The University’s Sigma Psi Zeta Sorority hosted VOICES 2009: Dancing Through Barriers Friday at 8 p.m. in the Runk Green Room. The event featured the Boogie Bots, a hip-hop dance crew that performed during the second season of MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew.”
The purpose of the event, which has been held annually since 2004, was to emphasize multiculturalism and diversity through dance, Sigma Psi Zeta president Juliette Cho said. The Boogie Bots, whose members represent black, white and Filipino ethnicities, “use their culture[s] as inspiration,” Cho said. The event also featured an interview session during which dancers spoke about the ways in which their cultural backgrounds have been influential in affecting their artistic pursuits.
Every year, the chapter holds a different event in line with this same theme of multiculturalism. Last year’s VOICES program was a career panel that allowed students and various successful Asian-Americans in different professional fields to interact. Other events in the past include a program with geishas and another presented by Wong Fu Productions, an independent production company that started with an amateur music video made in a University of California, San Diego dormitory.
Planning for this year’s event was a semester-long process, Cho said. Once the Boogie Bots agreed to perform, Cho said she enlisted University dance groups X-tasee, Mahogany and Panda Fresh Crew — a group that formed out of the Chinese Student Association — to showcase their own skills.
The Bots are “one of the best dance crews in the country,” said Marc Hall of X-tasee.
Since the group’s fourth-place finish on ABDC, the best of any East Coast dance crew on the show to date, the Boogie Bots have been dancing at different venues throughout the country. Two weeks ago, they performed at Virginia Tech.
The group, which formed in 2005, first met through Culture Shock, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit hip-hop dance troupe dedicated to dance education and outreach to diverse communities. The crew began with Bryan “BOOGIEMIND” East, Mike “Magic Mike” Arellano and Miguel Almario, but has since grown to at least eight dancers, five of whom appeared at VOICES.
East in particular said he loves that the group’s popular recognition allows the dance troupe the opportunity to serve as a voice within the community. In filling that role, he said, Boogie Bots can raise awareness about issues like cultural diversity.
“We loving coming out to places and inspiring kids to make [the] dance scene bigger and better,” East said.
—compiled by Stephanie Glover
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