The Show Must Go On

During our Leadership training in Northern Illinois University, the Philippine delegation to the Southeast Asian Youth Leadership Program (2010) was invited to perform a traditional dance during the Ethnotopia event. The group originally presented this dance during the opening ceremonies of the SEAYLP training. The dance is called "Tiklos" and is a Visayan dance. The Ethnotopia event is the second time the group was able to perform in front of a public audience. The third time was during the culminating activity when the group decided to teach the Tiklos dance to the other delegates and performed it together with their Thai, Indonesian and Burmese friends.

During the ethnotopia event, the foster parents of the kids were actually invited to watch and of course, when it was the turn of the Philippines to dance, the kids were beaming with pride. The dance started out fine. After a brief introduction I gave about the dance, the students came out and started to perform, just like professionals.

Somehow, in the middle of the dance, the CD player started acting weird. But that didn't stop the kids from dancing. Here's a video of the dance taken by one of the foster parents of the kids.



After the dance, I was so proud of them that I could not stop smiling. One fellow Filipino who was studying in NIU and happened to be in the audience approached them at the backstage congratulating them.



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