Fight Song

Chapter 6

Dianne's PoV
Working with Joe was actually quite fun. He was a lot more loose than I was, like there was no stress with him. He was just so sure everything was going to work out okay. It reminded me of myself before I became dance captain. I really wanted to get back to that state, and he was actually helping.
We'd been brainstorming choreography and coming up with phrases for about an hour, picking up on the big parts of the music to put in tumbles and bigger lifts. It was going to be awesome.

"Wait," Joe said suddenly as we were in the middle of the contemporary section.

"Yes?" I asked, annoyed he'd just stopped us mid-pirouette.

"You've used silks before, right?" he asked.

"Yeah, why?" I asked, my annoyance turning into confusion and curiosity.

"Let's include them," I said. "We could swing from them, maybe even run and grab onto them to like fly over the audience."

"That just sounds like one huge health and safety hazard," I looked at him in disbelief.

"It would be iconic," he continued. "Maybe using hoops too? I'm not amazing at hoops because I'm not flexible, but I can still do it."

"So what, we're now including circus skills?" I sighed. It had gone from beautiful to a potential disaster.

"Well no, I'm not using tightropes or stilts, am I?" he rolled his eyes.

I paused. Using silks and hoops would definitely make the dance even better... It could make or break the dance though... If one thing went wrong, one of us could end up seriously injured, and we'd be eliminated.

"Fine," I sighed. He looked overjoyed. "But you're coming with me and we're going to ask the Internationals board, because I certainly didn't bring silks and hoops with me, did you?"

"We have silks, but not hoops," Joe said, but then looked panicked. "Oh my god please don't tell your team that, I wasn't supposed to tell anyone, even our studio head doesn't know we're using silks."

"So now I have something to blackmail you with?" I grinned. "Oh this is going to be amazing."

Joe glared at me, but I only laughed.

———

The Internationals board looked extremely impressed by our question to use silks and hoops, and said we could indeed use them and that they would bring hoops and silks to our rehearsal room in an hour for us to practise with and set it all up for us so it would be safe.

"I must say I love the thinking outside the box," a woman called Darcey smiled broadly. "I can imagine this duet will look absolutely stunning."

Joe and I grinned from ear to ear. Everyone else would be there with their normal dances, and then there's us with like a million different styles going on, a storyline AND circus equipment. I felt pretty confident about us winning our round.

Joe's PoV
About an hour after Dianne and I had been to see them, these maintenance guys showed up to attach the silks and hoops where we wanted them and made us swing from them to check they were secure.

"Oh my god this is actually gonna be sick," I grinned.

"Not gonna lie, I wasn't all too thrilled to be working with you, but now I'm so happy we got partnered together!" Dianne clapped her hands.

"I always knew it was gonna be fun, but yeah, this is still way better than I expected," I laughed.

We worked out different pieces of our routine and how we wanted to use the silks and hoops, and eventually decided to have them hidden for the majority of the dance, but the hoop to come down first and we use it together, balancing and twirling it, then both of us get off as it starts to lower, then the silks fall down, we grab onto them and fly into the audience. We then decided to have Dianne sitting on the hoop at the end as I sink to the floor. By 10pm, we already had a rough outline of what we wanted our routine to be like, and filmed it a few times so we remembered it.