On Saturday 20th April, SUSUPA Dance held its first competition with dancers competing in Novice Ballet, Jazz, Contemp, Tap and Street, as well as Advanced.
A truly outstanding presentation of talent, creativity and fun. The atmosphere from the beginning was electric, a lovely blend of nerves and excitement filled the air. The dancers, in typical dancer style, were stretching and doing warm-ups or just enjoying the thumping chart music gearing themselves up to compete. There were dancers from all over the nation varying from Winchester to Bath and every genre of dance from ballet to belly-dancing, street dance and jazz tap and even within these categories endless diversity in influences.
So lets start with the Ballet. It began with Brighton Novice who did a Swan-Lake inspired piece which was accurately executed and full of fun. Then Southampton offered a beautifully presented piece, which reminded me of the Veela girls from Beauxbatons, you know the bit where they float in and sigh? If you aren’t obsessed with Harry Potter then just imagine gorgeous blue dresses and you’re almost there.
In the Advanced section Southampton’s ballerinas gave a memorable performance (which after some research I think may have been a Mexican folk piece about the ‘traditions of indigenous Mexican culture’). I was amazed by the precision of the dancers and the lovely choreography that was displayed. Bath’s Advanced section gave a classic performance with very well synchronized dancing using white flowers to underline their movements.
Then Jazz happened. It happened brilliantly, they had influences from Gladiator to Bob Fosse and back again. The tap-dancers were fabulous with a cool slow motion matrix section and I loved their mixture of Bolero and tap-dance. Bath’s dancers were especially talented with really intricate style and clever routines. It then came to street-dance sections with Winchester providing great motivation and hyping up the crowd, and the dancers who produced some stunning movements. Sussex were energetic, Bath had great connection with the music, Worcester had a lovely summer vibe and Southampton topped them all with creativity and diversity. But I have to say I was wowed by Winchester’s contribution to street-dance, which ticked all the boxes. I would say that at SUSUPA’s next competition they would be the ones to beat.
A special thanks to our belly-dancers and break-dancers who entertained the crowd whilst the judges were deliberating- very cool and extremely sexy. All in all it was a brilliant event which Southampton was proud to host and I encourage anyone who is even the tiniest bit interested in dance to sign up to one of the many dance societies out there and hopefully next year’s event will be even more amazing.
Results are as follows: SUSUPA Dance won 1st place in Novice Tap, Advanced Tap, Novice Ballet, Advanced Street, Advanced Contemp, Advanced Jazz and 2nd Place in Advanced Ballet.
The Edge would like to say a massive congratulations to SUSUPA Dance!
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further research has proved that Southampton’s advanced section’s was actually ‘russian character dance from the ballet coppelia and I was sent a link through Lottie Gibbons if you are more interested in the dance: