A new year for dancers has arrived! APAC dance, a second-season performance art, has always been a popular extracurricular option at our school, especially among our countless talented dancers.
APAC Dance tryouts started along with the start of school. Tryouts are already finished and training is intensely scheduled. Practices are occurring every day after school in order to train dancers into great performers in the upcoming Jazz Festival, and, eventually, APAC.
The new team this year is led by senior Rachel M. Also on the team are four juniors, two sophomores, and three freshmen. These dancers are the top in the school, selected from many students that participated in the tryouts. Regarding the high and increasing popularity of dance as an extra-curricular event in school, captain Rachel M. marked this as “an inspiration of high expectations and hopes” for AISG’s dance team to thrive a year after another.
The genres of dance they are preparing for APAC this year include funk, smooth, and dance hall. Captain Rachel is perfectly aware of the challenges within these genres, “one of the most challenging ones can be the funk genre, where we have to master locking, popping, waacking, etc.” She also claimed that the genre smooth also faced a lot of obstacles. Smooth is a genre where guys and girls collaborate in order to create smooth, beautiful interactions. However, Rachel marks that “since our team does not have any guy dancers, we had to adjust the choreographies so it won’t be awkward to be performed by only girls.” The last genre, dance hall, was marked to be “very exciting”. This is an unusual choice that has never been chosen by the team before. “It is a genre of dance that originated from Jamaica,” stated Rachel. Yet with the rising stars in the team, Rachel thinks that “it’s not a problem”. “Although we have a lot of younger members in comparison to previous years, I would describe them as stones that can be cracked open to reveal their diamond nature inside.” The captain certainly has high hopes for the team this year, she states that “though it is [her] first year being the captain, the team has shown enthusiasm and passion like non that [she has] seen.” In the future, she hopes to “make this year the best year for all our members and [to] make the rams proud” as it is her last year. When asked how, she simply smiled and said, “we’ll just do it.”
One last reminder: APAC dance will be hosted by AISG from November 13 to November 16 this year. Let’s cheer them on and show some RAMS spirit!