Dancing at Sea: Ship Life

We’ve been on the ship for almost a month now, and our schedule is finally getting a bit easier. Since boarding the ship in Cape Town, we’ve been rehearsing day and night to get all four shows teched and ready to open. Some of the bags that contained costumes and music tracks went missing, so we had lots of technical issues. Since this is an inaugural cast and all the shows are brand new, we had a lot more work to get the shows opened than a regular cast would have. We also had 4 cast members who arrived late to rehearsals in Florida who had to learn most of the choreography on the ship. The schedule and the workload were insane and I really did not think my body was going to hold up, but we made it through and the cast has grown very close. The production team is gone now and they made me Dance Captain, so I’m in charge of rehearsals, cleaning, and re-blocking from now on. We’ve only been able to get off the ship for a short dinner in Namibia and for one day in Rio. Fortunately we were in Cape Town for one day before we had to board the ship, so we were able to spend some time there as well.

The accommodations are okay, but this ship is older and in need of some upgrades, especially in crew areas. The food is pretty awful, but we are allowed to eat in passenger areas under certain circumstances and those meals are much better. In general, the passengers are very old, wealthy, and extremely demanding, so we’ve all found our socializing duties to be quite challenging.

As promised, here are some photos: