23rd Dance Celebration

It is new in my learning that a Dance Celebration is held annually. Based on what I watched, it is an inter-school dance competition with street dance and contemporary dance as some of its categories. This year has a theme about the involvement of youth, basically we, as students to the upcoming elections. Each dance group performer is not introduced by school, so the audience usually guess the alma mater of the performers. It’s just that UPans were so proud to cheer the representatives of the university, and with their cheers, we were able to recognize who among the performers are our schoolmates. Dance groups of different schools showcased the theme. Some had added patriotism in their craft while some used nationalistic icons, historical happenings and people in ornamenting their dance. But, some aren’t much anchored with the theme, rather tackled the social realism as seen at a present day situation. What I like about the dance competition is that, it reinforced the dance groups to conceptualize a theme for their presentation. Based on what I watched, it is evident that most of the groups had prepared for their piece. The objective of the organizers of the event to have the given theme stimulated not only the performers but also the viewers to think of the happenings in our society. The De La Salle University is this year’s host of the event and I personally didn’t like the way they handled the event. Maybe my point of view is biased because I didn’t like their intermission performances. The choral (as what they had introduced) surprisingly is a solo singer and pianist and the very long Contemporary Jazz performance choreographed by the school’s resident choreographer/teacher vividly marked in my head. The jazz performance has the narrative of nationalism and patriotism which in the end appeared to be trying hard because of their inappropriate approach on the performance’s elements. At the end of the night, UP bagged the champion and first runner-up awards. The two group performances of UP is great but based on what I watched, I can’t agree with the result of the dance competition in street dance category. Of course, I would want UP to win, but as what I call it, for UP to place the top two awards, is not just. There were still a couple of groups which are, objectively speaking very well made and worthy to be part of the top three. But, since I am not a part of the panel of judges, their decision of having UP at the top two slots and placing the dance group which portrayed street begging must be recognized with respect.