Kahaani Initial Reflection

LO3 INITIATIVE – Planning & initiating activities

LO6 GLOBAL VALUE – Engaging with issues of global importance

Kahaani is an annual celebration of Indian dance and music that takes place here at UWCSEA East. However, it is quite different to other dances such as Culturama and Dance Showcase. Kahaani is run by the Kolkata GC and is a service event – it raises funds and awareness for the organisation ‘Voice Of World’, which aims to support mentally and physically disabled children in Kolkata, India.

This is my second Kahaani, but my first Kahaani as a dance leader. My responsibilities this year are wildly different to what they were last year as a dancer – I now have the task of choreographing and teaching an entire dance to 18 other students.

Before we get to all of that though, our first steps were to audition, choose our songs, and get our choreography approved.

This is the first year that Kahaani held auditions to be a dance leader due to overwhelming interest. In order to audition we had to learn choreography set for us by Kolkata GC, and then finish the song with our own choreography. Here is our audition video.

Once we got into Kahaani, we had to start choosing and choreographing our songs. We chose 3 songs which we felt conveyed the message of overcoming challenges and persevering in the face of adversity.

Finalising the songs were more difficult than we anticipated – each song had to fit the theme and also take into account the issues we were trying to raise awareness for. This was really important as the songs we chose could be the make or break between the audience’s understanding of our theme of overcoming challenges. Throughout the process we learnt that it was essential to choose songs that presented difficulties not as a disadvantage, but merely a challenge. It changed the way I viewed disabilities, and we hope that it will change the audience’s perception as well.

We then had to edit the songs so that they were not only within the time limits but were also appropriate for a school audience. Each song had many versions based on iterative feedback:

For each song we made planning documents with inspiration, ideas, and thoughts for our choreography. This gave us the chance to put our thoughts down and gain some footing – going back and forth and eliminating and adding ideas before we dove in, which eventually led to us choreographing the dances to the best of our ability and in a way we were proud of.

followed by multiple attempts at filming choreography:

and finally our official choreography:  Song 1, Song 2, Song 3