YOG One Year Countdown at the Padang

In the midst of the bustling crowd and the excited audience gathered at the padang, we were given the honour to be part of the performing crew for the one year countdown to the inaugural Youth Olympics Games (YOG) held on 14 August 2009!

The combined dance ensemble is made up of dancers from National Junior College (NJC), Raffles Junior College, Anglo-Chinese Junior College as well as the alumni team from National Junior College, current students of National University of Singapore. Our choreographer Mr Peter Gn specially auditioned dancers for this item and it was vetted by the organizing committee of YOG.

We feel very privileged to be part of this dance ensemble and it was definitely worth all our efforts and time put in place in preparation of the performance. In fact, for the Western Dancers of NJC, this YOG countdown performance was another national platform we participated in this year, following the Asian Youth Games (AYG) Opening Ceremony performance on 29 August 2009. Indeed, we took great pride and honour to play such important roles representing Singapore for both events.

The YOG countdown performance gave us a lot of opportunities to mingle with fellow talented dancers from other schools and be able to exchange dance styles with each other. The two-practices-a-week held at CCAB gave us the opportunity to make many new and good friends as we were given many chances to interact with dancers from other schools. On top of this, the performance we put up was very memorable in many ways.  It was a great experience to dance in front of the Old Supreme Court, right before thousands of live audiences. For us dancers, we learnt a lot about teamwork amongst ourselves because each of us plays an equally important role in making the dance a successful one. Only when we work together as a team and support one another do we bring out the true spirit of dance and represent the energy of the athletes of YOG!

- Sherryn Tham