Articles

MODF 2010

by Sze Yen (29 Aug 2010)

The Malaysian Open Dance Fest was a huge success. Read all about it here!

The Malaysian Open Dance Fest, jointly organised by Emily Mah, Lane Lee and Teresa Liu, into its second year, was a brimming success once again! The competition included a wide range of dance genres, including belly dance, line dance, hip hop, street jazz, and a new one which few had heard of - Persian Aero Dance.

This year, the compeition saw the largest number of participants in the belly dance categories. The day events were dominated by the belly dance events, with belly dance individuals of various skill levels ranging from novice to advanced, and of various age groups ranging from little ones under the age of 12 to dancers above the age of 45. The belly dance Individual Advanced event was a very exciting one because this time, unlike all the other events, the dancers were not given pre-selected music - the advanced dancers had to dance to live music performed by a musician. None of the dancers knew what music was going to be played; they only found out on the day itself, where they were given a preview of the music before they went on the floor for the actual competition.

And while belly dance is usually reserved for the ladies, the competition did see two male entries - one in the Intermediate Open and another in the Intermediate Advanced, both of whom were so good they made it into the finals.

Hip hop and street jazz individual categories saw an increase in the number of participants compared to the year before. The team events however, were notably smaller this time, with the exception of hip hop and belly dance troupe, which saw about nine teams each. Every team was given a fixed piece of music which they had to choreograph their routine to, which may have been the reason for the decrease in participation; however this was obviously no deterrent to many teams, and did not affect the quality of the routines of the different teams. The judges were supposed to pick the top three from each category for the night finals, but the hip hop teams were so good that they ended up picking five.

The organisers also initially had planned to put a few teams on the floor at the same time, but changed their minds and decided to put one team at a time, which was a good decision, even though they ended up taking a longer time to complete the entire championship. This way, every team's routine could be properly watched by not only the judges, but by the audience; and some teams were certainly very entertaining!

The night events were filled with the line dance events and the finals of the belly dance and hip hop events. Line dance this year had a notable decrease in participation, so much so that they had to combine events. The line dance team events were supposed to be separated into Open, Crystal (30-44 years of age) and Diamond (above 45 years of age), but there were only a total of four teams - two for Open, one for Crystal and one for Diamond, so all four teams were combined to fight in the Open category. This did not prove to be a severe disadvantage for those in the higher age bracket though, because the Diamond team came out second.

One of the most exciting line dance events was the Novice Diamond category. The organisers put both the Novice Crystal and Novice Diamond on the floor at the same time to be judged due to the few numbers (Crystal had 4 participants whereas Diamond had 2 participants), but it was evident that the audience loved watching the Diamond dancers more - they were screaming and cheering for the two ladies throughout the event! Because they were both so good, the judges couldn't decide who was better and decided to award both of them the first place - a well-deserved placing. In fact, one of the ladies didn't even belong to the Diamond age category; she was actually supposed to be in Gold, which is reserved for dancers above the age of 60.

All in all, it had been a fantastic competition, and we look forward to the Malaysian Open Dance Fest 2011!