Day three - how can it be going so quickly?

Wow - that's the third day gone already! It's amazing; I can feel the week slipping away and it's hardly even started.

So, today we started off with a warm-up which seemed very similar to a Scottish ceilidh dance. It was lovely to see so many English people trying to ceilidh!

After that we went on to our classes. In the morning and the first part of the afternoon, we did music. As well as chorus work, we also took some time out for the principals to do their numbers. And then... the dancing started.

We set "Dancing Fool". Now, I have seen a very good society do this purely as a sung number. Not so this time - it's choreographed from the first drum beat to the last note. And there's none of this "repeat to the left" stuff either - it's a completely danced through number.

When I'm playing Tony, I am right at the front centre. And when I'm Rico, I still get to dance the number (obviously not in Rico costume), but in the chorus at the back. What makes that even more challenging is that there are a number of places where Tony makes a move, and the chorus then copies it. It's hard enough to remember four minutes of dance set in about 90 minutes, without having to deal with two different sets of moves depending on whom you're playing.

The great thing about summer school, however, is the way that the students work together to help each other. A few of us got together in the rehearsal room after dinner and had a run over the first half before going on to our evening activities.

There were three evening sessions; the students are free to choose one or not attend any. The three were "Interactions - a study of the relationship between cast, MD and director", a dance session based around a number from Hairspray and a talk about auditioning by the school's director, Ray Jeffrey.

I went to the last one, where Ray spent an hour or so talking about what a director looks to get from an audition and how to play into what the director needs, how to prepare for an audition, and how to face the reality that you may not always get what you wanted. He raised some interesting points that made me think about my attitude to auditioning and how to do it better.

Finally a short session in the bar, and off to bed... Good night!