UKQE ASSIGNMENT 1 : REFLECTION 1

1) Reporting

Ruthra Sangamam is a National interuniversity dance competition that was organized by Indian Society of University Malaysia Terengganu. The competition was held on 23^rd March 2019, at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. Students from all around Malaysia be it private or local universities participated in the competition. The competition had 4 stages, entrance, quarter finals, semi finals and finals. Almost 25 over teams joined the competition in the beginning and it was filtered stage by stage in each level of the competition. The selection was done by us sending a dance video of us to the selection committee. The results were announced almost 1 and a half month time and our team was selected to join the competition physically at UMT on 23^rd March for the next level of the competition. Hence, we officially represented our university (Universiti Teknologi Malaysia) in the competition.

I was the team leader for our team in this competition. We had an instructor who was a postgraduate student from our university named Thamilarasan from School of Mechanical Engineering. There were 8 of us participated in the competition under dance category. There were several other students who also joined the competition under singing category and one of them even managed to be the champion of the singing category. As a team leader, I had a lot of responsibilities towards the team, from the beginning till the end of the competition.

My responsibilities can be divided before, during and after the competition. Before the competition, I was a member of an Indian dance club named Velan Arts which is under Persatuan Mahasiswa Hindu. When we received the invitation to join this competition, I was given the responsibility to find for qualifying dancers. Hence, I contacted students I know who have performed in previous events and gathered them together. I managed to find a few of them and some of them brought other dancers with them. At last we had 8 people altogether. All of us were from different faculties and courses brought together for this competition.

During the competition, I was given the responsibility to keep the team together. I also had to be a second instructor as I was thought the dance moves earlier than the rest of them so that I can help them during the training hours. I also took the responsibility in collecting the data of the participants for official purposes. I was also the representative for our team during the physical competition in UMT. As a team leader I also kept the team’s spirits high before and after our performance and result announcement. Unfortunately, our team didn’t make it to the finals. However, even after the competition I as the team leader took care of my teammates and made sure they were safe and nothing wrong happens.

The main reason why we joined this competition was not only to get merit marks but we wanted to create bond with students from different faculties and courses as we were freshers that time. We learned a lot throughout the process of competition.

This picture was taken at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu with the dance team and the champion of the singing competition together with props team.

2) Responding

After joining this competition, I felt more responsible as I was a leader for a long time. I also felt very motivated before, during and even after the competition. Before and during the competition I felt motivated to not just win the competition but to make UTM proud. After the competition, I felt even more motivated to join more programs and competition as such to make UTM more proud. Other than feeling motivated we also felt upset and a bit disappointed after the competition as our goal was not accomplished as we didn’t win the competition. We worked hard day and night to win the competition, and there were days where we had to practice all night and we used to attend classes right after the training sessions without sleeping. Hence, we felt our hardwork was wasted because we didn’t win. However, we persuaded ourselves to join other competitions and accomplish what we didn’t accomplish in this competition.  In fact, we also joined another national open dance competition organized by University Malaya just a few weeks after this competition. They were impressed by our dance performance and invited us to join their competition too. This was indeed one of the accomplishment done by our team in terms of making UTM proud.

3) Relating

Actually, some of our seniors did took part in this competition in the term before. Hence, we learned a lot from them. In fact, our choreographer was also an ex-participant of the competition. He could not join us as the competition was only for undergraduate students. All the process then and now were the same. The only difference was that our seniors made it to finals and we didn’t. Personally, I have joined many competitions during my school and matriculation days and hence, failure was no stranger to me. Hence, I had the courage and mindset of facing whatever we were going to go through. Relating my personal experience with what my seniors told us, I did came up with several strategies to deal with the competition such as we made sure we did not repeat our seniors’ mistakes and we also brought new things and brought variance to our performance compared to last time.

4) Reasoning- 

The most important aspect of this competition is that we learned a lot about dance and also about ourselves. None of us were professional dancers accepts a few of us who were traditional “bharathanatyam” dancers. However, this competition required us to step out of our comfort zone and do western moves. Hence we learned a lot of dancers from  different genres from Asian to Western. We also learned to be more discipline where we had to be quite strict with our diet as it will affect our stamina and we also had to be punctual for the dance practices. We learned to get strong physically and mentally. We also learned to be team players.

In terms of what I learned personally is that, I learned to think from different perspectives. This also can be divided into 3 stages such as before, during and after. Before the competition I had to think from other students’ point of view when I had to invite and persuade them to join this competition such as will this affect their academic performance, how will they make it to the training sessions, and etc. During the competition training, I learned to think from my opponents’ perspectives. What would my opponents would do according to the theme given and how we could outshine them. I had to think from the perspectives of judges such as what can impress them, how would they judge us if we perform in a way and etc. After the performance, and the result announcement I had to think from my teammates perspective to understand how they feel about it and why. I also had to think from the judges perspective that, no matter how good we performed they also had a restriction in terms of choosing only a limited number of groups. This was to make sure that my teammates and me do not blame the judges for not choosing us for the finals. I was also the coordinator for dance in Velan Arts, hence I also had to think like a coordinator on how I was going to convey this news to our fellow members and take things positively and cheer them up and keep them motivated.

5) Reconstructing

In the future, we decided to be more strict and creative in terms of our dance performances. We gathered all the comments given by the judges and now we have 2 batch of teams and comments from them. Hence we will use the comments to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake. This might work because the comments given by the judges to us were strong comments and if we take them seriously there is no doubt we will be the next champions. Other than that we decided to be more strict in terms of choosing our dancers where now we have criteria to choose the dancers such as their past experience, their willingness of doing stunts and their level of flexibility, their stamina and etc. One of the change that I can and benefit others is that as the current dance coordinator of Velan Arts, I want to start our training sessions way too early even before the announcement of the next dance competition. This will benefit everyone in terms of saving time and not having to sacrifice their sleep and study time. My idea is supported by the rest of the coordinators and the founders of Velan Arts. We also have a marketing strategy where we want to market ourselves before joining the competition by being as famous as we can on youtube. This strategy is actually being followed by one of our opponents and this was also one of the reason why they won and we didn’t. Being recognized will help our team in terms of political issues if there is an

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