Northwestern Bhangra 2017-2018 Season

[abhinavtalwar1]

BTF,

Here are a few of our performances from this past year. Hope ya'll enjoy watching them, and please offer critiques if you can so that our next years team can grow from them.

I'd like to give a huge shoutout to all the teams we competed against this year – we were privileged enough to see some awesome collegiate sets live, which inspired us to push harder and improve our set more and more. That being said, I'm incredibly proud of the final product our team put forward this season, as it was definitely the best that it's ever been in my three years on the team. We took on 5 new members, 2 of whom danced in set for the first time (after learning bhangra for just 3 months!). We got into Blowout for the first time in my college career. We took home first at Crossroads, and got pretty close to placing at both Nachde Nashville and Nachle Deewane.

Lastly, this post would be incomplete without a huge shoutout to Legitamit for patiently working with us as first-time (largely naive) captains. Thanks for creating a dope mix.


-Abhinav Talwar, Akshay Goyal



Dancers:
Red - Abhinav Talwar, Ankita Chowdhry
Black - Akshay Goyal, Yasmine Diara
Teal - Rohan Savoor, Kinnera Vallabhaneni
Blue - Rushi Shah, Divya Ramesh
Pink - Daniel Abia, Megan McDonnell
Green - Vishal Giridhar, Arzu Singh
Yellow - Siddhant Ahuja
Chimta - Bijal Mehta / Heena Srivastava


Crossroads of Bhangra:


Nachle Deewane:


Blowout:

 

[sdadoo15]

Congrats Northwestern on an awesome season! I will say, sitting in the Blowout audience, I was really really amazed with what I saw on stage. I had seen a video of you guys prior to Blowout (shocker right, a video leaked ) and I remember a lot of our team was extremely impressed with what we saw and got a little more nervous leading up to Blowout because of it. This set was imo one of the better collegiate sets this year and the energy was phenomenal!

Positives from watching this (Blowout) at first glance:
- the intro was very, very cool. the first time I saw this, I freaked out. i could've guessed that the girl to guy switch would happen, or something of that sort, but the way y'all executed it was phenomenal. the immediate change of pace from hype to graceful was the unexpected part, and consequently what sold it, for me.
- the jugni formation concept at 6:14 was my favorite part of this set. it was a creative concept, yet it was simple enough to be digestible when watching it for the first time
- energy was very, very good. it made you all very exciting to watch and I thought you were on par with the placing teams with regards to this

Critiques for moving forward:
- not sure what the judges said, but the biggest overall issue I had was with footwork fundamentals. I noticed a lot of legs that weren't getting up (i.e. kicking your feet all the way up during taps/pataka footwork), and many dancers looked grounded in their footwork (i.e. not bouncing off the ground during each step).
- shoulders were for the most part absent in my opinion. I noticed this especially on the slow morchaal drop - if you are going to have an entire drop devoted to morchaal, it has to be executed near perfectly. footwork was good here, but there were no shoulder movement and I lost interest in the drop quickly because of that.
- the only other critique I had was with timing and the minor errors. there were enough moments throughout the set where I noticed 1 or 2 people make small mistakes. and while no dancer single-handedly made a lot of mistakes, the small 2 or 3 mistakes that every dancer made added up to a lot. by mistakes, I don't necessarily mean choreo errors. small things like being slightly off on a betka can make a huge difference when looking at overall team execution/cleanliness.

This was an unbelievable performance, especially taking into account the amount of newer dancers and first-year captains. I'm really looking forward to seeing you guys in the future - I hope next year's leadership continues to build upon the huge steps that you guys took this year in establishing Northwestern in the collegiate circuit. Once the dancing catches up with the set construction, you guys will be very tough to beat for a lot of teams next year! Congrats on this year.

 

[wadz]

I watched ya'll at Crossroads and it truly blew me away. The gimmicks and set pieces were dope and well spaced throughout, and that intro concept was fiiiirreeeee (esp. flipping the script with the girls taking the hype, powerful seg and the guys rocking the jhummar beats). Best of luck this year - ya'll clearly have a great foundation to build on!

 

[UmerQureshi96]

-I honestly wished you just opened with that slick intro with the dudes, the girls showed off that they could dance well at the beginning, but it didn't transition well into that thing y'all did with the guys. Yo red dude you're sexy as hell. Really killed it. Idk I think the intro just fell flat for me because you did this aggressive intro with the sher and the girls, then went into that sof thing with the guys and then back into aggressive saaps. Each individually are good, but together right next to eachother don't flow well.
-Sucks that two peeps saaps hyperextended but overall, the saap segment was solid.
That cell phone toss was suuuuper slick. Loved it.
-the drop of that segment wasn't really built up well, like you went into hype ass drop randomly and just didn't jive with the vibe of that segment at all, and then again went right into a chill khunde, getting a lotta whiplash
- khunde was solid, a good segment, drop hit but I wish you milked the chaal just for another 4 more beats. It happened and just as it happened it immediately stopped, ya didn't let me appreciate it
- This 'escobar' seg is where I'm starting to see energy really take a dip
- love the formations in jhoomer
- as the set continues really seeing energy dip
-formations for the jugni segment were suuuper cool, but I just don't think the build up was as good as it could have been to really make that drop hit as hard as it could have
- yo the opening for the end with pink guy was hyppee hahaha though I wish he stopped after the kiss, that would be a better place to end the hip hop stuff

Overall: Yo this set had amazing ideas y'all, MAJOR props to whoever had a hand in putting this together. I think for this upcoming year if the stamina gets up, basic footwork proficiency increases y'all could be seriously lethal.