DANCE REVIEW: WEST COAST CROWN
Electrifying Indian Dances Shake Up Stage at Wadsworth Theater
Westwood, California – Whoever said culture is lost among our youth clearly did not attend the first-ever West Coast Crown dance competition displaying some of the finer points of Indian performing arts on February 20th.
With twelve colleges from around the United States descending upon the Wadsworth Theater on the Veteran Affairs campus in Westwood, the West Coast Crown competition featured four different dance categories with three teams vying for first-place top honors in each genre; one of the four category winners was also announced as overall winner.
Hosted by Acron Entertainment, West Coast Crown is an intercollegiate South Asian dance competition featuring the various styles of dances including Bhangra, Raas/Garba, Hindi Film/Bollywood, and Fusion.
Among the participating schools included UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of Pittsburgh, and Boston University. It was UC Irvine’s Mitraas team who grabbed overall first-place honors, earning the title of West Coast Crown after a stunningly beautiful Raas/Garba performance while sporting elaborate Gujarati-themed orange dance uniforms.
Mitraas also nabbed first-place honors in the Raas/Garba category, edging out teams from UCLA and UC-Riverside.
In the other geographically specific traditional dance category, USC’s Jachdi Jawadi earned the trophy for best Bhangra team, handily defeating University of Pittsburgh’s Steel City Bhangra and Southern California-based LAPD.
Among the team competing in the more modern-themed dance categories, UC Davis’s Toofan team was named the top Bollywood squad. Their filmy dance-story about a scientist who creates the perfect woman and falls in love with her was well-executed, its high level of energy and solid chemistry among dancers more than enough to separate the team from USC’s Anjaane and University of Texas’s Nach Baliye.
Finally, the sole non-Southern California team to claim victory at the West Coast Crown competition was Cal-Berkeley’s Zahanat, whose revolutionary all-male dance team that experimented with different dance forms throughout its routine was among the show’s most memorable. In winning the Fusion category, Zahanat defeated Boston University’s Jalwa and Mandala.
After winners of each of the categories were announced at the end of Saturday’s dance program, UC Irvine was named the best of the best among a field that included Cal-Berkeley’s Fusion team, UC-Davis’s Bollywood squad and USC’s Bhangra crew.
Along with the competition rounds, the West Cost Crown featured a South Asian a capella group, UCLA’s own Naya Zamana.
The show was judged by Achinta S. McDaniel, Nakul Dev Mahajan, Kuljit Sangha, Sachin Bhatt, Hannah B. Curtis, Hiral Joshi, Shivani Thakkar and Johnathan Bosco “JB” Noronha; each judge has significant choreography or artistic direction experience.
West Coast Crown was organized by Acron Entertainment, a group organizing South Asian entertainment programs for audiences in the western United States, including concerts and dance competitions.
