The Lambert Agni Dance Team, Lambert’s Bollywood and hip hop fusion dance club, placed second at the Atlanta Showstopper Regional Competition on Feb. 8. This award earned them a platinum award in the senior advanced small open category, an impressive win for the dance team’s first competition, which also qualified them to participate in nationals. The experience has allowed them to showcase their talent to a larger audience and has opened up new opportunities for the group.
The showstopper competition has been a highly anticipated event since its the team’s entrance into the dance world as a competitive team. Consequently, the dance team’s officers have been planning for it far in advance.
“Me and Claire [Nila’s co-captain, Joanita Claire John Bosco] have been preparing for this competition since July of last year,” Nila Prabhu recalled.
Lambert Agni’s Dance Team is an entirely student led club, which means that all the responsibilities of preparing for a competition, theme choice, song choice, costume design and club promotion fall on the club’s main officers. After finalizing these essential details for their seven deadly sins themed dance, the team’s choreographers Arani Pittu and Meera Shibu began training the team in October. The dance group had two practices each week, where the club’s choreographers teach the dances to its members, then grade their performance and assess what things to improve for the next practice.
Choreography training can be very intensive, especially when preparing for such a large and well known regional competition. Due to this, John Bosco credits much of the team’s success and the competition towards their members’ enthusiasm for learning and improvement.
“Without the dedication of the members, that fire in them, we definitely wouldn’t have really gotten as far as we did,” John Bosco explained.
Member involvement has been incredibly important for the Agni Dance Team because they are an entirely student driven club. Being a student-led organization comes with many obstacles for the club officers and its members, which they have had to work together to overcome. One such challenge is being able to secure club funding, which is important for affording the best equipment and costumes in order to compete in competitions such as the Atlanta 2026 Showstopper.
“The biggest difference [between student-led and professional dance teams] is the funding,” John Bosco stated. “We have to get costumes, find all these things by ourselves, and make sure we’ve paid for everything, because usually if we were a studio there would be a team handling each thing,”
In order to fund their club without high member fees, Lambert Agni members have participated in many activities, such as selling donuts at boys basketball games, Chipotle fundraisers and the Aga Khan Foundation fundraiser, a community event for spreading awareness and resources to combat poverty. Despite the challenges of running a dance team as students, Lambert Agni Dance Team’s officers still try to make the club as accessible and open to any prospective members.
The Showstopper Regional Competition left Agni Dance with a monumental win, and has opened up many opportunities for the club to advance and grow at Lambert.
“We’re getting a lot more attention,” Prabhu noted. “People are taking our club a lot more seriously now that we’re starting to actually get awards that we can show for our team.”
Placing second at the Showstopper Regional competition has brought a lot of recognition for the dance team. This could lead to more fundraising, more competing and more member growth opportunities. Receiving awards has also inspired John Bosco and Prabhu to begin taking steps towards making the Agni Dance Team an official Lambert sport instead of just a club, which could bring a plethora of new benefits to the clubs members.
With this recent win, the Lambert Agni Dance Team has shown that student-led organizations can be successful on a large scale despite not having the same resources as professional studiosThe Agni Dance Team no doubt has a bright future ahead of them in the dance competition world, and the Lambert Post wishes them the best of luck in all of their future endeavors!
