y11-13 team (Invicta) came 2nd in the Y11-13 Category.

NZMADE also saw many of our dancers represent the college in Solos. 

Cara Collins Y9 – 2nd place

Ruby Watts Y10 – 1st place

Taylor Weston Y10 – 2nd place

Onera Beck Y12 – 1st place

Grace Bilbie Y13 – 2nd place

Ruby Watts, Onera Beck, and Grace Bilbie received nominations to represent TNT at DanceNZMade Nationals in the Solo competition.

The following dancers also received a Golden Ticket.  This is a new award at DanceNZMade where dancers are selected from the workshops held during the day by the adjudicators.  These dancers will compete at a DanceNZMade Golden Ticket competition in November later this year:

Shaz Corin-Goldsmith (Y12)

Onera Beck (Y12)

Taryn Drysdale (Y12)

Aimee Barber (Y10)

Lexie Stock (Y10)

It was incredible to see how many of the TNT dancers offered to help other dancers from various Intermediate and Primary schools with their solos, duets, and groups.  We certainly have created a culture of passing on our passion for dance and sharing our skills with others.

Further dance news is that our Y9-10 Team from 2020 will be representing the college at PACANZ (a National performing arts competition) in October this year.  These dancers received a PACANZ nomination at a studio dance competition in October last year.  It is very rare for a school to be in this position as most teams at PACANZ are studio teams.

Ruby Watts (Y10) will be representing her studio at PACANZ in the Modern Solo division.  Ruby has been part of the EPD Programme since Year 9 and in the Y9-10 and Open teams that represented the school at NZMADE Regionals and Nationals in 2020 and will do so again this year.  She is also in the Y9-10 team who will compete at PACANZ this year.