Yoga Dance Show Set for Sunday
A yoga dance concert and competition will be held this Sunday at the B.T.L. Park. The event is organized by Yoga Instructor Ashanti “Airbender” Garcia and is focused on bringing awareness to the intricacies of the creative sport. Garcia told News Five today that the event will include performances from several yoga students of all ages.
Ashanti Garcia, Yoga Instructor
Ashanti Garcia
“We are having the first ever yoga dance show in Belize so it is supposed to be a very exciting show. We’ve never had an event where you merge yoga and dance together. So I’m looking forward to presenting this young beautiful talents that we have at our studio as well as other people outside of our studio who merge yoga and dance beautifully. It is definitely a lot of work. I’ve never organized an event before and it really thought me that you really need to put in a lot of effort. So I really have a lot of respect for people who organize events because it takes a lot of work. I am basically doing all the choreographies for the kids who come to my studio and I’ve been helping some of the teens and adult choreographers and dancers. So I’ve probably done over six dances and I’ve never ever choreographed for other people, but along the way I really found that I enjoy doing this kind of work and seeing how people could discover their own inner talents. Then you have the other side of organizing and trying to make…I worked really hard on getting sponsors for the event. There’s a whole bunch of prizes for the competitive segment so that makes it a little bit more exciting. I have two segments in the show which is the non-competitive—which is what the kids did—and then the competitive for first second and third place in the show.”
Duane Moody
“Tell us about the merging of dance and yoga. You know people would say that they are two completely different things. Tell us about the merging and how one helps the other.”
Ashanti Garcia
“Yes definitely. A lot of people will initially think that they are two opposite because they thing yoga is just about stillness and they think dance is just about movement. What I tell people is that there are lots of poses in yoga that you actually do in dance except that you add additional movements to make it a dance. So the idea isn’t too difficult as people perceive it to be and once you start to put something together, you find that the graceful movements of yoga really add that extra poise in the performance that we have dance elements. So for me, it is a very interesting and unique thing that I am offering to Belize. So through this medium, I get to spread yoga more and dance gets to improve on their elements because of the yoga styles that we put into it.”
The show is free and starts at five p.m. at the B.T.L. Park.
