On Saturday August 27th, 2011, Night & Day Dance took part in the Vancouver Mitsubishi City Chase. The Mitsubishi City Chase is a unique urban adventure that requires participants to exhibit teamwork, resourcefulness, determination and the ability to make decisions on the fly as they search for ChasePoints scattered in unknown locations throughout the city. ChasePoints are designed to test teams with a variety of physical, intellectual, adventurous and humorous challenges.

Night & Day Dance set up one of the ChasePoints as a ballroom dance obstacle course. Participants were taught proper social ballroom dance frame and then how to walk, rotate and grapevine together with that frame in an obstacle course format. We increased the difficulty level by having the follow do it while blindfolded and having both of them dance together to keep a volleyball balanced between their chests. If the ball dropped at any point then the participants had to go back to the beginning of that leg of the obstacle course and start it again. For the final leg of the obstacle course, one member of each two person team had to hula hoop to the finish line while the other had to balance a ball on the back of his or hand, if either of them dropped their prop they had to stop, switch props and then keep going.

Despite the intense heat of the day, and the participants’ exhaustion from running around to the different ChasePoints, they couldn’t help laughing at themselves as they worked together to get to the finish line without tripping over each other or dropping the ball.

Here are two photos from the event. The first one shows me and a volunteer The second photo shows two participants walking from cone A to cone B while balancing a volleyball between their chests and while the follow is blindfolded. The intense look on their faces is partly due to the exhaustion of running around to the different ChasePoints on an extremely hot day.

Social Ballroom Frame

Ballroom Dance Obstacle Course!