The Dancing Experience

For our presentation during the Carnival that we established for our Brazilian Dance class, we chose to do our parade performance on the theme of Water Pollution. It was a theme that we all agreed on because of the Orixias that we thought would be excellent to portray in the dance. The characters in the dance were all types of fishes such as a shark, clown fish, crab, turtle, beta fish, and a jellyfish. The two main characters in the dance were the two Orixias Omolu and the water goddess Iemanja.  We chose the theme of water pollution because we believed that it was a problem that the world is facing today and it also related to our dance moves and the Orixias.

 

            The story of out performance or the setup was about two major powers colliding and it affected the living things around them and in our case, the fish. Fish would be living normally in the ocean and then Omolu would come in and make the water around the fish dirty and eventually all the fish would later on die. Also having the predator (shark) swim around the ocean without his food (fish), really made it hard for him to survive so he also died as the fish did. Then when the fish were all dead, Iemanja came in and fought with Omolu and killed her and then she revived all the fish. Then once the fish came back, they started worshiping her.

 

            We were able to put the whole story line into our performance very well mostly because of the dancing styles that samba brings. Since samba can be danced with many styles of music, it was easy for us to find a song that would work with our performance. For the dance we chose the song “She Came Along” by Kid Cudi.  The song does not relate to the story line but the beat or the bass line really did help us out because of the movements we were doing. It all contributed greatly and the dance was able to work well with the song.

 

            My job for the Sub-Zero group was the job of looking for our locations in which we practiced and where we had our meetings. For the most part we had our very first meetings at the University Village and then in Diego’s apartments. At first we began to talk about how everything is going to be. Since we just needed to talk, I decided to go to places in which we were able to talk about how we were going to make the dance. Once we began actually practicing the dances, we practiced at the UCR dorms. After getting the entrance, we began to practice at the actual parade route after we were shown how the parade was going to be. In the last few days, all our meetings were at the actual parade route. That was basically my whole participation in the group other than buying some shirts for some group members and giving a few ideas for the dance.

 

            We had to cut some things from the performances in order to make it shorter because at the practice parade it was too long. But everything came out perfect for the final performance. I had a lot of fun in the class because I would never pictured myself actually dancing in a parade in front of people in school. It was a new experience for me because I was usually a very shy person. Being able to dance during lecture was very enjoying because in the beginning I did not know what I was getting myself into, but throughout the course I guess I could say that I actually changed. Before I went into class I basically only knew about Brazil from their soccer based views and the land of very beautiful woman. But I was able to learn more about the carnivals and their whole traditions and gods. It was very interesting. The whole course ended with a bang because of the parade we did. I would actually laugh if anybody told me that I would dancing in a parade in front of the school months before. But I truly believe that dancing in with the whole class and being able to enjoy it made actually get enough strength in order to dance in front of the school. Overall it was really great class that I enjoyed, I am not just saying that because I would like to get a good grade for my final. But I really mean it that I had a lot of fun and I met a lot of people and it was great experience, I loved it.