One of the more prestigious hip hop dance competitions finally came to the south this year. It has been more than a year in the making to bring Prelude to the Southeast. I guess there just wasn’t enough of a hip hop dance scene down here to warrant Prelude making the arrangements to have a Southeast chapter. This last Saturday May 7th, Florida came out hard and proved to the greater hip hop community that there is some serious dance emerging south of the Mason/Dixon line.
Taking the first place title this year was a new all-female squad by the name of Collaboration Kids. Straight out of Orlando and under the direction of Megan Batoon, they cleaned house and received a standing ovation for their show. After breaking up a three-way tie for second place with some crazy judges’ score sheet magic, Purple Elephant Society out of Atlanta took home a second place trophy. This group was made up of members from Swagger Crew of MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew” and they brought some hard, polished routines to Tampa. Taking home a third place trophy by less than a point is my very own Apocalypse Dance Crew. We filled up the stage with brand new members that had been dancing with us for less than a month and also received a standing ovation.
Here’s our show:
The event was everything you would want from a close knit, albeit competitive, hip hop community. Everyone had love and respect for other dancers and could be seen shaking hands and networking their contacts during and after the show. An ongoing freestyle battle, along with several exhibition performances kept the audience entertained between acts. Apoc, of course, was goofing off the entire time after their performance and had mad love for many of the other crews who showed up to compete including: U4ria, Illmatik Phlow (out of Miami), Remedy, and F.O.B (out of Orlando).
Coming home from the trip our team was high on life and energized; ready to take on the next dance challenge. I think we built ourselves up a little too high from our performance on Saturday but we were quickly humbled after watching our video from the show. Keeping our high energy we refocused our goals and sought to be the great dancers we all want to be in our minds. Even with great success, we found that there is still something to learn and improve upon. We have a winning formula, we just need to tweak it and perfect it. Settling for what we have now would only hinder us in the long run. We know that competitions like this are only the beginning. What we left with as a team is greater than what we arrived with and it will propel us to the next level.
We are now poised and ready to roll. We have big things on the horizon for both ourselves and the team. With new blood on the squad that knows what it feels like to work hard for an entertaining routine, we plan on using our momentum to continue competing in Florida and eventually branch out to other regions to the north and the west. The plan is simple: World Domination. We just have to take it one step at a time.