Hot stepping for cold climes

The Ninth Annual Winter Dance Festival 2012 enters its concluding week

November 25, 2012 04:59 pm | Updated 04:59 pm IST - Bangalore

It’s time to do the shimmy shimmy shake. The Ninth Annual Winter Dance Festival 2012 featuring seven dance styles across four weeks from November 5 has entered its last lap giving Bangaloreans a final chance to learn from internationally acclaimed dance maestros Jeevitha, Prithvi and Ree. The festival enters its final week with the Rueda de Casino from November 26 to 30.

Describing how the dance festival came to be, instructor Jeevitha says, “Prithvi started this festival eight years ago. The concept behind the festival is that one gets to learn different Latin American dances in a week. When Prithvi started, it was just a small group, but now we have about 100 students for the festival with about 55 for each style.”

The festival has brought in several Latin American dance forms that are unusual in Bangalore like the Bachata and Rueda De Casino. “The Rueda de Casino is a Cuban form of salsa that is done in a big group. The dancers form a circle and partner up between the men and women, and then perform different patterns keeping the circle intact,” explains Jeevitha.

According to Jeevitha one of the most popular styles of the workshop is the freestyle, which is the Funk and Bollywood week. The Salsa style follows closely behind in popularity.

The festival is expected to end with a bang on December 1 with students performing what they have learnt along with their instructors for their friends and family. The show will be held at St. Johns Auditorium in Frazer Town beginning 7 p.m, with walk-in entry permitted.

“An exciting thing about the final show is that the students haven’t seen their instructors perform yet. We will be performing at the Berlin Salsa Congress 2013, so we will be coming up with a Salsa number and we’ll perform a piece of that at the final show,” says Jeevitha.

Classes are held at the Just Dance studio, Coles Road, for Rs. 1,000 per week. Call 9845166667/9900647067/9845122220 or log onto >www.justdance.in for more information.

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