LAST month, 40 to 50 dance crews worldwide competed for the World Supremacy Battleground championship in Black Town Workers, Australia.
Under the Monster Crew Division, 12 crews competed including EMNT, a Davao-based dance crew representing Mindanao.
There were other crews from Luzon and Visayas as well. According to EMNT founder Samuel Garte III, they started competing outside Davao City in 2017 wherein they have already competed against dance crews in Cotabato, Bukidnon, South Cotabato, M’lang, Kabakan, and Koronadal. Most of the times, on these competitions they always find themselves winning.
During the preliminaries of the Monster Crew Division, they won 2nd place retaining and being consistent during the Finals and still getting the 2nd place, besting against the other dance crews from New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Thailand.
“During the Final round, we really felt the struggle financially. About 80% of our expenses came from our own pockets including plane tickets, 20% came from sponsors. We also had costumes of course. I chose our costume design depending on how the colors look good together. The simpler the better,” Garte said.
EMNT started as a small dance group of LGBT members who are scholars in the University of the Philippines in 2015. They were dancers executing femme dance moves but are also very good with hiphop steps.
“It was the peak of LGBT dancers but the dance is jazz. I thought I’d change the game. That’s the time people discovered that gay dancers can also do hip-hop and not just the guys,” he said.
From being university scholars and solely LGBT members, EMNT had branched out their reach outside the school and is now performing with 47 members aged 15-25 years old, most of them students.
Since February of this year, Garte also started recruiting non-LGBT members to the team.
“I trusted my team, their will and their passion,” Garte added.