By Rikuto Sakamoto (Fountain Staff)
Junuary 5, 2021
Blue light brightly flashes in a dark evening sky. As a music starts, 6 dancers in fancy dresses start moving around the stage. Surrounded by cold winter air, audiences’ eyes are on those girls.
The K-Pop dance event called “K-Con” was held near the Oita station on December 2, 2020. For that stage, a third-year APS student Dwithi Hariharan made a great contribution to her group under a hard situation because of the pandemic.
According to an Instagram page of K-Con, 13 dance groups which only consist of APU students participated in the event. Those groups were to perform K-Pop dances to audience.
Hariharan joined two groups out of those 13 groups. One team was consisted of 6 members, while the other had 9 dancers. Each group had different members.
The group of 6 members danced a tune by a Korean female group called G-Idle. The tune is called “Dumdi Dumdi”.
Before they started practice, each leader of different groups chose a song they would dance. “The important things are how popular the song is, and how good the dance is,” Hariharan said.
Her group began practicing since October 5 with some restriction due to the spreading of Covid-19. They could practice only twice a week and one practice had to be 3 hours maximum.
In addition, they had to wear a mask even during dancing. “We needed to practice facial expression which is necessary to K-Pop dances, so that was hard for us,” Hariharan said.
While many of other teams only consisted of Japanese students, her group of 6 dancers had 2 international students. Nevertheless, there were no big language barrier.
“Our teamwork was pretty well. Everybody was super passionate to dancing. Speaking Japanese was hard for me, but the leader was helpful, and everybody was easy going,” she said.
However, Hariharan herself contributed to the team as much as her leader.
Though the group had 2 international students, 4 out of 6 were Japanese so they mainly spoke Japanese.
“Dwithi is literally good at speaking both English and Japanese, so she helped our international teammate keep up with discussion during the practice,” a second-year APS student Moe Umehara said. She was a leader of Hariharan’s group.
“Additionally, Dwithi cheered us up when we argue each other during the practice and our atmosphere went bad. She also talked to me when I was feeling exhausted on Sunday’s practice,” Umehara continued.
However, Hariharan was engaged in a part time job, and Teaching Assistant while practicing dancing. “Because an organizer made up schedule without knowing how busy she was, she must have been even busier,” Umehara said. So far, there no plan of events like K-con. However, she certainly showed her passion toward dancing and made contribution to her mates.
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