Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
'Dancing Dynamites' main organiser, Jennifer 'Jenny Jenny' Small. - FILE
WITH A first place cash prize of $250,000 and $150,000 to the runners-up, plus other prizes in kind, over $1 million is there for the light of feet and limber of limbs in the first MiPhone Dancing Dynamites competition.
Details of the three-month long contest, for which eliminations begin on Saturday at the Island Village in Ocho Rios, St. Ann, and will hit TVJ on Saturday, April 15, for its televised stage, were outlined at the Hilton hotel, New Kingston, on Wednesday evening.
The competition's main organiser, Jennifer 'Jenny Jenny' Small, made it clear that Dancing Dynamites is not only for dancehall and reggae music, as hip hop, Latin, traditional, ska, rock and roll and others will be equally embraced.
"We are the international stage for dancing. We believe in dancing ... finally, we have given a stage to dance," Small said.
VOTES FROM COUNTIES
There will be 14 competitors at the televised stage, four each from the counties of Cornwall and Middlesex and six from Surrey. The votes of a panel of judges and the public will determine the winner.
The Surrey eliminations take place at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts on Saturday, March 25, and the Agua Sol Theme Park in Montego Bay, St. James, hosts the Cornwall leg on Saturday, April 1.
There was a gust of laughter when MiPhone's marketing and communications manager, Renee Whithorn, named talking as another main pastime of Jamaicans, in addition to dance.
Accordingly, each member of the winning dance team will be provided with a pair of telephones on the MiCircle plan and $10,000 calling credit.
Patrina McIntosh, marketing manager of Fruta drink distributors Jamaica Beverages, said Dancing Dynamites "will help to develop our youths and society as a whole," as well as "promote our culture internationally and lift our spirits locally."
Mack D's financial controller, Denise Thompson-Williams, pointed out that "Dancing brings people together, people from all walks of life."
And TVJ's general manager, Kay Osbourne, put the contest in the larger picture of culture and the possibilities that holds as an industry, saying "I know that this is a business that could become bigger than remittances."
However Sydney Bartley, director of culture in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture, concentrated on the historical significance of dance in Jamaica, first paraphrasing Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace in The Dragon Can't Dance with "Dance, if yu women leave you, dance, if government hike yu taxes, dance, dance because it ward off evil ..."
And dance they did in 1834 in Portland, spontaneously breaking out in 'bruckins' to celebrate the end of the evil of slavery.
"It was not for Hollywood, it was not for Broadway, it was a people expressing their essence," he said.
Bartley also pointed out the significance of Jamaica, saying "We were First World long before the U.S. was even thought of."
And it was to Jamaica that Simon Bolivar came in 1815 ahead of liberating the continent of South America and "In the 20s anything that was to be successful on Broadway was first put on at the Ward Theatre."
DANCE IS A WAY OF LIFE
"Dance for us is not art. Dance for us is culture, dance for us is a way of life, dance for us is survival, dance for us is a way making connection with part of us that we thought would have been lost," Bartley said.
There was, naturally, a great deal of dance at the Hilton on Wednesday evening, Ashe, Cadillac Dancers and Men in Black providing coordinated moves.
And Dancing Dynamites judges Neila Ebanks and Orville Hall also dropped a few moves as they were introduced to the audience.
