Members of Northwestern’s Raas team said they felt like underdogs as they walked into their first-ever competition at the Raas Chaos event in Washington, D.C. on Friday.
At the end of the night, they left with second place at one of the biggest intercollegiate competitions in the country for the Indian dance style. Penn State won first place.
Raas is an energetic and playful dance where men and women move in two concentric circles and create rhythm with sticks called dandiyas.
The NU Raas team grew out of an informal dance group last year and held tryouts at the beginning of this year to choose its members.
Weinberg Senior Jeet Patel, a choreographer for the team, said members did not have much time to get ready for the competition. Because NU starts later than other schools, the team only had two months to practice its routine. The team held two-hour practices four nights a week to make up the difference.
Raas Chaos is one of the biggest Raas competitions in the United States, Patel said. Teams had to send in three-minute video clips of their routines to enter, and only eight out of the 20 teams that applied were invited to compete.
Teams were scored based on dance steps, energy, formation and synchronization. NU mixed traditional aspects of Raas with modern styles, Patel said. For example, the team incorporated elements from hip-hop dancing and Boomshaka – NU’s drum, dance and rhythm ensemble – into its routine. Members also used traditional Indian music that had been re-mixed to sound more contemporary.
Weinberg junior Neeral Sheth said because the team had so little time to practice, the second-place finish felt like a win.
“It was awesome,” he said. “All of the other teams were East Coast teams, so they had a lot of people cheering for them, and we only had one or two people so we had to cheer for ourselves.”
The success was a team effort, Communication freshman Khushbu Shah said.
“We worked together so well and we had excellent chemistry,” he said. “We blew the audience away.”
For second place, the team won $800, an invitation to compete at other competitions and name recognition.
The team plans to use the money to reimburse members, who had to pay their own way there, Patel said.
The team will continue to compete during Winter Quarter and will perform on campus in the South Asian Student Alliance’s annual show in February.
“Our primary goal is to press harder and be really successful at the rest of the competitions,” Patel said. “We want to set up the team to raise awareness of Indian dance on campus.”
Reach Ketul Patel at [email protected].
