Last year my crew, Born to Rock, were asked to fill in for the bride and groom for their official wedding dance. I’ve danced at weddings before, performed at them too, but never for THE actual wedding dance. Of course we agreed and thought we’d turn up and it would be a normal showcase, no!
Thought we’d mix it up a little and took two of the older generation, Tony 44 and me 43, with two of the younger ones both under 20. As always we get there early to make sure we’re bang on time to perform, so once we’ve introduced everyone to the bride and groom etc we go off to the car park to have a little concrete cypher* to warm up. As we were on straight after the speeches we decided to go in and wait while they were delivered.
The speeches is what changed things from a normal showcase. During the three speeches (bride did one too) it is revealed that the date is special for two very important reasons. First of all it is 5 years to the day that the grooms dad lost his battle with cancer and passed, and it also marks 3 years that the bride and grooms daughter has been in remission. Me and Tony looked at each other shocked, did not expect that! Now the pressure of delivering the wedding dance has intensified due to the sheer overwhelming emotion you could feel in the room. Clearly a mixture of people that already knew and those like is who didn’t, but an absolute unified pouring out of love could be felt all around you, could almost go as far as to say you could see and taste it too! To give them their credit, the younger lads were tuned in to it too, we didn’t really need to tell them that we now had to put a ton of extra passion into the showcase, hopefully you’ll agree we did this when you watch it.
It’s interesting how you are convinced you always perform to the best of your ability, especially something you love doing so much, but there’s always something that can help you find that extra gear.
Oh yeah, and to echo the words at the end of the brides speech ‘FUCK CANCER!’
- cypher - a gathering of b-boys and b-girls whereby they make a circle and enter one at a time to show off, or maybe battle each other if the mood takes