After a lot of spandex, tricks and white lies, Rachel Chadderdon and Brian Yeado’s secret is out.
Yeado, a Medill senior and Chadderdon, a Weinberg junior, were asked to keep quiet for 10 days about being Dance Marathon’s 2004 emcees until the official announcement at the all-dancer meeting Wednesday night.
“I’ve been lying to easily 30 people a day for the last 10 days,” Yeado said.
The duo went through three separate auditions where they had to entertain the DM chairpersons with planned and improvised songs, dances and skits. They even did math problems.
“For our second audition they called us back at three in the morning and gave us a code that we had to decipher to tell us where our callback was,” Yeado said. “Once we got there we had an hour long audition.”
Even after the decision had been made, the DM chairpersons weren’t easy on the emcees.
“They made us wait all weekend to hear and then told us we were going to have a second callback and had us read the news ourselves on notecards,” Chadderdon said.
“The last line was, ‘Congratulations Brian and Rachel, you’re the 2004 DM emcees,'” Yeado said. “We thought it was just part of the script. They had us good. It was fun.”
Yeado and Chadderdon met last year when Yeado served as Communications Residential College’s president and Chadderdon was Shepard Residential College’s president. Yeado, who danced for DM his sophomore year, asked Chadderdon to try out with him.
“Rachel and I get along really well and I thought that we would make a perfect combination for DM emcees,” Yeado said.
Justin Ballheim, DM co-chairman, was enthusiastic about the choice.
“We were just looking for two people who we thought embodied DM and were equally excited about Dance Marathon itself and about our charities,” said Ballheim, a Medill senior. “We wanted two people who were really willing to do whatever it took to excite people. We know they’ll keep dancers pumped for 30 hours.”
Though the auditions are over, the emcees are working to put together a preview video for Winter Quarter and videos for the event itself.
Chadderdon said she wants to imitate NU cheerleaders, who do push-ups to celebrate every score by the football team, to motivate dancers.
“I’m in training to be able to do a push-up at the end of every hour,” Chadderdon said. “I’m going to challenge NU dancers who feel up to it to do it with me.”
DM’s primary beneficiary this year is Have Dreams, an after-school program for autistic students. Yeado and Chadderdon both plan on volunteering for the organization.
“I think the volunteer opportunity really puts a face to the cause,” Chadderdon said. “It will make it all the more meaningful when we’re dancing for 30 hours when we can think about the kids who will benefit from this.”
