Dancers battle for bucks, AIDS awareness

Chaos stormed the dance floor Friday night as six groups popped, locked, dipped and twirled to compete for a $250 prize and the “Rutgers’ Best Dance Crew” title.
Judges awarded first place to the 12-person, hip-hop style group Chaos Theory.
Their performance — themed “Chaos Asylum” — literally leapt off the stage as some of the dancers ran into the audience during the dance.
The Children’s AIDS Network, a student organization that works with the Robert Wood Johnson AIDS program, hosted the dance competition in the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus as part of its three-day AIDS awareness campaign.
Inspired by the MTV show “America’s Best Dance Crew,” Justine Kim, president of the Children’s AIDS Network, said the group wanted to piggyback on the popularity of the show to gain publicity for the organization.
“Dance is really popular, especially with the whole America’s Best Dance [Crew], and there are a lot of great dance groups at Rutgers,” Children’s AIDS Network co-Events Coordinator Ariel Lefkovith said. “We’ve done a talent show before where we’ve had a lot of great dance groups and we’ve seen the talent, so we thought we’d unify it into one theme.”
The six groups danced to a variety of styles, including hip-hop, jazz and belly dancing.
After each performance, the dancers received criticism from a four-judge panel on their originality, creativity, presentation, synchrony and overall impression.
 “I think you guys are fearless,” said judge Lauren Gibbs of the group’s performance, joking about the group’s off-stage antics. “You really went all the way there — all the way there, all the way here, all the way over there.”
The piece was a compilation of old and new, said Chaos Theory dancer Stephanie Whitfield, a School of Arts and Sciences junior.
Team leader Keenya Logan, a School of Arts and Sciences junior, said they put the dance together specifically for the competition, learning the entire dance in about two weeks.
Logan said the group was extremely happy with its performance at the competition.
“It felt great. We did great [and] we had a lot of fun,” she said.
The other competitors included Verse One, the Rutgers Middle Eastern Belly Dance Troupe and RAPS Dance Troupe, a jazz-style trio.
Judge Jacque Burgering said she was impressed with the choreography of second-place team Team Technique.
“There were so many different ... level changes,” Burgering said. “It was really interesting for me to watch — there was always something going on, and everybody was engaged all the time.”
Even though they did not win, Verse One dancer Jessica Chan, a Rutgers College senior, said she enjoyed the opportunity to be judged because it will help the group’s future performances.
“Every single time we perform, all we hear is applause. We never really get critiqued, so it’s really awesome to get critiques so we know what we have to fix,” she said. “It’s another way for us to get better.”
School of Arts and Sciences first-year student Erika Reyes could not decide which dance was her favorite.
“It’s hard to compare, because there’s the traditional belly dancing and the more hip-hop dancing and the whole jazzy theater dancing,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to pick because they’re all so different.”
All proceeds from the competition will go directly to children with AIDS to help defray the cost of necessities like groceries, rent and bills, Kim said.
“When you have a child with HIV/AIDS, there’s a lot of emotional burden, financial burden, physical burden, social burden,” she said. “What the [Children’s AIDS Network] does is address those needs any way they can, whether through programs or events or even through financial means.”
The organization also hosts benefit concerts, a Christmas party for the kids and their families, and a Halloween party, Kim said.
Roseanne Marone, program coordinator for the Robert Wood Johnson AIDS program, said her organization is extremely grateful for the efforts of the Children’s AIDS Network in assisting children affected by the virus.
“We cannot express the amount of appreciation we have for CAN,” Marone said.