By Wang Ziqian (20A01B), Chairperson
“5…6…7…8… RSD NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA EHHHHHHH!!!”
Hi! Welcome to Raffles Street Dance. We invite you to one of the most exciting one-and-a-half-year long journeys with a promise of a good time. Here, you’ll find a team of spirited dancers, passionate and always eager to learn; every batch of street dancers has something different to offer and their own special stories to share. Apart from our annual Street Showcase, we perform at multiple events (varying depending on the year), such as Founders’ Day, Batch Night, and Graduation Night.
Our CCA sessions are on Mondays and Tuesdays. Nearing performances, we step up our practice sessions and sometimes see one another’s faces almost daily in order to perfect our formation changes and clean up our steps at the mirrors. Most of our practices are held at the Multi-Purpose Studio, but if you asked any street dancer, their home would be at the mirrors.
During our normal practices lasting 2.5 hours, we learn and strengthen our basics (such as body isolation) and genres (such as hip hop) after warm ups and physical training (PT), led by our instructor Ms Stefanie Leong (Ms Steffi!). Basic dance sets aside, we also often get to play with choreography and layering with our batchmates. Sometimes, we even have exciting group challenges to choreograph to a certain song or theme. Always privileged with opportunities to explore different genres, every single one of us is invited to break out of our own comfort zones and try styles we’ve never tried before. Just recently, we had a short introduction session to breakdancing—despite its relative unfamiliarity to most of us, we were the most excited at the thought of being able to do power moves or simply a shoulder freeze. During Homebound—our showcase this year—items consisted of a variety of genres such as hip hop, urban, contemporary, and street jazz, with all the J2 dancers performing in multiple items and each J1 assigned to one item on top of the finale dance.
Apart from merely learning dance moves, many of us are also accorded the opportunity to create our own choreography, stringing together our own steps and designing our own formations. Others have the opportunity to choose or even design costumes and sets, giving performances like our showcase a creative and dimensional flair.
Just as how being a dancer doesn’t just mean expanding our dance vocabulary, our passion and grit for the CCA is also found in more than just dance. The spirit of our performance, our collective breathing as we execute our steps, our determination to keep giving all of our energy for every single run, our team huddles before performances where we sing and jump and hype ourselves up, our hugs and high fives exchanged backstage right before our performance… Raffles Street Dance is more than just a CCA for all of us: it is a team and we are a family.
Hard as it is to fully capture the warmth of being a street dancer, we hope this short preview offers an enticing glimpse of what our CCA does. With this new year, we enthusiastically invite you to join our team. Auditions consist of learning and performing a choreography, and an incorporation of some freestyling. Absolutely no background dancing experience is needed, so don’t worry and we hope to see you at Auditions 2020!