1st Perak International Dancesport

I went to Ipoh on a one-day trip yesterday with a friend to watch the 1st Perak International Dancesport which has four different categories of dance: latin, ballroom (standard), line dance and hip hop. The hip hop section alone was worth it... there's a team of four boys called D'Artiz whom we have seen in the past few competitions, whose dancing is SOOO good that they've set a very high level of hip hop which I think no other can reach, at the moment. In fact, they did something really novel yesterday. Aside from the hip hop individual and team open events, they also took part in the Professional Hip Hop Team Showcase event. The difference between this event and the team open event is that they get to use their own piece of music whereas in the team open event, the teams have to use a preselected song chosen by the organiser. They didn't use an existing piece of music, they SANG their own song (although it was chiplaked from other songs... i.e. they took other songs and modified the lyrics a little) in Hokkien. The quality of the recording wasn't great, but their moves were. The song - a medley - basically introduced themselves (you'll hear the words D'Artiz from time to time) as a team and also individually, and questioned whether the people who do hip hop nowadays really know what hip hop is. Of course, they won...

And I saw a few girls who had been winning the line dance individual events the whole of this year participate in the hip hop individual events, and also made it to the finals in this one. I don't know if they won, because I left before prize-giving (the competition was running late; it was supposed to end by midnight, but by 12 the ballroom section still had not even started. And we had a 2-hour drive back home). I'm not their fan... I'm only mentioning this out of jealousy. Hehehe. Well, my time will come...

Oh, and more observations. People who are good at latin are not necessarily good at line dance. While line dance is seen as a "lower" level of dancing compared to latin and ballroom, the standards of line dance has increased tremendously in just 1-2 years, and comprises many different styles, including rise & fall (waltz), cuban, smooth, lilt, funky, and novelty. If the style of line dance happens to be similar to latin, the latin dancers obviously have the upper hand; but watching them do funky is like watching a tennis ball thinking it can do the job better than a pingpong ball in a table tennis game. It's just... something you cringe at.