VivaLatiNUS: Looking back on CACTUS' 15

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

As we prepare for the Viva Gold Concert 2015 (which is happening on September 20th), we pause to reflect and think about who we are and why we do what we do.

All of us here at Viva Latinus have been putting in countless hours of hard work to juggle 11 items with our very small cast of dancers. We have been living and breathing dance for the past 6 months... It is tough, but it will all be worth it for the joy and exhilaration we feel as the curtains open on the 20th of September 2015!

After all, the memory of CACTUS'2015 is still fresh in our minds, and we definitely had a blast performing together with the other subclubs of CAC this year (:

At CACTUS, Viva Latinus put up total of 3 items:

1. Happy (Jive)

Many of the dancers in the Jive item had never done latin ballroom dancing before joining Viva Latinus, and we are so very proud of them for doing a fantastic job with the item. The girls looked absolutely stunning and classy, and the guys looked suave in a light blue blazer and bowtie.

Let's take a peep backstage!

Here's Sheryl and Ning Jin getting ready with hair and make up

Veo putting the finishing touches on Phyllis's chignon

And here's Samantha just casually stretching amidst the chaos of the dressing room haha

The girls blowing you a kiss <3

Yay! Presenting the Jive cast of 2015!

They looked great especially with the colorful lights, and we were so proud of them for having excellent blocking and super neat steps! Looks like our efforts to perfect this item wasn't for naught! Well done our dearest Viva Babies!!

2. Cinema Italiano (Samba)

The Samba was a technically challenging item, and the dancers worked extremely hard to pull this item off.

Getting the costumes ready was also a rather distressing affair. Our beautiful skirts only flew into Singapore a week before the show!!! They were heavy with long tails, and the girls had to get used to dancing with them flying around. We also had to make the skirts shiny and pretty by hand pasting Swarovski crystals alllll over the tail. We probably pasted more than a thousand crystals on them!! Kudos to Carin for staying up extremely late to do a lot of the work of pasting these crystals. We love you Carin!

The samba girls getting gorgeous and sexyyy (The guys are hard at work too, because they performed for BOTH the jive and samba)

Last minute prep!

Our samba dancers are sexy as! (even though the guys are still in their jive costumes hahaha)

A shout out to the guys for juggling two items at the same time! Our girls are usually the shiny audience attention catchers because of all the pretty costumes, but truly, partner dancing would not be possible if not for the amazing guys who work doubly hard in order to let all the girls get a chance to dance (: Much love to our Viva guys!!!

3. Gravity (Rumba)

Gravity was our alumni item for this year, and also the first ever alumni self choreo-ed item ever!

It was definitely not easy trying to do up choreography, but it was a very enriching experience. More so that this item meant something personal to us.

Blocking this item on stage was challenging because the success of this item depended greatly on precision lighting, and we were so grateful to the lighting technician when he finally managed to make it work. We didn't have much time to perfect this item because the alumni were busy cleaning up the other items, but we definitely gave our best to it, and perhaps a little part of ourselves to the item as well.

Viva alumni whoosh!!!