Chargers K-Pop dance crew showcase in Bucknall Theater, Orange, Dec. 2, 2023.
On a night in early December, the Charger K-pop Dance Crew (CKDC) held their first big event since their founding in February, their Winter Showcase.
Despite a 30-minute delay to the start of the performance, people were still excited to see dance performances, as evidenced by the large number of people at Bucknall Theater and the cheering throughout the night.
In an introduction to the evening, Julia Inacio, the crew’s vice president and junior criminal justice major, said, “We are a newer [Recognized Student Organization], so we want to show you guys a little bit of what we have.”
While she spoke, crew members dressed all in black lined up by the rows of chairs in the theater. After Inacio’s speech, music began and more crew members came onto the stage and began to dance.
Onstage, six people lined up, swerving out of the line to give well-coordinated moves. Soon afterward, the rest of CKDC came out to dance, each dancer moving quickly and efficiently.
The next performance came from a dance organization that started this semester, the Tropixx Dance Collective. Tropixx dancers wore blue t-shirts with their organization’s name on them. They danced the coca to Afro-Caribbean-style music and midway through, they went into pairs to dance with slow, calculated hip movements.
Up next was another performance from CKDC that had a Hollywood Western theme, as described by Inacio and evidenced by one of the four dancers on stage wearing a bandana. When the music grew faster and more intense, the dancers matched that tempo by giving quick movements to each beat. Soon, more dancers came out, many of them wearing cowboy hats and swagger in their smooth entrance.
A technical difficulty tripped up the dancers, but that did not stop them from jumping back in with on-beat clapping from the audience to support them.
The story told through dance was “cowboys” on stage getting into a fight, leading to more intense dancing.
Up next were performances who used high school as a theme. The first one was a recreation of the “Jingle Bell Rock” dance from the film “Mean Girls,” with each dancer recreating each move perfectly. When the music “malfunctions” as it did during the film’s dance scene, it remixes into a different song and the dancers gave hand-based performances while moving around the stage.
After a 10-minute intermission, CKDC members danced, according to Inacio, a “sexier concept” inspired by the Miss Majorettes, another dance organization on campus. The performance began with one person sitting in a chair with others lined up in front of her, all of them wearing black. As the dancers moved closer to the chair, the seated dancer stood up and moved toward the middle to kick off the dance.
The next performance had a group of five people, one of them wearing a cheer uniform while the rest wore sports jerseys and bunny ears that are reminiscent of “Space Jam.” There were many leg sweeps throughout the performance along with collaborative moves.
Another guest dance group, Incendio Dance Project, involved four pairs of dancers wearing sparkly black tops and black leggings with one in each pair either wearing sneakers or sparkly heels. Everyone danced with their partner and smiled throughout the quick movements of their feet and occasional twirls.
To end the night, CKDC began with a few members wearing pink and sparkly clothing. They stood in their respective locations for a while but gave quick moves that were full of energy.
At the end was a gathering of all the CKDC members wearing vibrant clothing and performing the same moves, creating something reminiscent of a well-coordinated dance party.
