Sunday 13 February 2011

BOOM!! Pro para dancers are we!

It's been quite a week, the week I became a parapara dancing champion and stepped into the pro dancing ranks!!

Everyone reading this probably knows that parapara is my number one love in life. It's what I live for. Well last week Bancho, the organisor of my favorite para club event, Starfire, he asked me and my para dancing partner Jasmine to be part of the team for a live event on the Thursday. Of course we jumped at the chance. What it was was a live internet streamed event on Nico Nico, where the big three para clubs were invited to dance a couple of hours sets, all to promote Super Eurobeat 210 album.

Well we had no idea what to expect, all we were told was to be at Avex records headquarters on Thursday at 8pm. SWEET!! Oh and it would be fancy dress/cosplay as well. DOUBLE SWEET!!

So the day itself came and we hit Avex and finally found everyone after wandering around lost in the marketing department. SEF, 9loveJ and obviously Starfire were all there and each club had their own table. Everyone was surprised to see me and Jasmine seeing as it was just the best dancers from each of the clubs. Well we're Starfire dancers now so suck my dick!!

It was such a professional setup, like a proper tv show. The other side of the waiting room was the studio itself with the dj booth, stage, and big screen. Anyway the night was setup so SEF went on at 9pm, 9loveJ at maybe 11pm and Starfire last at 12:30am. At around 9pm all the other Starfire dancers arrived. They were (for those interested)...

Keetan
Innochi
Shintaro
Ryohei
Harumi
Take
Negi
Hitoshi
Heather (from America)

It felt amazing to be part of such an awesome team and even more amazing to dance with them. I love that Harumi, Innochi and Keetan were asking me to show them some of the dances. I feel like they really treat me as an equal in the para world. I know they've been around so much longer and let's face it are the kings of para, but I've worked really hard on my para style for a long time so I could be up there with them, and I've gotta say I feel I'm pretty good these days. Jasmine as well.

Well it wasn't long before Take and Hitoshi hit the conbini for alcohol goodness. We were all a little worried to have more than one drink seeing as this was quite a big event, but the Avex director '7A' came over to our table and told everyone to not worry and just have a good time, and generally just do what Starfire does best. And that is get drunk and dance! So that's exactly what we did. While the other clubs were being super serious and practicing in the toilets, we were all doing shots and having an awesome time. Bancho who was dj'ing was pretty drunk by the time we went on... haha, what a legend!

So it was getting near to us going on, so we all hunkered down around the setlist to decide who would dance what songs. There was about 70 songs in our set. I got to dance a lot of songs which was nice, and I was picked for a bunch of songs because me and Hitoshi were the only one's who could remember the routines.

Starfire dance time STARTO!!!!!

First song was Kingdom of Rock, and Hitoshi and Take went up first but Harumi was pushing me to join them, and who am I to argue!




Ohhhhh my days was it like a dream come true to be dancing with my favorite para dancers on tv (well internet). I danced a whole bunch of songs with all different people. Harumi, Hitoshi, Innochi, Keetan, Take, Jasmine and Heather. Just.... awesome!! The Starfire set went by so so quickly and we all had such an amazing time dancing and boozing. Throughout the night people could type messages that came up on screen, it was weird to see my name a lot. Messages like 'Max is sparkling'. Haha!

And I was XD




Half way through me, Jasmine and Heather were interviewed. That was embarrasing.... I just blurted out some rubbish Japanese that made little sense, but they know what I'm like and gfound me funny at least. For the end ten songs we decided everyone from Starfire would dance on camera together. That quickly turned into everyone who was there dancing, even Satoko from the parapara allstars. I just can't express how much fun it was!!

At the end the presenter wanted to interview the most messaged and requested dancer, and guess what, it was little old me XD I felt like a celeb, I was taking pictures with people at the end and we even had to sign a load of posters for avex. Awesome!!! Avex even payed for an after party. How nice! 7A the director is actually really nice, and Eri (hyper techno Eri) was sitting with us at the izakaya and she is really sweet. First time I've ever talked to her.

It was almost 7am by the time we got home and.... I had work at 8:30am. Bad times. I managed to get there by 11:30am. Not to bad....

So highlights of the night??

- Teaching Harumi, Innochi and Shintaro lots of routines.
- Dancing with the best para dancers in the world and feeling like I deserve to be there.
- Having everyone shouting 'Max Crime' when we were dancing Sex Crime.
- Annoying all the camera crew because we were all drinking in the studio
- Feeling like a minor celeb and making everyone laugh.

You can watch it all here - http://www.sendspace.com/file/p3w6eo

So there you go, one of the best days of my life, and I guess now me and Jasmine are part of Starfire. Ambitions have been met!

5 comments:

  1. ahahaha you look great. The pink color is very cool, good legs xD!!
    Please talk more about this project, looks like great!!
    Good Luck, really, i miss dance parapara a lot, please :3 film new routines, teach more about parapara :3.
    Greetings from Chile
    Akane

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Amazing!!
    Hi Max, we havnt met yet but I'm Bambi :)
    Nice to meetcha. I'm friends with Heather as well. I'm in Sapporo now, I move to Tokyo end of March begining of April so lets be para friends please <3

    http://ambibambijapanbi.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Akane, thanks! I`ll try and film some routines soon, and I should post more about the para club scene in Tokyo.

    Bambi, Hi! Look forward to hitting the clubs with you!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. sounded like such an aaaaawesome event! i can't wait to come dance again with you and everyone. and OH GOD i want to meet eri too. she's my favorite techpara dancer (female that is, you know my favorite male...)!
    //sofia

    ReplyDelete