Boiler Bhangra Season 2017-2018

[varun.pandey]

Hey BTF!

My name is Varun, and I'm one of the captains of Boiler Bhangra. As our competitive season comes to an end, we'd love to share our videos!

We had the opportunity to compete at 4 comps this year: ADZ, Nachde Nashville, Derby City Dhoom (1st place), and Circle City Bhangra.

Thank you all for having us! Congrats again to all the placing teams for amazing performances at all the comps (MBT, Stanford, DRP, Spartan, Texas, NJJ, and FAUJ), and all other teams who competed! It was a huge honor to share the stage with so many great teams this season.

As a growing/new team within the competitive circuit, this year, we really wanted to make as much of a positive impact as possible. Compared to previous seasons, we’ve focused much more on set design and a consistent dance style. We’re extremely proud of the progress our team has made and the work that our dancers have put in, and we wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything without their dedication and passion for bhangra. As always, there’s immense room for improvement, and we're so excited to see what we can accomplish in the near future.

Big shout out to my co captains Nikhil Shekar, Medha Hiremath, and Nia Birt for putting their all into captaining this team and wouldn't be possible without these guys! One more thanks goes to our captain and graduating senior Nikhil for everything he's done for the team over the past 4 years. He's been a huge part for this team reaching its goals and we'll miss him killing it on stage for us in the future

Finally, here are our videos! We’ve posted the links from Derby City and Circle City below. Please post any feedback, critiques, or recommendations you may have! Good or bad, all is welcome and we'd really appreciate it!


Derby City Dhoom (1st Place):

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Red - Varun Pandey & Medha Hiremath
Ferozi - Nikhil Shekar & Nia Birt
Yellow - Rohit Sirosh & Esha Kulkarni
Purple - Rishabh Gupta & Sunanda Prasad
Green - Naman Misraraj & Maya Kumar
Black - Tejas Bedi & Priyanka Santhapuram


Circle City Bhangra:

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Ferozi - Varun Pandey & Medha Hiremath
Red - Nikhil Shekar & Nia Birt
Yellow - Rohit Sirosh & Puja Maheshwari
Blue - Tejas Bedi & Sunanda Prasad
Purple - Karan Bhatia & Maya Kumar
Green - Adit Mukherjee & Priyanka Santhapuram
Sher - Anmol Singh Guram

 

[JesseMangat]

Got to see you guys live at ADZ and gotta say was very pleasantly surprised, super clean and energetic performance. From there you guys only improved and it got a lot better by the time Circle came around. Some things to maybe improve upon, you guys have ample energy it looks like and no one dies and legs are nice and high, but use some of that energy to dance lower and add proper modhe as well to enhance your stage presence and really use your energy as an advantage over other competing teams. Choreo wise some ideas seemed already overdone by other teams in the circuit in terms of drops idk if that was intentional or not, but I'd recommend watching a ton of old videos in the circuit and make sure you aren't "stealing" anything and just really trying to add your own variations and twists to traditional drops. Last thing song choice was good but some of these songs were too recognizable, for example there were a lot of songs I've seen NJ just destroy recently. So when I hear Shokeen for daangs, I subconsciously think of NJ and how they murdered that song recently, which takes away a bit from your performance and presentation of the song/segment if it isn't up to par. So maybe some underused or unique song choice would also help your performances as well. Overall you guys look like you put in a ton of work this season and improved a lot, congrats on a great season and excited to see y'all up it a notch next year!

 

[Raghavtrip]

Got to see you all live at Nashvillle and then Derby City Dhoom, and I was really impressed by your performance and rapid improvement. It can be hard for a new/growing college team to break into the circuit and make a name for themselves while still training younger dancers and managing the team in other non-dancing aspects, and you did an excellent job. What really distinguished you from other growing college teams from my perspective was that it looked like you focused a lot on the team as a whole, rather than individual dancers--you all dance like one unit, and rarely does any individual person stick out. I especially enjoyed how you hit each formation cleanly and each movement seemed intentional, as well as that your energy shined throughout the set (also dhamaal was really hype). A few things to improve on for dancing ability would be cleaning your saap extensions (especially on double hits), ensuring that your modhe stay strong through the end of the set, and cleaning how each person holds/moves their khunde. From the set design perspective, keep working on trying new/innovative things in terms of choreo/formations and set construction to distinguish yourselves from other co-ed college teams. Now that it's clear you have a great approach to training your dancers and practicing the more minute details of the set, I think you can take more risks to make the performance even more memorable.

I'm really impressed by your improvement over this year and how hard you all worked to get this far in such a short amount of time. Looking forward to seeing you at competitions this coming year!

 

[UmerQureshi96]

-So saaps looks like y'all just went ham the entire time. I'd ask you this, if you look at the segment what part of the segment did you want me to remember? Biggest advice I could give is, give your set to your parent. Can they remember 8-10 moments? If they can't something has to change. A judge has to remember your set at the end of the night if you wanna place. Thus your set has to be memorable, right now that saap segment is hard, but you're not building up well. Rn you're just throwing everything at the wall. I'd say look at the set we made for Bruin, notice how the second saap song is literally us just double saaping for 32 beats. That allows us to highlight the drop https://youtu.be/QdP5qGkwpsQ?t=1m45s
-The drop at 4:36 suffers from a similar thing, you put jadoo singha, phummania run, and kicha all within 5 seconds of each other. What do you want me to remember from that?
-4:50 clever transition
-5:00 I'd say next year don't do anything like that, circuit is getting tired of it
-5:15 so KPGD just got 1st place at Bruin doing this, don't copy stuff from a team that won 1st at a big comp because think from a judges perspective. When you take something from a performance that many people have already seen, all I'm thinking about how that other team did it so much better and ruins the impact of the drop. Again 5:39 we got 1st place at clutch, you're gonna get called out on ish like that
-5:52 the drop was solid doe
-Yo one thing that's a pet peeve for most judges is blowing air while dancing so whoever that red dude is during power jhoomer, tell him it makes him look wack
-7:33 just listen to the song, song is slow but you did a switch with the double dhammal that wasn't that great and seems incongruous with the mix
-8:01 again, KPGD 1st place popularized the shiv chand step, don't do it
-Easiest dancing fix I'd tell y'all. Stop shaking your head so much
makes ya look like a raas dancer
-Overall solid start. Biggest thing is fundamentals. Basic execution will elevate this performance from not not placing at all to in deliberation from 3rd. Listen to @thebhangrapodcast we did an episode about training form from the ground up


If y'all got questions feel free to hit me up on facebook or wherever (don't ask on IG I barely check that shit)