From Alex to Us – His incredible experience
First Update:
As I write this, I’m sitting in a snazzy coffee shop on Hollywood Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale with my Czech world high diver buddy. The weather here is fantastic…the summer we never got basically, plus a little more!
Never thought I would say this after my last Florida experience in Orlando, but the people here are incredibly friendly! Any day I go into a shop, strangers are actually eager for simple chit-chat, and have a nice laid-back Floridian air about them.
Ok, so where to start? I guess a description of the shows would be fitting. Everyone is really excited for our night-time cirque-type spectacular called Oasis of Dreams. I open the show as a Griffin character with a giant pair of wings atop the 10 metre bridge (narrow walkway connecting the two 10 metre towers). Think the male equivalent of a Victoria’s Secret Angel with slightly less sex appeal, and ramp up the mysterious factor with some cool makeup. I invite the principal character, The Beautiful Girl, into a dream world filled with abstract creatures (the cast) that guide her and the audience through this realm. The feats performed include springboard diving, tower diving, a trampoline act, synchronized swimming, hand balancing, hand to hand, aerial acrobatics, all being intertwined with some terrific dance choreography. I’ll be performing tower and springboard diving mainly, but will also be doing some aerial acrobatics and hand to hand (people balancing and contorting on top of each other’s bodies) from the 10 metre bridge. This show is shaping up to be really spectacular.
The second show is a light-hearted afternoon show called Splish Splash, which is a comedy dive show. I’ve been cast as the lead for this show, a clumsy buffoon mechanic called Josh.
The cast has been apprehensive about certain dives because of the constraints of the stage. While it’s the largest and deepest pool that’s ever been built on a cruise ship, it’s still nothing in comparison to your typical diving well. If we lean a little too far on our takeoffs from the boards, we risk landing on either the center portion of the pool (only 7 feet deep), on the area we’ve affectionately called the Beach (aka the solid ground portion of the stage), or flying right into the audience. That would give them a bang for their buck! Also, the underwater entrances and exits via scuba tunnels add another challenging element to the show, so we’ll see how that all works out once we get to the ship in Turku, Finland.
Second Update:
Anyway, after a 10 hour-or-so long flight, we made it to Turku, and were greeted on the tarmac by news cameras and the captain of the Oasis of the Seas. Was a clever way for them to try and offset our shock from the blast of cold we felt as we emerged from the plane! I can’t believe I’m supposing to be rehearsing in an outside pool in this weather within a couple of days. Those wetsuits better be able to insulate like polar bear fat, or else someone’s going to get hypothermia. We’ve currently been in the process of doing a whole bunch of safety training for onboard fires and the like, which has been useful but slow. They even trusted us enough to put out real fires outside in the shipyard. Most people were fine, although one guy sprayed the instructor with the fire extinguisher by accident and proceeded to run away with the extinguisher still going.
My consist of safety training, sleep, eating, sleep, eating, more training, etc. I don’t even know whether its night or day when I wake up in my tiny cabin, as the bed feels like a dark coffin with the curtains drawn. All I have to say is thank God I am not claustrophobic, or else I would be royally screwed. On a happier note, we had fittings for the parade costumes the other day. My first one looks like an upside down teacup with my head poking out the base, topped with a red hat that looks like a giant Hot Tamale. In the second, I am wearing an orange and purple costume, with a giant skirt around my waist, accompanied by 2 mini-skirts attached to each limb. And then the hat looks like an exploded spaghetti dinner, with noodles draping down the sides.
Goodbye for now. Will definitely have more interesting of an update next time, as our directors and choreographers are flying in tomorrow. Now the fun really starts 
