Young People Taught Adult Dancing
The weekend before last Kyiv’s Palace of Sports hosted the Kyiv Open International Sports Dancing Competition, which the Ukrainian Athletic Dancing Association (UADA) has held for six years.
UADA, the nation’s athletic dancing federation, has been a member of the National Sports Committee of Ukraine since 1992. It unites a major portion of Ukraine’s dancers (around 30,000) many of whom take an active part in competitions both in Ukraine and abroad. For the tenth time it is being carying out the highest competition, the World Championship. In this competition Ukraine was represented by pupils of such renowned coaches as Sviatoslav Blokh, Iryna Biedniahina, Ihor Bohdanov, Iryna Balahula, David Burtov, et. al.
The participants were divided into several age groups: juveniles-1 (9 years old and under), juveniles-2 (10-11), juniors-1 (12-13), juniors-2 (14-15), youth (16-18), and adults (19 years and over), who competed in standard and Latin American programs.
On the first day perhaps the most interesting and long awaited were the competitions in the youth category with a program of ten dances, in which pairs from 32 countries took part: Australia, Austria, Canada, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Latvia, Hungary, Germany, Georgia, France, Slovakia, Spain, Slovenia, Moldova, Great Britain, Denmark, etc. In spite of the cold hall, the public was heated with emotion. In almost every age group a Ukrainian pair climbed the podium. Perhaps the most pleasing moment for all fans were the finals in the Latin American program, where six pairs from Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Italy, and Slovenia took part. After them the winners were announced. As our Latvian guests said in a short interview, to enter the finals at such high-level competition is itself a victory. But the winners were Sviatoslav Blokh’s pupils, Dmytro Blokh and Olha Urumova (Dynamo Athletic Dancing Club, Kyiv). The second was a Russian pair, Yevgeny Stepanov and Mariya Goncharuk, while Slovenians Matik and Lena Pavlinik placed third.
The Ukrainian pair has a sound list of victories behind it: world champions in the junior category in 1998, Eastern Europe champions in 2001, and overall champions of Ukraine (junior) in 1999- 2000. Now they have added a new victory to their basket of awards.
It is good to realize that our state had a decent representation at the competition: we had winners almost in every age group. Among juniors-2 a Dnipropetrovsk pair was first; another Ukrainian pair, Ivan Khrustaliov and Yuliya Khalipova, occupied the second place in the juniors-1 category, while Oleksandr Kravchuk and Anzhelyka Kumar, also Ukrainians, won it. Both winning pairs are Kyivans. Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Simferopol schools were also quite well represented.
On the second day the main attraction was the adult finals, with the entire podium occupied by our Russian guests. Unfortunately, this year no Ukrainians won in this age group, though Yevhen Nazarov and Iryna Bezhuzova were among the finalists. Illia Svintsov and Liubov Bondareva, absolute leaders, won and will take part in January’s competition in Great Britain.
