Dancing in 100 Places Pt. 5

“Before I left for my Performing Arts Abroad experience in Italy, I was dared to film myself dancing in 100 different places over the course of my travels. A challenge? Most definitely!”

Sophie Marshall is a dancer from Armadale Australia and she is currently an Arts Administration (Dance) Intern in Florence, Italy. This is the fifth in a series of updates on her Dancing in 100 Places project.  See the rest of the series here. You can also follow her on Instagram @lipbalmiscool

Throughout this whole adventure my main difficulty has been finding the confidence to actually bust out my moves in public. Now that I’m well into the second half of my trip, I only find it difficult about 10% of the time, which is a HUGE personal achievement for me. I can feel how much my self-confidence has grown, and although I still feel incredibly awkward most of the time, the videos are definitely getting so much easier to film. My new concern is that I’m not going to manage the full 100 locations. When I first started, I was pretty much just winging the entire thing – picking a place, chucking the music on at any random moment and hoping it’d turn out ok (which luckily for me, did work out quite well). But now that I’m getting closer to the end I think I actually need to sit down and plan out the rest of the video as a whole. I need the locations to be spread out throughout the video, not clumped together in one section, which means I’m going to have to plan which part of the dance I’m going to do before I actually start filming. So this week I spent a lot of my downtime making a rough plan in Excel, which will hopefully help me stay on track (it’s colour-coded and everything!).

Love Locks on the Jetty

This entire week has been ridiculously hot and sticky, so on Friday afternoon I took one of my housemates to Viareggio to check out the beach. When I was there last week it was slightly cloudy, so the mountains in the background weren’t very visible, but this time it was PERFECT! We set up on some rocks along the jetty and had a great view of the beach and the mountains.

Porto Antico

On Saturday morning I set off for a day trip to Genoa, a port slightly north of Cinque Terre. It was so much bigger than I was expecting and I was pleasantly surprised by how much there was to do. I strolled through the city centre and browsed a few shops before stopping for lunch, then headed down to the Porto Antico (the old port). The harbour was beautiful, with its combination of massive cruise ships and smaller sailing boats contrasting nicely with the houses on the hill behind it. I spent a solid 3 hours just wandering around and enjoying the atmosphere, and at one point I managed to sit down just as a group of free runners started jumping and flipping off of the wall in front of me. In hindsight, I wish I’d gotten a video with them flipping in the background but I was too busy watching them to even think of it at the time!

Free Runners

On Sunday we were supposed to go on a trip to Verona and Lake Garda, but it was cancelled on Saturday afternoon due to low numbers (much to everyone’s disappointment). So instead we had a bit of a sleep in then went for a late breakfast at La Milkeria (they make great waffles!). We took the long way back to the apartment and browsed some of the local markets as we went. We decided to get some cheese and wine and have a picnic in the park, so after popping to the shop we headed over to the park down the road.

Picnic

Apart from the large swarm of pigeons we attracted, it was a great afternoon. As disappointed as we were in the cancellation of our trip, it was a nice, relaxing day.

4 weeks in, 59 down, 41 to go. Bring it on.