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entertainment Panther Prowler • Feb. 8, 2019
Dance for Hope performers boogie for American Cancer Society Brian Fang Staff Writer
Big fan- XueQing Li, Xing Chen, Hong Yu and Fei Wen performed a Chinese folk dance for Dance 4 Hope. “I feel very happy that our dance can help others,” Wen said. They are a small informal dance group who prepared dances for Lunar New Year. Jessica Zhou/Prowler
The lights dimmed in the Newbury Park Performing Arts Center on Feb. 1 for the 10th annual Dance for Hope concert. The curtains opened, and the crowd clapped and cheered as music filled the auditorium. The performers smiled. Dance for Hope is a multicultural dance event in which people from around the community come together and raise money for cancer research. Hosted by the Interact club, dancers from the Dance team, a Chinese Dance Troupe, Aspire, Thrive, Academy of Dance Westlake, Zumba, IB Dance and the Bollywood group performed. Enthusiasm and sweat was put in by the dancers to make the event a success. Zain Kazi, senior, helped the bollywood boys bring out more emotion. “I make sure to model my techniques in a way that I’ve always been an advocate for. I’ve seen multiple situations where people I have danced with have been discouraged because they were laughed at or moved to the back row of the dance,” Kazi
said. “This year, I made sure to find the best qualities in each dancer, motivate them and boost their confidence which allowed them to shine.” Priya Setty, senior, also had to take on more responsibility as the leader for the bollywood girls this year. “ The past few years...I was just responsible for making sure I knew the dances and performed well. But being in charge of the dance I have to choreograph the steps, teach the dance, move around practices to fit everyone’s schedules, organize formations for the stage and (much more).” To give the audience a more engaged experience, performers further went out of their way to take more risks. “This year I took a different approach than the past few years. I tried to incorporate some modern hip hop with the Bollywood mixes in order to bring the crowd to life. I felt that the fusion of the different types of music appealed to both the dancers and audience,“ Kazi said. Amiya Prasad, senior and president of the Interact club, is proud of letting our community express their varied backgrounds. “I think this event helped our community as a whole because it brought together people of different cultures and made them more aware of how diverse our community is,” Prasad said. “They were willing to help at every turn and showed how strong our community really is.” The benefit raised $3,100 in the end, including a generous donation of $1,500 from the NPHS American Cancer Society club and event proceeds. Additionally, a volunteer match program is currently in the works with the help of a dancer who works for Amgen. “It took so much work and effort from so many different organizations to put this show together, but the overwhelming support and the contributions to American Cancer Society made it so worth it,” Setty said. Work it- Varna Kanapuram, junior ar NPHS, and behind, Humna Ahmad, senior at Royal High School, strut their stuff as they perform a Bollywood dance routine at Dance For Hope. Together with students from across CVUSD, the Bollywood group was the finale performance for the benefit dance concert, which is in its 10th year. Emily Nagamoto/Prowler
Netflix’s documentary is Fyre Hailey Washington Staff Writer During our last four-day weekend I decided to watch a few documentaries, and upon strolling through Netflix I found “Fyre-The Greatest Party That Never Happened.” Both Hulu and Netflix created documentaries based off of this event. The Hulu documentary is called “Fyre Fraud” and the Netflix documentary is called “Fyre.” This a small difference, but the documentary styles and approaches are quite different. When I watched the Netflix documentary, my initial reaction was “Why?” Why would anyone go on a trip if someone like JaRule is involved. There are many failed businesses run by rappers, but others become the face of the project when it succeeds. Take the rapper Soulja Boy and his “new” game console, SouljaGame Console, from last year. We all knew that was not going to be successful. My point is that the people who bought the tickets to go to this “festival” were easily tricked. However,
Hulu’s documentary changed my view on these people. Hulu’s viewpoint was that all these people bought tickets thinking they would be missing out on the biggest festival to ever exist, and ads for the festival were no help. Displaying famous models like Bella Hadid and Elsa Hosk just fueled the perceived need for people to go this event. In this way the Hulu documentary was better. They had a better perspective on the consumers of the festival. However, the Netflix documentary did an overall better job. Not only did the Netflix documentary have better cinematography, there was a better perspective on the people who worked on the festival itself. Take Billy McFarland’s angle, the co-founder of Fyre Festival. The Netflix documentary displayed him as a charismatic businessman who seemed to be able to accomplish anything -- even giving personal accounts illustrating festival workers’ feelings about how they could somehow pull a
win, because of him. Hulu didn’t even try to answer the question of why they would continue doing the festival knowing it would fail. To add to this, Hulu interviewed Billy McFarland and it was very weak without any new information being added. The Netflix documentary was able to better incorporate footage from the festival than the Hulu documentary. When watching the video I noticed that the Hulu documentary often used video footage that was only partially related to the festival, in order to fill in gaps. For example, they included footage of a random bank or of random stacks of cash. Netflix didn’t do this; they stuck to footage from the Fyre Festival itself and Billy McFarland’s other business ventures. Overall, the Netflix documentary was far better than Hulu’s. So, if you want to find out more about the Fyre Festival scandal, I would stick to your Netflix subscription.
