Ten minutes to steal the show

Short Dances

Dancers in the City got an opportunity to stage their performances in a one-of-its-kind dance festival held at Alliance Francaise recently. Australian company ‘Short+Sweet’ organised a dance festival called ‘Short+Sweet Dance’, which threw a challenge to ten teams to put up their performances within ten minutes. Any team which crossed the time limit would be disqualified, they were warned.

Among the ten teams, three would qualify for semi-finals and a fourth team would be reserved for wildcard entry. Interestingly, the best teams will be picked up by the audience themselves. Every member of the audience was given a scoring sheet to choose his or her favourite team.

Depending upon the responses of the audience and judges who were anonymous among the audience, the winning teams would be selected.

Anita, the mind behind the dance festival, said, “‘Short+Sweet Dance’ is taking place in the country for the first time. The first short dance festival was held in 2002 in Australia. I am involved in theatre and I have roped in this concept for theatre festivals too. Now, we have adopted it for dance.”  The opening performance Shiroi Hana was by students from Bornfree Dance School. It depicted the state of children when Hirsoshima was bombed. ‘Beautiful’, a performance by Latin Dance India, and ‘Believe’ by Tarantismo received a lot of cheering. Preema, a student from Gujarat who was in the City for vacations, said, “I like contemporary dance and knew the show had some interesting performances lined up. And I was not disappointed. I really liked watching ‘Believe’. Their expressions were so good and I could connect with the dance. The meaning of the theme was brought out very nicely.”

Not just audience, the dancers too seemed to enjoy participating. Ujwal, from Ramana Maharshi Centre for Learning (RMCL) team, said, “This is the first time my teammates and I are participating in such an event. We are all bharatanatyam dancers and we tried contemporary dance today. All the teams performed very well and it is motivating to compete with such teams. Our team has people from all age groups ranging from five years to 20. So it’s fun to be with all. I hope we will get qualified for the final round.”

Winners from this round will join the winners from the next two rounds to be held on August 30 and 31.

Winners from all the three rounds will battle it out in the final round, which will be held on August 31 evening at JSS auditorium.