In­nis Fran­cis

in­nis_fran­cis@ya­hoo.com

Dance pro­mot­er Keefin Rawl­ins con­tin­ues to use con­tem­po­rary-style dance as a form of es­capism to build the youth in to­day’s so­ci­ety.

With­out bias, Rawl­ins said the “dance” is sat­u­rat­ed with dif­fer­ent clas­si­fi­ca­tions, which all re­sult in a wide av­enue of self-ex­pres­sion for youths to do some­thing mean­ing­ful.

Rawl­ins be­gan Sev­en to Smoke All Styles Dance Bat­tle in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his dance or­gan­i­sa­tion, Un­stop­pable 4CE Unit­ed, 11 years ago to pro­mote the skills of young dancers.

He said his in­tent for the bat­tle was to mir­ror pos­i­tiv­i­ty and to in­flu­ence youths to show­case their tal­ents in a friend­ly and com­pet­i­tive way.

Rawl­ins said the mar­ket has a lot of new ter­mi­nol­o­gy for dance in­clud­ing Bboy (break­ing), pop­ing, dance­hall, and many oth­er dif­fer­ent styles of dance.

Dance acts from around the coun­try took part in the bat­tle burn-out held at the San Fer­nan­do Cre­ative Arts Cen­tre on Ju­ly 23. Four­teen com­peti­tors took part, among them 11-year-old Sabri “Smee­gle” Seep­er­sad.

Seep­er­sad was the youngest in the com­pe­ti­tion, win­ning four rounds and was named the peo­ple’s choice and she re­ceived $100.

De­spite Rawl­ins’ many at­tempts to se­cure spon­sor­ship for the event, he said, he al­ways had to use his funds.

“All the fund­ing was from my pock­et. I got no spon­sors, it is al­ways a chal­lenge to get spon­sors … we don’t get any sup­port. I save mon­ey and host the event be­cause of my love and pas­sion for dance. The crime rate is high and this would be a pos­i­tive thing for the up­com­ing gen­er­a­tion. In this com­pe­ti­tion, all are wel­come, there is no lim­it, in­clud­ing con­tem­po­rary, clas­si­cal … once dance is in­volved, all are wel­come,” he said.

Rawl­ins said the per­form­ers were all high­ly skilled in their re­spec­tive ar­eas of dance. He said he was al­so hap­py to have tal­ent scouts at the event in search of po­ten­tial dancers in the up­com­ing Pan Amer­i­can Games, World Games, and Com­mon­wealth Games.

For the an­nu­al bat­tle, Rawl­ins said: “My goal is to get this com­pe­ti­tion go­ing re­gion­al­ly; to be host­ed in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. The Caribbean has so much tal­ent that the world needs to see. And then I’d like to take it in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.”

Andy De Leon, of San­gre Grande, re­tained the ti­tle for a third year. The 20-year-old con­struc­tion work­er said his goal is to open a dance school. He said dance com­pe­ti­tions were his way of chal­leng­ing his com­pet­i­tive po­ten­tial.

De Leon held strong through­out the bat­tle and even topped his dance teacher and placed first over­all; he re­ceived a tro­phy, a cash prize and a cham­pi­onship belt.

He said: “I would like to see more com­pe­ti­tions like this. I see it as a way to train and get bet­ter at my style, be­cause nor­mal­ly when I dance I per­form nor­mal­ly, but when there is com­pe­ti­tion with oth­er peo­ple, it is a big open­ing. I do see my­self bet­ter­ing my­self from the last year of the last bat­tle … every­body likes to see some­body flip, some­body do those kinds of crazy stunts.”

He added: “This com­pe­ti­tion has both ben­e­fits; to in­spire young chil­dren to come out and dance and do stuff they nev­er ac­tu­al­ly tried do­ing but at the same time you have to make a liv­ing. I don’t know when there will be a com­pe­ti­tion again.”

First vice pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Ball­room Dance As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, De­clan Hive, said the as­so­ci­a­tion has been work­ing with the Min­istry of Sport and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, and the World Dance­hall Fed­er­a­tion Or­gan­i­sa­tion to source dancers to rep­re­sent this coun­try at the Olympic Games in Paris.

Hive said: “I am here scout­ing to see what po­ten­tial we have, so in my up­com­ing meet­ing I will talk to the ex­ec­u­tives to see if we get some of those ath­letes here. I am see­ing break­ers (break dancers), Andy De Leon and Sabri Seep­er­sad, Eli­hu Stephen. I see the po­ten­tial.”

Hive said the scout­ing process be­gan dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic but the vir­tu­al pre­sen­ta­tions were not like at­tend­ing the phys­i­cal bat­tle zone.