Last Thursday during Flex, dozens of student dancers gathered in the Knight gym. Preparing for Jesuit’s community celebration assembly, dozens of people danced in coordination with music from a variety of cultures.
Leaders of the South Asian Culture club–seniors Sash Ravishankar and Simran Sahita–stood outside the gym to answer questions about their preparation, with practices starting in late January.
“We’ve been doing a couple practices every week for a few hours every practice,” Sahita said.
Ravishankar said that the process starts even sooner, with leaders brainstorming ideas for songs as far back as the start of this year.
The songs themselves are selected by a team of leaders, with the goal of having a good mix of songs that represent the different parts of South Asia.
“I think the goal is to honor different parts of South Asia. There’s different movie industries [in South Asia]. So we try to touch on different industries in South Asia and get some fast paced songs, as well as some slower songs,” Ravishankar said.
Sahita said that they also try to have some songs that represent female voices.
“One of the songs from this year is from a movie called Queen which talks about a girl who leaves her marriage that she doesn’t want and focuses on individualism,” Sahita said.
With sixty people participating in the dance this year, coordinating practices is a challenge.
“You want to bring people in and you want people to participate. So making sure that everyone feels comfortable and excited for [the dance] is a challenge because there’s so many people [doing] so many different things,” Sahita said.
Senior Sophia Alicata is one of three students leading the Chinese Culture club in their dance. The Chinese Culture club has been preparing for the dance since late January, and has twelve dancers participating.
Alicata said that their dance was designed to be an improvement on previous years.
”We didn’t really have much time because finals were pushed back a week. So we kind of recycled an old dance. But we’re changing it and trying to make it better,” Alicata said.
Alicata said that challenges this year centered mostly around making sure that new participants were able to keep up with the veterans.
“We have a couple of new dancers that don’t have a lot of dance background. So teaching them the steps is obviously more time consuming and challenging, just because they don’t have a background in dance,” Alicata said.
Amanda Montez, the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion said that for some groups, the practicing starts very early.
“We usually get comments before Christmas break about students practicing,” Montez said.
In the three weeks before the assembly, the DEI office starts to help coordinate final rehearsals.
“Three weeks before the assembly, we will [coordinate] after school practice, flex practices, and we do a big Saturday afternoon dress rehearsal,” Montez said.
Ravishankar said that he has done the dance two times before, but had been in the club since his Freshman year.
“We celebrate different festivals and things like that but this is the event that everyone looks forward to because it’s the whole club coming together to put on this performance. It’s pretty cool,” Ravishankar said.
Sahita said that the club had been doing dances since before she arrived at Jesuit.
“We’ve been doing this for a very long time[…] and I think it’s just like the one thing that brings our club together the most because when you dance with people, you’re allowed to get to know them better and I feel like I wouldn’t have known a lot of these [other dancers] without the dance,” Sahita said.
