Bending the rules

Holland, Romania, and South Africa. Courageous is the word I’d give to them. I would never be able to go up and perform alone in front of so many people.
Romania, she had a beautiful voice, everyone was absorbed in her first song, cheering and screaming, applauding for her talent, but after two songs. It just would’ve helped if we understood the lyrics, giving too little and having the audience wanting more is always preferred to giving too much in performances.
That can be said for South Africa, amusing to watch at first, but after a while it was repetitive, and had no dramatic peak.
Holland… I applaud your courage.
Hawaii/Polynesia gave a beautiful performance, well prepared, and enthusiastic.
But the rule about at least one of the performers having to be from that country… Wait! Is Hawaii a country? Hmm. Maybe I’m just not that educated enough. What is a state and what is a country? I’ll have to think about that one. Somewhere in my uneducated brain I thought Hawaii was part of USA. Where did I get such an idea? But if it was part of USA then two groups can’t compete for the same country, and one would be judged out of the performances, right? My conclusion: my education in not sufficient enough to judge if Hawaii is a country or not.
Ok, at least I know that Taiwan is a country, but the two people representing the country were African-American, and Japanese… singing… in English and Japanese??? Was the major language in Taiwan, Japanese? Of course only the Japanese people recognized this, hey, at least I thought it was Taiwanese until a Japanese friend told me about it. Where is the ‘Taiwan’ part in this? Oh, Taiwan was ceded to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, so they’re singing about their sad history in Japanese, right?
India, oh, that’s the country that had the personal cameraman! Was that cameraman part of the performance, or was he just up there to take pictures? Now, this is not the first International Festival I saw, and I’ve seen other performances done by India, but what they did this year, wasn’t it just disco dancing? Their beautiful multi-colored Sarees were always a sight to see. Where did they go? Are they telling us all the traditions are molding into one uniform pot of modernization? They could’ve done that dance in Sarees and I would have thought it was Indian, but they chose to get rid of that tradition too. The young people these days.
And of course the almighty Japan. Keeping first place for as long as I remember. Always with the most performers, always pulling money out of their pockets just for this one event that they pour their hearts out to. Too bad the program misspelled some of their names, and left out some of the names of the performers; well that’s what happens when there are too many names and they all sound the same, like Rika, Risa, Kouji, and Kouji. I still think they deserved 1st prize other than the fact that there were only two large groups and only two prizes for large group performances, but if they were competing against themselves, their worst ever! I couldn’t see as much synchronization as I saw in their previous performances. They used to move as though they were one! It was almost scary to see them so uniform (in size, too). But this year didn’t give me the chills of uniformity that I expected. Of course the confetti from the balcony made me forget the whole performance, and admire the falling paper (who cleaned that up? Probably took more time than making those things)
Going into the non-country performance, Tae Kwon Do was great, the woman kicking all the men’s butts was hilarious but it didn’t have the power, and the beating didn’t look too painful. Except for one person who was pretty good at acting beaten up, or was he really being beaten up? Their preparation and effort didn’t match what Soul Beat went through. They never let us down on the comic performance done with so much more strength and effort that they show on stage.Although they lack the all too famous back-flips and whatever you call those crazy flying moves, their efforts apparently exceeded those of Tae Kwon Do. Oh, and I saw two exactly same names on the soul beat list, mistake or coincidence?
And lastly BIA (Bridgeport International Academy), cute, with everyone in the background swaying and singing. They’re high school students, right? I’ll just leave it at cute.
All in all I can’t really say anything, ’cause I didn’t have the will and courage to go up and perform that night. If I did go up I probably would’ve gotten the worst review.
Overall a decent event let’s just be careful on the rules that are handed in. Those rules are given to follow, not as advice. And if they’re going to be rules, enforce them next time, or no one’s going to follow it. And judges… I know it’ll be easier to judge if there were more performances to compare it to, but good job any ways. Let’s look forward to next year’s event.