UGA’s Best of the Worst Dance Crew

Winners D-Coy celebrate. Photo by Blane Marable.

By Ashley Bene

Hosted by the Committee for Black Cultural Programming, the UGA’s Best Dance Crew competition had its inaugural event on March 22, 2011. Tickets were free for students, and in hindsight, even the free entry couldn’t make up for the wasted hour of my life.

Five UGA dance groups - Georgia Dance Team, D-Coy, Red Hotz, Mahogany, and Sweet Dreams - competed. Each team performed twice: one regular number and one number in which they had to complete a challenge such as dancing in slow-mo. Of course, none of this was explained to the audience before the competition began, and I found myself asking people around me why some groups had to do a “challenge” while others had regular numbers. It was not until the first repeat group of the evening that the course of the competition was clear.

The only group that stood out was the second group, called D-Coy. They are comprised of males and females and specialize in hip-hop dancing. Their performances were clean and energetic (one of the judges said, “too energetic”).

They stayed in sync with each other, while also incorporating their own personalities into the dance moves with facial expressions and body language. When they did transitional moves to change formations during their numbers, they kept the transitions short, careful not to waste precious dance time. They came into the competition as a crowd favorite, and their second routine got the only standing ovation of the evening.

The other four groups were all-female and despite each group claiming to have experience with a number of different types of dance (jazz, tap, lyrical, hip-hop, contemporary, ballet, etc), they relied on sexiness to appeal to the crowd.

The groups are interchangeable in my memory as I remember the competition. The one who stands out most was Georgia Dance Team, which is in its first year at UGA, because they were the least polished performers. Two of their dancers almost collided, and many had rubbery knees and legs as they attempted spins. They looked at their feet a lot, and one girl looked so bored I was expecting her to yawn in the middle of the number.

The other three groups had better energy and covered any mistakes they made more smoothly, but their routines were about shaking their hips around and hair-tossing rather than any challenging dance moves.

Now, I don’t expect college students to get on stage and perform straight ballet or tap pieces to hip-hop/pop songs, but they can incorporate more of the principles of these dance forms into it to stay true to the art form. There’s nothing impressive about dancing like you’re in a night club. Most of the girls I know do that every weekend with no prior dance experience. Perhaps the worst moves these groups made was over using poses.

One group did sexy poses for the last thirty seconds of a song, while the other groups used poses as transitional parts of routines while some of the performers moved around the stage, posing as they walked. There is nothing impressive or creative about posing. If you want to pose, model; aside from the start and end of a dance, there is very little room to waste music on poses.

As if a dance competition full of bad dancers wasn’t enough, the judges were pretty clueless as well. The four judges included the Myers Hall Area Coordinator, Adam Scarbaro; two basketball players, Chris Barnes and Trey Tompkins; and, the only judge with dance background, a female UGA student, Shirleyse Costen.

After each number, the judges got to critique the dancers, which ruined any chance of the competition or the judges’ abilities being taken seriously. Scarbaro told nearly every group, “good job,” which garnered laughter from the audience after the first three performances. Costen made helpful observations a few times, but made a snotty comment when she told D-Coy she “has stepped before and wasn’t impressed” with their challenge to include step moves, even though it was a clean, energetic dance. Barnes and Tompkins were oblivious to the dancing and spent the evening ogling every scantily-clad female on the stage. After a particularly sexy number by Sweet Dreams, Barnes said, “I’m gonna have sweet dreams tonight!”

Lucky for the judges picking a winner wasn’t rocket science, as D-Coy was easily the best group there and had the most audience support. Mahogany earned second place over Sweet Dreams, who came in third. Really though, winning UGA’s Best Dance Crew is meaningless, as nobody in the competition was that impressive.