JabbaWockeeZ may have the national spotlight, but UCLA’s burgeoning dance crew scene has its own up-and-comers. On Wednesday night, five dance crews competed in the Hill’s Best Dance Crew competition, and the winnersÂÂ ““ Andre Philippo, Kathleen Xu, Tania Contreras, Estela Villanueva, Kay Irao, Andrew Lewis, Isaac Hui and David Lo of the UH! Crew! ““ gave it their all. The Daily Bruin’s Christie McCollum spoke with dancer and choreographer Estela Villanueva, a second-year biology student, about the performance.
Daily Bruin: How was the performance?
Estela Villanueva: Our performance was a little bit of everything. It was mainly Andre who came up with the whole idea, and then everybody else put a little into it. It was really a team effort. I choreographed the reggaeton part. Kay (Irao) choreographed a different part. It was really bit of everything, and we decided to go with creativity because we knew it was going to get the crowd going and we had to rely on it heavily. Because none of us are technical dancers, none of us have really had experience like that, so we had lots and lots of fun, and I think it showed.
DB: What inspired you to join the competition?
EV: We all like to dance, but we just kind of came up with it. We’re all on the same floor in Dykstra Hall and … we said, “Sure, we all like to dance.” So even though we haven’t really had experience like some of the other groups had, we knew we had our creativity going for us.
DB: How did you get into dance crews in the first place?
EV: I think it was related to just showing that we could have fun. We wanted to make up a dance crew and do something really creative and just show that we could do it. We all knew (the trend was) because of the TV shows, but I don’t think that was our center. I think our main thing was just getting together and having fun.
To be honest, we never thought we were even going to be (in the) top three. We did give it our best effort, but just from looking at the other crews, we were like, “Whoa, we shouldn’t see them dance. Let’s go backstage now.” It was just us, that was our main focus: just having fun, being together, bonding. We’re all floor-mates and we’re all friends.
DB: What’s a typical practice for your crew?
EV: We would call rehearsal at about 9 p.m., and we wouldn’t actually start until 10 or 10:30 p.m. We would just be calling everybody until we would actually get everybody together. We would rehearse in Dykstra until we would get kicked out by the RAs because it was too late to have any music playing, and then we would run off to De Neve or Bradley or just outside sometimes.
We would walk through our routine first, then we would rehearse it a bunch of times. We would videotape ourselves on Kay’s laptop and then we would go back and watch it all together. … We would practice as much as we could.
DB: Describe the final performance.
EV: It was around 4 1/2 minutes, and we had (Sir Mix-a-Lot’s) “Jump on It”; we did his choreography. We had a song by this Latino reggaeton duo, we had a song in Korean, and Kay and David are a couple, and he would sing to her as she was sitting on top of two of our crew members.
We also did “Intergalactic.” We just threw them in together to go along with the (around the world) theme. The Korean song was something from another place and the reggaeton song was in Spanish, so that was Latino and the “Intergalactic” song was going around the world.
We said that we were the theme because we are all different, and we were just putting in bits of who we are and what we knew.
DB: What’s next for the group?
EV: I think we’re always going to be the UH! Crew! We’re never going to forget this. We had so much fun, we put so much work into it and we went all the way to first place. … I don’t know if we would actually go into another competition or leave this experience just as it is, because as it is, it was really perfect. It was so much fun. I don’t think any of us would have asked for more.
E-mail McCollum at cmccollum@media.ucla.edu.