The Open Swing Championship 2019 was held between November 28th and December 1st last year in Los Angeles. It was a huge success and the audience had the chance to enjoy amazing performances by many dancers from all over the country.
One team, in particular, made a great impression and won 1st place in their category.
They were the Junior Shag Dance Team from Landis, North Carolina.
The team currently consists of twenty members who love the Carolina shag dance, practice regularly and perform all over the world. The non-profit organization was founded in 2008 by Brennar Goree, who, along with three more people, choreograph, coach and manage the team.
The dancers are devoted to making the Carolina shag dance popular around the world.
This dance started in the 50’s somewhere in the Carolina Great Strand. It’s a partner dance, done primarily to beach music, which makes perfect sense if we consider where it started from. It has been considered to be “a descendant of Carolina Jitterbug, and its predecessor, Little Apple, which was the white version of the Big Apple“.
According to the Jr Shag Dance Team’s official page, the mentality of the family-oriented Carolina shag community is to support the youth, while respecting the elders who founded the dance.
“Aside from their sense of purpose and duty to their community, the kids can flat out boogie!” they write on their Facebook page.
The dancing team has changed from time to time, but the choreographer team has remained the same. That is until recently, when Brennar Goree was deployed with the military, so his colleagues took on the task of coaching the team without him- and it seems they did pretty well.
“Our dance team is not only special for their skill or aptitude […] it is special, because it highlights a dance most viewers at home will have never even seen or heard of,” they write on their page.
So when boys and girls appeared on stage dressed in black and pink respectively, the audience burst in applause. Then they go quiet as the dancers took their positions and, when the upbeat music starts and the pairs start doing their fancy dance, they can be heard clapping and cheering for them. This certainly gave the group a boost to go on with more confidence.
The team’s moves are perfectly synchronized, and completely in accordance with the music. Their formations change as they get closer together or go far from each other, in perfect timing and exceptional style. One can tell that these guys are professional-level dancers and that they have spent countless hours practicing their moves.
Undoubtedly, the dancers’ choreographers and coaches must have been really proud of them at that moment. It seems that hard work and devotion pay off when the time comes.
Check out their award winning performance below. Their hours and hours of practice certainly paid off!
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