The best thing about spacing is that you don’t really have to do anything. The worst thing about it is that you don’t get to do anything.

Spacing is simply moving the dancing from the classroom to the stage. We spend the entire first day in the theater making sure we go to the right spot on stage, and that we’re always in line and that we enter and exit from the correct wing. It’s very common for us to have to run a single entrance over and over again.

This is usually the day we all realize that we don’t actually know where we’re supposed to be in the space. Every single position and line is corrected, because someone is always not in the same place as everyone else, or one line is closer to the edge of the stage than the other. This occasionally leads to us not finishing the entire ballet. Last night we got lucky. Even though we had to start 45 minutes late, we managed to space every dance. This is much better than last year when we didn’t get to space the Waltz of the Flowers, which caused havoc on stage.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we managed to fit everything in, there were long stretches where most people were sitting backstage or in the audience, waiting to go on. The most notable of these was when it took 30 minutes space a less than three-minute dance. I will now ask you to compare this to Waltz of the Flowers, which is a seven-minute dance, and took about 15 minutes to space two separate casts of people. However, these long waits in between working can be mildly educational. For example, one of the things I learned over these long breaks is that it’s really hard to play “I Spy” backstage (also, saying you spy something black is cheating, because everything backstage is black).

With spacing out of the way, we’re ready to move on to day two of Theater Week. Check back tomorrow for more information on technical rehearsals.