Serving as the second counselor in young womens has been such a great calling! I absolutely love it. In December, the Stake President asked me to serve in an additional calling as Stake Dance Coordinator. Looking back, I don't think either one of us had a clue what would be required as part of this calling.
To make a long story short, Tyler was later asked to serve along with me since our dance contained a separate boy part and girl part. After murmuring threats of buying a PS3 and questioning his involvement in the matter, Tyler soon gave in. Mwahaha!
Before I go on, let me tell you what the Spectacular is. The "Arise and Shine Forth Youth Spectacular" is a church program that was the first of its kind and was performed on Weber State University's football field. The production covered everything from the premortal life to the pioneers, to the 1920s, 50s and 60s eras, to modern day, to different nations around the world. It shared a message that the gospel is spreading forth and blessing the lives of all who come in contact with it and that our job today is to, "arise, shine forth, and be a standard to the nations" as we "shine our lights unto the world".
During the 7 months that transpired, we learned the dances and taught them to all of the youth in our stake and then combined with another stake to teach with them as well (About 400 kids in all). Our dance was choreographed to represent the Oceanic Temple District which included: Somoa, Tonga, Fiji, Austrailia, Hawaii, and New Zealand. This was especially tricky considering the fact that my beehives were too young to participate and most of the practices fell on their weekly activity nights. I ended up learning dances, planning beehive activities, recruiting volunteers to work with the beehives for me, setting up their activities, and then dashing to our practices which were held anywhere from 2-4 times per week.
The whole thing became a very huge undertaking! 4,000 youth from around the area participated in this thing. We danced in the rain, in the scalding hot sun, and even in the snow at one point. Our youth were the best group of kids ever! They were so very frustrated on multiple occasions, but they totally stuck to it and in the end, I think most of them had a lot of fun with it. . I'm so glad we were able to see it it through because the final performance made it all worth it. They even asked Tyler and I to perform with them, which worked out well because we look their age anyway. We felt a little bit like thunder-stealers since we had to dance in front of the rest of the group, but our dancers needed someone to watch during the performance.
I could go on and on and on about this experience and some of the events that transpired, but instead I'll end with some pictures I have acquired from other people. Tyler and I weren't able to take pictures since we were on the field performing, but hopefully this will give you some idea of the enormity of the production. Most of these were taken at our dress rehearsal.
For the record, our youth totally rock! It's so great to be able to work with these young men and women as future leaders and to watch their shining lights grow brighter.
These two darling girls came to watch. Are they cute or what?
Our friends Mapu and Tupu- they helped choreograph our Polynesian dance.
Can you say 4,000 kids?!
Sign Language- "I Know that My Redeemer Lives"
This is our group- love these kids!
4 comments:
yay shaela! that looks like so much fun! I wish we could have come!
Now you can remember that fun experience forever!!
Haha! Yes... we're only going to remember the fun parts. It was a LOT of work, but paid off in the end.
that's really awesome, and looks like it was fun!
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